Table of contents of the article:
I'll get started right away - if you're using cPanel, stop before it's too late! Backup your website and clean your server.
This is perhaps a very rude intro and not the most elegant in wanting to talk about cPanel, but this has been (sadly) for the many lazy readers out there.
If you've used cPanel and think you can get decent performance or security for your website, you shouldn't have a website. Chances are high that with cPanel in use, your website will be too slow or hacked soon enough. Yup. Quick to hack e page speed non fast (forgive the pun).
Let's see why I had to put those bold claims above.
cPanel is slow because ...
Use Apache.
This should be enough for technical users to understand why it is slow. nGinx is the lightweight counterpart of Apache. It works better and requires less system resources.
Mount everything under / var / www
That is, it mounts everything under the / var / www partition instead of the more suitable / home, it does not mount the partitions with the noatime and nodiratime flags and in fact you find yourself buying very fast SSD or nVME disks and then losing 20% of performance for unnecessary last accessed disk writes. Think about how much I / O wasted on high traffic systems. The same thing happens on MySQL of course.
It is extremely swollen.
cPanel is bloatware. It's actually more like a root kit because it takes its evil roots deep inside the Linux system. By eating up valuable RAM and CPU resources, servers slow down. cPanel tries to meet your every “management” need and includes too many unnecessary components.
Easier to hack
cPanel is in fact the most used control panel for web servers. But it is proprietary software. What happens when many people use proprietary software? Ta-da! There is a lot of interest, it attracts many developers and hackers and after many hundreds of hours of debugging with skill, perseverance and a bit of luck it gets hacked once in a while.
Because it is less safe.
cPanel is more prone to hacks because it must have full access to the Linux system, i.e. run with root privileges (i.e. the system administrator on GNU / Linux systems). The more unnecessary software that is running on your system, the more chance the server can easily hack with script kiddies. By running cPanel, you are providing hackers with a potential additional and more vulnerable gateway to your website data and server resources. You should really only have SSHD running for access management (and maybe on a port other than 22 by default). Maybe today it's safe, tomorrow too, in 3 months as well, but in a year it will come out that in the Dark Web on TOR there was an exploit for Cpanel and at that point they will have stolen all your data.
How the hell am I supposed to manage my server then?
Wakes up! You should not. Set it once correctly and that's it. You should manage the content of your website and not your server.
- If you are having trouble with the initial server setup, hire a skilled engineer to set it up. That is, if you are serious about running your website. There is no need to pay extra hidden costs for a server with cPanel. Now you can perform a perfect server configuration with our systems assistance that saves large amounts of time, optimize performance, costs and also make your website really fast.
- If you really need to management of server, which means proactive server changes, then I would say your project should be large enough and requires a dedicated sysadmin.
cPanel does slow database backups with night downtime.
cPanel does not use tools like Percona Xtrabackup to make hot backups without taking the DB and related sites offline. If you want to read the problem better, follow the article in which we will tell you how to make MySQL backups and why cPanel and the default mysqldump utility is the worst choice on the market.
Still inclined to use cPanel? You must have a lot of free time, because building websites with cPanel is a hobby , not a business.
Obviously this is true for all control panels. Cpanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin and so on.
