Vesta Control Panel - Simple Yet Powerful Control Panel For Linux

cPanel web hosting is easier to set up and manage. Users unfamiliar with Linux servers can easily maintain servers using cPanel, a GUI control panel for web servers.

Buying shared hosting or managed web hosting can provide users a control panel. But both types of hostings have their own advantages and disadvantages. Read this article to know things to remember before buying web hosting.

In this Linux cPanel series, I am discussing the best open source alternatives of cPanel. Most of the open-source alternatives of cPanel are free.

Today in this article, I will talk about Vesta Control Panel, a free and open-source control panel for Linux servers. Vesta CP can be deployed on Red hat/CentOS (version 5,6,7), Debian (version 7, 8, 9), and Ubuntu (version 12.04 – 18.10).

Vesta Control Panel – Simple yet powerful control panel for Linux

Vesta control panel is developed and maintained by Serghey Rodin. It is an open-source project that means anyone can fork it and make his own customizations. But, VestaCP supports more than enough features to maintain a small server.

Vesta interface

VestaCP has a simple and clean user interface. Information regarding current users, registered domains, DNS records, Mails, databases, cron jobs, and backups is available right on the dashboard.

Creating new user accounts, web domains, DNS records, or databases is as simple as creating a note. Vesta control panel also has a cron job management system. Cron jobs allow users to run commands automatically after a specific period.

Vesta Features

Vesta control panel interface is simple but has a great number of features. As I call it the server administration bar, the top navigation bar allows us to check for server updates, server IP address, graphs, statistics, logs, Uptime, Firewall, and install apps from softaculous.

For security purposes, Vesta only opens a few necessary ports. If users need it, they can open any port from the firewall.

Vesta CLI

Vesta also provides commands to manage the server from the command line. Users can perform any action from the command line, such as adding or deleting a user, domain name, mail, firewall rule, database, etc.

To use the CLI commands, users will need to remotely logged-in to the server via ssh. Once logged in, they can execute vesta commands –

Add a firewall rule

v-add-firewall-chain

Delete a firewall rule

v-delete-firewall-chain

Stop autoupdate by deleting autoupdate cron job

v-delete-cron-vesta-autoupdate

Add domain name

v-add-domain

Delete domain name

v-delete-domain

v-add-user

v-add-user

Add firewall blocking rule

v-add-firewall-ban

Add a system IP address

v-add-sys-ip

Delete user IP addresses

v-delete-user-ips

Delete DNS record

v-delete-dns-record

Delete domain SSL support

v-delete-web-domain-ssl

Disable server firewall support

v-delete-sys-firewall

For a full list of Vesta commands, please visit the official documentation.

Vesta Paid version

The free version provides all the vesta core functionality to manage the server. There is also a premium version to activate SFTP chroot and commercial plugins support. SFTP chroot is useful if you have multiple users using the vesta control panel. It will restrict users’ access only to their home directory.

The paid version costs $3/month or $18 for a lifetime.

Vesta documentaion

The documentation will help you get out of the problem if you are stuck anywhere while using Vesta. Please refer to the documentation here.

How to install Vesta Control Panel

Install vesta is extremely easy. The control panel supports Red hat (5, 6, 7), Debian (7, 8, 9), and Ubuntu (12.04 to 18.10).

The installation script automatically detects the distro and installs all the tools and dependencies.

Log in to the server and run the following command –

curl -O http://vestacp.com/pub/vst-install.sh
sudo bash vst-install.sh

Once the panel is installed, it’ll create the admin user credentials. Please save these credentials securely and open http://server_ip:8083.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Vesta control panel is an easy-to-use control panel and lets users easily manage servers from GUI. Vesta CLI makes it even easier to perform actions on the server with easy-to-remember commands.

If you are ever stuck anywhere following this guide, please drop a comment below this article.