Here’s another alternative to easily install LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP) on your VPS or cloud server.
Enter CloudPanel! You might have already guessed it from its name.
Cited from its official page, CloudPanel is a modern server control panel with lightweight components for PHP applications with specific features for all major clouds.
CloudPanel was originally developed by MGT-COMMERCE GmbH, a Berlin-based company, more than ten years ago exclusively to provide tweaked hosting experience for Magento sites on the AWS cloud.
Nowadays, this free control panel has evolved to be one of powerful Nginx server panel compatible for wide-range of PHP scripts.
That being said, it now becomes more flexible.
Despite not specifically being optimized for WordPress, CloudPanel is also compatible for it.
In fact, you can run any of your favorite PHP applications in any cloud or dedicated server within minutes with CloudPanel.
It’s a general purpose hosting control panel for any Debian servers.
Wait, did i mention Debian?
Yep, currently CloudPanel supports only one Linux distro which is Debian OS.
Probably that is the only drawback from CloudPanel. Other than that, it’s a perfect general purpose free control panel.
How to install CloudPanel? Just like any other hosting control panel, it is pretty much simple and easy to install CloudPanel.
Before we go a little bit further, let’s have a glance of what CloudPanel offers?
Key Features
- Free (no premium plan, just free)
- Easy to use (that’s for a panel made for)
- Modern (just perfect)
- Secure (free SSL/TLS certificates)
- High Performance (thanks to Nginx)
- MySQL database
- Redis Cache
- ProFTP
- NodeJs
- Yarn
- Multiple PHP versions (with selector)
- Ready to go within 1 minute
- Supports all major clouds
- 10 translation languages
- Optimized for DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud.
Can I install CloudPanel on Vultr, Hetzner, UpCloud, or any other VPS providers? Why not!
Despite being optimized for DO, AWS, and Google Cloud, that doesn’t mean it cannot run on any other clouds.
Installing it on the three cloud providers just give you additional perks to help you do many cloud tasks without the need to login to the management panel of respective providers.
Installing CloudPanel
In this article, we show you the installation process to get CloudPanel up and running on a Hetzner cloud server.
Requirements
Recommended server specs:
- Debian 10 (Buster)
- 1 CPU core
- 2GB minimum RAM
- 15 GB or more disk space
Make sure you have root access and have basic knowledge on common Linux command.
Steps to Install
First, deploy a cloud server (or a VPS) running Debian 10. Hetzner users can do this as easy as cake – see this.
Second, open up Putty and login to your Debian server as root.
Third, do an apt update and upgrade task using this command:
apt update && apt -y install curl wget sudo
The command above also installs curl and wget, in case if not installed yet.
Next, use this core CloudPanel install command:
curl -sSL https://installer.cloudpanel.io/ce/v1/install.sh | sudo bash
Screenshot:
The process shall finish in few minutes. It looks like this:
Basic Setup
Now basically you have just installed CloudPanel on your Debian server.
What you’ll need to do next is creating the Administration account for your panel.
Doing so is super easy.
Open up any of your favourite web browser such as Chrome, then access CloudPanel using server IP address at port 8443. See screenshot below:
As there is no single trusted SSL certificate installed just yet, you have to click the Advanced button then Proceed to x.x.x.x (unsafe) link.
Note: x.x.x.x is your server IP address.
Next, fill in all details including your Name, email, Username, and Password.
Make sure you agree with the Terms and Privacy Policy.
Finally, hit that Create User button.
That’s it! You can now log in to CloudPanel for the very first time.
Go ahead, look around and familiarize yourself with the interface.
Enjoy!
What’s next? We will show you how to add new domain and database for your website, probably installing WordPress, and how fast its performance is.
