As owners of websites will confide, it is very difficult to manage multiple websites without the help of a control panel. Today, the tide is turning in favor of open source control panel for servers. Presently, many web hosting control panels are available for hosting multiple websites on VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and Dedicated Servers.

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You can use such open source hosting panels to simplify the process of handling servers. Managing these hosting panels does not require expert knowledge of server administration. Let us look at some of the best open-source control panels for Linux and other servers:

Sentora: https://www.sentora.org

Sentora is open-source software, released under the GPL v3 license. Thus, you can use it free of charge and also receive free upgrades. Sentora is modular. So, you can avail of its power to develop a simple module system that enables you to extend functionality. This “free-to-download” web hosting control panel is developed for Linux, UNIX, and BSD based servers or computers. This can be used to turn a domestic or commercial server into a complete, easy to use, and manageable web-hosting server. Written in PHP, Sentora utilizes various other GNU and open source software packages. Some of these software packages include Apache HTTPd, PHP, Dovecot, Postfix, PROFTPd and MariaDB, just to name a few.

ISPConfig: www.ispconfig.org

ISPConfig is an open source and multilingual control panel. It allows you to manage multiple servers under one control panel. Licensed under the BSD license, it also manages FTP, SQL, BIND, DNS, Database and Virtual servers. With ISPConfig, you can easily manage more than one server from one control panel with the help of an easy to use web-interface for admin, reseller and client login. In addition, ISPConfig makes it very easy to manage web servers such as Apache and NGInx. It is also possible to manage email and FTP servers along with configuration mirroring and clusters.

Ajenti https://ajenti.org

Ajenti is an open source feature rich as well as powerful yet lightweight control panel. It provides a responsive web interface for managing small server set- ups. It is also best suitable for dedicated as well as VPS hosting. Ajenti is available along with many built-in pre-made plugins that configure as well as manage server software and services. Ajenti is one of the best systems that people use to administer their servers. It comes with lots of plugins for system and software configuration, monitoring and management. In addition, it does not damage your system configuration. Instead, Ajenti preserves the configuration structure and comments. The best part of Ajenti is that it is extensible using Python. Plugin development is also fast and enjoyable with rich APIs.

Kloxo: https://lxcenter.org/software/kloxo

This is an advanced and free web control panel for Red-Hat as well as Cent OS distribution. It is available in two flavours called Kloxo HostInABox, which is a complete web-hosting platform and Kloxo Enterprise, which is a distributed hosting platform. With the ability to view, search, and manage your entire hosting and every domain from a single page, it can also support apache/lighttpd, djbdns/bind and pure-ftpd. You can easily backup your hosting or restore any part of it. You can also move your resources across machines on the fly. Kloxo allows you to start with a single server and add just another server when you have reached saturation.

CENT OS Web Panel https://centos-webpanel.com

Cent OS Web Panel is a free web hosting control, which can be used to manage multiple servers easily. Cent OS can be used for Dedicated as well as VPS servers. With this versatile web panel, there is no need to access SSH for every small task that is needed to be completed. This feature rich control panel includes many versatile features such as Apache Web Server along with PHP and a PHP switcher. It also includes MySQL along with phpMyAdmin and Config Server Firewall. Other features include live monitoring, CPanel account migration, and Free DNS Server. Besides an easy user management interface, you get a file system lock wherein all you files are locked from changes to prevent website hacking. It also features options such as varnish cache server and Apache redirects manager. Cent OS Web Panel compiles the PHP from source and improves up to 20% on performances. You also get postfix and dovecote with Roundcube webmail.

Conclusion

The above  list is just an indication of the popularity of open source control panels for servers. The list can extend to include many more, but for now, we have limited the list to five. We wish you good luck with your choice!