I’ve been using cyberpanel for a bit over 3 months now. I know because I had issues with the SSL not renewing properly, as mentioned in this post. The initial SSL was good for 90 days, so I must have been using this for longer than that at this point.
I have very mixed feelings about the experience. First, the good:
Vultr (follow this link for a $100 credit for the first 30 days to test it out) makes it very easy to set-up a VPS with Cyberpanel installed. I had no major issues with setting up all of my websites, although migrating them was a hassle. That’d be true moving hosts between pretty much any. Cpanel maybe makes it easier with other cpanel hosts. Cyberpanel did have a script to import cpanel backups and it worked somewhat.
Using Vultr’s high frequency intel cloud compute is inexpensive ($6/month at the time of this writing, and I pay the extra $1.20/month for backups – I am glad I did as it made recovery very easy on the one occasion the server was acting funny) and plenty powerful for hosting a dozen low traffic wordpress sites – I am generally using around 10% CPU utilization and have almost never gone about 25%. They run much, much faster than they did on my reseller account at Hawkhost. And probably faster than they would on any shared host, even ones with pretty generous resources.
Cyberpanel also seems to be faster and less resource intensive than other server configurations because of the use of openlitespeed. In hindsight, I’m not sure how critical that is, given that I have plenty of CPU overhead, even on a small VPS. Of course, I don’t know for sure how much more taxing it would be without litespeed.
As to the downside, I have had occasional bugs that required some tracking down. The SSL renewal one was getting very frustrating and I’m glad they posted a solution. Perhaps they had posted the solution before, but I only found it today to fix my issue. I have also had occasional issues with my email accounts. I had an email forwarded set-up and it suddenly stopped working. I think it may be a combination of issues, but I’m still not confident I have it fully fixed. As I don’t use the domain emails for much, that hasn’t been a deal breaker issue. At some point maybe I’ll confirm all of the email settings are done properly. That is likely more of a lack of knowledge issue on my part as much as a lack of user-friendliness of Cyberpanel.
When I initially unable to get the SSL issue fixed, I did explore other free control panels. I actually went ahead a set-up another server with HestiaCP as that seemed like a nice alternative. People seem to choose Cyberpanel over Hestia mainly because of litespeed. People seem to choose HestiaCP over Cyberpanel due to more stability / fewer bugs. At least that is the sense I get.
If I continue to run into problems with Cyberpanel, I will likely give HestiaCP a try. I really don’t want to migrate all of my sites again. It is either try another free control panel, or go back to a reseller hosting account for slightly more money and a slower website. I don’t mind the slightly more money as having a good host takes away a HUGE amount of potential aggravation.