zPanel Hosting Control Panel Review
If we're working with a server for web service configurations, a powerful control panel will save time greatly and make the work more professional. However, since a good control panel is always costly solution and it's very complicate to configure a free product, sometimes we have to do everything manually. Today we're going to introduce one of the most simple and powerful free control panel software – zpanel
zPanel Introduction
ZPanel is an open sourced web hosting control panel that can be installed on Microsoft Windows and POSIX (Linux, UNIX and MacOSX) based servers or computers. With zPanel, people can quickly make a server/computer to fully fledged, easy to use and manage web hosting server.
zPanel Control Panel features
zPanel is completely equipted with open source projects such as Apache, Mysql, PHP and Filezilla/Proftpd etc. We can manage domain names, DNS, Email boxes, FTP accounts and Mysql Databases the same way in cpanel or other popular control panels. The latest release zpanelx(10.0.0) is designed with all up to date softwares.
Like all popular control panel solutions, zpanel gives out web API integration for production use purpose. we can customize the product by using various modules to fulfill our actual requirements. Got into problem or need further features? No worries, because the zpanel project is being joined by a large team all over the world, problem fixing or feature improvements can be handled very efficiently.
zPanel compared to other free control panel softwares
zPanel is one of the very few hosting control panel that is developed for both Linux & Windows server. From paid softwares, only Plesk/H-sphere have similar features. For people who like to manage both platforms efficiently without having to learn another software, zPanel is by far the best free choice.
There're many good free hosting control panels on the internet like ISPConfig, Kloxo. They are also very powerful for personal use purpose, however it's little hard for users to get them working as expected since not everybody is so familiar with command line.
The big advantage with zPanel is about the simple installation. No matter with windows or linux, there're just few clicks away to get zPanel running perfectly. Just check out this installation guide to see how simple it is. Unlike any other free control panel that requires complex configurations, zPanel is almost 100% automatic.
What would be the weakness? Yes, zPanel is powerful and user friendly enough but only works with apache web server. That means we can not host other programming languages like asp.net. We can install on windows server but can't take the full advantage of the platform, this makes it hard to be installed on production windows hosting server because IIS would be standard web server for most cases. If they zPanel team could integrate it with IIS and other windows technologies like .net and sql server, it's not a long time for zPanel to be one of the best windows hosting control panel.
Who should use zPanel?
As long as you're good with LAMP you can take the advantage of zPanel. Especially when we deal with unmanaged vps servers, zpanel will help a lot for service configurations. If we're good at programming, we can install zPanel to productions server directly with integration to billing module and offer hosting services to people. zPanel is only limited by our imagination!
