I’ve seen a wide gamut of those “control panel” things for hosting providers, and most of the ones I’ve looked at, I haven’t liked. They usually cost tons of money, use software I hate (ie, qmail), and do not integrate well with my preferred distribution (Debian). I ran across one today that seems to work pretty darn well — SysCP.
Advantages:
- Designed for Debian
- Open-source
- Uses “good” software (Apache, Postfix, Courier’s pop3 daemon, etc)
- Stores users in MySQL, so they are entirely virtualized
- Fairly easy-to-use web interface
Things I don’t like about it (right now):
- Only supports woody/sarge
- Only supports Apache version 1, and PHP version 4 (probably easily worked around)
So far, so good.. I will probably move my virtual hosting over to this platform eventually, with redundant MySQL servers and mail servers and such. Because it uses postfix and virtual MySQL mailboxes, it should also tie in very well with Maia Mailguard.