My name is Justin, and I am a hacker. No, I don’t mean I spend my time trying to break into systems and steal people’s identity. I simply mean that, in my many years of working with Linux servers, I have never used a control panel. I am a person who uses SSH to edit configuration files, still knows what chkconfig does and blames SELinux for all the evils in the world.

You may wonder why I have never used a control panel. Well, many years ago, I had the privilege of running a site hosted on a Cobalt RaQ3 server. From my vague recollection, this server did have a control panel of sorts. However, it spent more time breaking configurations than helping. It also was bloated, eating up much of the precious server memory.  (Remember when RAM was expensive?) On that server, I had to manually configure everything after giving up on the control panel. Many servers later, the trend stuck. That is, until I came to SourceTOAD.

In the words of Darwin, SourceTOAD grew from so simple a beginning. It began with Greg, a VPS hosting account and a prayer. Greg, unlike me, has had experience with newer control panels like cPanel. Unlike me, Greg liked and used cPanel. That’s why, in an “un-hacker-like” way, he setup SourceTOAD’s servers to use it. When I came around, my first order of business was to familiarize myself with cPanel.

I must say, cPanel has grown leaps and bounds from the control panel I remember. I have made complex configuration changes—including recompiling apache with different modules—and have never broken anything. It makes managing Virtual Hosts a cinch by combining email, DNS and apache all into one configurable system. As someone in the know, the amount of tasks it performs in the background for the user without him being aware of it is extraordinary. Finally, on servers not constantly inundated with massive amounts of traffic, cPanel is very resource friendly.

So, am I a cPanel convert? The answer is a whole-hearted yes, with a caveat. cPanel is great for a multi-site environment, but I still think its overkill for a single site running on one or multiple servers. Also, cPanel is still best handled by people with hacking experience. A lot of things cPanel does by default could very well cause problems for completely uniformed users. For example, cPanel does not automatically rotate some of its logs. Instead, the system does offer the ability to have it manually rotate some—but not all—of them. However, this does not operate like logrotate, whereby logs are saved for a few weeks and then deleted. cPanel explicitly says the logs rotated this way will never be deleted, only compressed. That seems moronic to me. The only way to fix the problem was by manually enabling logrotate on those logs. This is not something a non-hacker could easily do.

All in all, it took me a fair amount of good-old fashioned hacking to become completely comfortable with my cPanel installation. For this reason, I won’t be deleting my SSH client just yet.