Hi there I am looking around to try new panels as I wish to move away from cPanel for some non-critical client wordpress sites. I've done some research and ISPConfig seems to tick many boxes, and I was initially impressed with the features and capabilities. Firstly, congratulations on what looks to be a very comprehensive foundation so far. You have clearly worked very long and hard on this However I have a few questions - mostly around whether this is actually a business, or more of a garage project? Observations(not criticism) 1. It seems a bit old and outdated in terms of the forums, no github? and also the user interface and GUI for ISPC is quite 90s looking. Are there any plans to enhance and refresh / modernise the look and feel of the theme? 2. On the forums, it appears that one person (Till?) is answering all of the queries. Is there a team behind ISPconfig? It would be nice to see this on the website so that I can have confidence in its longevity. Till appears to be the founder and clearly a very talented person, but boy, he must be busy!! Is there a wider team? Who are they? And if not, why not? Several of the team members on the forum haven't posted in a long while, makes me wonder if they are still involved. 3. Why no support plans? As a business, I would be happy to pay a monthly subscription to be able to receive timely support via email ticket. 4. I use several server hosts, for example, Vultr and Digital Ocean. Vultr offers installation ISOs for many webpanels, but ISPConfig is not one of them and I wonder why? 5. Are there any plans to attract funding to grow the panel - that would be awesome to see, but I guess the team (Till) would have to work with investors if that happened, so I get the feeling it hasn't happened already for that reasons maybe? But surely possible to find benevolent investors (even crowd funding and / or subscriptions)
ISPConfig is a business. ISPConfig is a registered German corporation, and we have been developing HostingControl panels as a company starting with 42goISP, then ISPConfig 2 and ISPConfig 3 for more than 20 years now. Yes, as we posted in January in the ISPconfig blog Roadmap post. Why should we use a Microsoft service when we run our own servers and build and git systems anyway? See https://git.ispconfig.org To get the functionality we have now for the whole team, we would have to pay Microsoft Enterprise licenses per user instead. And the forum, we might buy and install a new Xenforo theme at some time, but it has no influence on the functionality or provided service. Yes, there is a team behind ISPConfig. However, not all team members are there to provide free community support. We do not publish lists of our employees, freelancers, and partner companies we work with online. But as far as I know, neither cPanel, Plesk or Directadmin publish such lists online either. And what more confidence of longevity do you want to have than that our company has been constantly developing ISPConfig for 20 years now, and we have seen many other control panels come and go in that time. So ISPConfig is one of the most longtime stable panels and projects in this space. There are support plans available, but we lay them out individually. Just contact business support: https://www.ispconfig.org/get-support/ ISPConfig support plans have been available for about 20 years now. But I agree that we should make some basic monthly plans available on the website. Probably because other panels pay them to be included, and we do not do so. ISPConfig is so easy to install with a single command to be run on a server that it does not make much sense to build an image. But yes, maybe we can start paying hosters in the future as well to get included in their image bases. We have an installation base of roughly 150k servers worldwide at the moment, and it's growing nicely as many cPanel and Plesk users are switching to ISPConfig now. Currently, we do not need any external funding, the panel and user base is growing nicely organically. But talking with investors is always an option.
Here is some feedback from someone who has made the journey from cPanel to ISPConfig. We (almost) abandoned cPanel when they were acquired and changed their licensing model. After a very brief stint with DirectAdmin, we switched to ISPConfig. We are very, very happy with this decision. We are growing with ISPConfig, while cPanel remains part of our legacy. We have now been using ISPConfig for about five years. We’re not particularly large—just a few thousand customers—but large enough that centralized management and scalability are important. One of the great things about ISPConfig is that its code is open and understandable. It has hooks and an API, making it possible—and easy—to customize ISPConfig. However, the single biggest advantage is its multi-server support. This provides incredible opportunities to scale both up and down and to separate mail and web servers. As for support, ISPConfig offers commercial support. With this, you can get assistance at a much more advanced level than what cPanel typically provides. Yes, it comes at a cost, but I prefer paying for the support I actually need rather than for what others might need, so this model suits us perfectly. On the downside, some might argue that the interface is lacking. Personally, I like it because it’s simple—no excessive JavaScript clutter causing issues. However, our customers aren’t always as impressed, which can be a drawback, even though many find cPanel overwhelming. Furthermore, ISPConfig requires a certain level of technical knowledge from its users. For example, when creating a new website, you need to manually set up the web instance, create an email domain, and configure DNS records for both the website and email. For advanced users, this may be an advantage, but for less tech-savvy users, it’s a hurdle. We’ve addressed this by developing a simpler control panel in WHMCS, utilizing ISPConfig’s API. We have been running our business for just over 25 years, and we’re actually starting to count down now. Hopefully, Till & Company, after their 20 years, aren’t approaching their own countdown as well!
Thank you for your feedback. It's great to hear about your experience with and how you use ISPConfig! Regarding UI overhaul, we will stay with Bootstrap as the basis but I tend to try using one of the free admin themes like https://coreui.io/product/free-bootstrap-admin-template/ or https://adminlte.io/themes/v3/index3.html But I have to see how it can be integrated, maybe we end up using and customizing Bootstrap 5.x directly.
For those who might not be able to create an API-based solution as you did, there is also an ISPConfig extension that might help in this regard: https://git.ispconfig.org/ispconfig/module-wizard
Hi Till, I saw that tabler.io (opensource) just released version 1.0 (https://tabler.io/admin-template) of their admin web ui template based on Bootstrap 5.
Perhaps your search has ended with ISPCONFIG! I also left CPanel and paying for managed server hosting from other companies for ISPConfig and managing everything myself. It will be year since I fired up my first of three servers that are in use today. I set up 3 full web hosting servers in about 2 months and moved all of my web hosting clients over (I have less than 100 accounts) one by one. I really don't have anything negative to say about ISPConfig 3. It just works. I've got myself into trouble a few times but I always found help on the Forums and was able to resolve any issues I ran into. Some of that was just learning how to do things the ISPConfig way versus the one click wonder of CPanel. In the long run I now have better control. As I was moving over to ISPConfig 3, DKIM, SPF and DMARC were all new email requirements that my "paid" server hosting company hadn't implemented yet. After some research it was fairly easy to do this with ISPConfig. My 3 servers run on smaller machine specs than the 2 servers I had before, but since I was able to spread my clients out over 3 servers instead of 2, I'm quite happy with performance and lower fees. Take a serious look at ISPConfig 3. Do what I did. Go rent a cloud server and install ISPConfig and "play" with some domains you have laying around and experiment. I think you'll be very pleased. --Gerry.
ISPConfig 3.2 is not shiny in appearance but its stability is solid; also very fast, free to use and free to donate and subscribe.
Hello everyone, thank you for your comments - very interesting reading and I like the vibe so far and I do want to support a grass roots company, I can't stand what's happened to cPanel (and on a wider scale, what's happened to the tech industry / world - hijacked by pricks with too much money and greed) - but let's not go there!! Don't get me wrong, I am all for making a decent living and a reasonable profit, but I detest the greedy sharks. So it's time to move from the feeding frenzy, into a calmer waters and find a stable home. @atle That's a decent review, and very useful, thank you. Yes, one issue is that end users want cPanel. I will retain a few servers for them - but in my experience 90% never log in. I am definitely going to spin up a demo server on my side and see how it goes. I will report back. Congrats, I've also been in this business 20 years, so I know what that takes. Thanks for the reassurance. Yes I saw that - looks good. Any update on the Rocky 9 Linux installation manual ? I would like to try that. That's fair enough. Well, I wasn't expecting a list of names lol! But more like some visibility of what kind of team is behind the product (i.e not just one man in his garage) - there does not appear to be anything published about a team, so I was looking for a little more detail on the number of people involved and what sort of roles there are. But as I say, not essential and your answer has given more assurance. In regards to support plans, I get that there is 'Amsterdam Tech' offering paid support, however I have no idea what that costs (it sounds a bit serious and therefore expensive ) I was thinking would be nice to have a some "comfort" in terms of being able to open a ticket and be able to expect a reply within 24hrs - so perhaps an optional monthly fee (especially for those new to ISPConfig) to easily access answers to queries etc. However, I fully realise that requires staff and they're expensive. I did a trial run with Virtualmin and they offered this option - which I found to be really good (the pro monthly subscription was $7.50 virtualmin dot com /shop/) OK I will spin up a test and let you know how it goes!
Then you might consider getting a Howtoforge subscription: https://www.howtoforge.com/subscription/ That support is not by email, but you get access to the priority support forum. Besides that, you find basically any question already answered here in the forum anyway.
No. But there are threads here in the forum describing what needs to be changed compared to the centOS 8 setup. But in general, I do not recommend using RHEL-based distributions for ISPConfig; your setup will be way more complicated to install and maintain than Debian and Ubuntu. I converted quite a few setups for clients in the past from CentOS/RHEL to Debian, and these were all hardcode RHEL users; they were very surprised at the end when they found out how maintenance costs dropped and uptime increased. Also, some of the setups were even faster in the end while running on the same hardware as before.
I am new with ispconfig and was avoiding only because lack of WordPress installer as creating DB then DB user was taking a lot of time. I would always prefer Debian 12 for ISPConfig. It is stable, light, fastest as i have used.
Even now, you can already speed up the creation of a site using wizard module: https://git.ispconfig.org/ispconfig/module-wizard
thank you, i was not aware of this before. i will wait for the next release to have it without additional setup. i have 4-5vps that needs new ISPconfig.
