Technological Advantages of the Enhance Panel

DracoBlue

What are the technological advantages of the Enhance panel compared to, for example, Plesk or cPanel? I am mainly interested in the technological stack. Perhaps the authors of Enhance can provide insights on this matter?

FabioP

DracoBlue

I speak as a user, I have used, working-wise, always and for years CPanel and then I moved on to Plesk (which, personally, I think is much better than CPanel) and also, but only out of curiosity, I have tried and tested many other Control Panels systems such as Interworx, DirectAdmin, Webmin, ISPconfig, CWP (Control Web Panel), CyberPanel etc., etc.

I can tell you that the potential I have found and find in the Enhance Control Panel is far superior to all the Control Panels I have ever used or tested including CPanel and Plesk.

For example, if we talk about Web Server, the Control Panels that allow the use of OpenLiteSpeed free version (not to be confused with the paid commercial version called LiteSpeed) are very few and I will list them all: Direct Admin, CyberPanel and Enhance.

Obviously for anyone who has ever used Direct Admin with OpenLiteSpeed knows how time consuming and complicated it is, and then there is CyberPanel which is free, but with an update a year if all goes well and no response on their forum, a community practically non-existent, therefore I absolutely do not recommend it for production.

So if you want to use OpenLiteSpeed as a Web Server, the Enhance Control Panel is the only professional, valid and stable solution you can find.

But let's say that as a Web Server you are not interested in OpenLiteSpeed because perhaps you prefer to use NGINX.

Here too I recommend Enhance over both CPanel and Plesk (I don't even consider the other control panels I mentioned at the beginning of the post) for a few simple reasons:

Enhance is already a stable Control Panel that can be used easily in production;
Enhance allows you to use OpenLiteSpeed as a Web Server;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to the Database (MySQL or MariaDB) much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a dedicated server only for caching, for example, with Redis, much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to only the Backup much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to only the Mail much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to only the DNS much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to only the Control Panel much faster and much more easily;
Enhance allows you to have a server dedicated to only the Application / Website much faster and much more easily;
Enhance provides a Road Map currently quarterly on future updates, implementations etc., etc.;
Enhance has a Team of Developers and Administrators who are very responsive and attentive to satisfying user requests;
Enhance for many use cases is much, much cheaper than both CPanel (which costs an exaggeration) and Plesk (which is still very expensive).

In conclusion, CPanel and Plesk are stable and ultra-tested Control Panels but they innovate very little, they live on income, they are stale, no Road Map that can be called such, you can forget that user requests are taken into consideration, they are absolutely not designed and built for be able to predict HA (High Availability) or LB (Load Balancing) services in the future, indeed CPanel and Plesk (just do a search on Google) have clearly said that they will never have HA (High Availability) or LB (Load Balancing) functions while, in my humble opinion, the Enhance Control Panel, given the great reactivity of the Developer Team and the availability of the Administrators, in my opinion in the not too distant future could integrate HA (High Availability) or LB (Load Balancing) services which would be a huge evolution in the Control Panels sector as it would allow all of us great savings both in an economic sense and in terms of time in server management and I say this because in my opinion Enhance seems built precisely to expand in this sense, but we will know only in the future

Unfortunately, I have only discovered Enhance a few weeks ago and I have not yet had the time to carry out detailed comparison benchmarks with CPanel or Plesk to verify which of these three Control Panels consumes fewer resources and which of these three panels manages them better for the same performance. test system.

What I wrote is only my humble opinion but I can confirm that I can't wait to have the time to move everything I have from Plesk to Enhance.

Obviously we need to give the Enhance Team the time it needs to improve and expand this Control Panel, I myself would like Enhance to be able to implement this or that function, but I realize, that the Enhance Developer Team has already done miracles that on CPanel or Plesk you can only imagine them, so I wait confidently and limit myself to requesting the features that I consider most important and I am sure that sooner or later I will find them implemented on Enhance, after all, as they say, Rome was not built in a day.

Hoping to have been useful to you, I greet you and wish you a good day.

DracoBlue

FabioP I am currently migrating from PLESK after 3 years of use to the Enhance control panel. As I have noticed, the Enhance panel operates on a different principle, not utilizing PHP as is the case with PLESK. I do miss some cool features from the PLESK panel, but I hope that they will be introduced in Enhance soon.

JohnB

FabioP Well said about enhance. Also yeah CyberPanel is garbage. I cringe when I hear "professionals" using it for "professional" hosting. This is the same panel that had an exploit that could gain root in two unauthenticated requests. Literally.

They also failed an audit by a cybersecurity company, fixed the issues and a year of updates later, a bored security analyist at that company got root in 10 minutes. Cyberpanel brags about "we are the only panel that has been audited......" In other news a resturant with rats starts advertising that they were audited by the health inspector this year!

I do not understand why litespeed endorses this garbage panel. Its a bad look.

inspiredearth

FabioP Obviously for anyone who has ever used Direct Admin with OpenLiteSpeed knows how time consuming and complicated it is, and then there is CyberPanel which is free, but with an update a year if all goes well and no response on their forum, a community practically non-existent, therefore I absolutely do not recommend it for production.

You’ve literally and precisely summed up why, after quite a few years of using Cyberpanel, I’m finally making the time-consuming leap to leave that ship, and get aboard a better one. Which is currently looking to be Enhance.
In my years with Cyberpanel, if something broke or didn’t work as expected (which was relatively often), I was up shit creak without a paddle ... as the saying goes.
Thanks for your detailed and helpful answer to the OP’s question.

Oldschool

One thing I saw on a forum about enhance that made me get on board was someone mentioning how easy it was to scale up and scale down a customer.

Scenario, customer has a website with very little traffic but occasionally has an event with a planned large traffic spike, you can easily spin up a beefy VPS, seamlessly migrate the customer to it for this huge traffic spike and then seamlessly migrate them back after to shared hosting again.

I think things like this are huge.

All this along with containers for security and OLS for speed, some really innovated stuff going on at enhance. Also like the simplistic easy UI just sometimes wish it had an expert mode with more info.

twest

JohnB it's because either the owner or lead dev (or both?) of cyberpanel works at litespeed.

bgeek

JohnB This is always something that makes me bad feeling on litespeed.

FabioP

JohnB twest bgeek JohnB

Hi, JohnB, twest and bgeek.

Obviously, as I have already written before, I also totally agree with you in considering the Cyber Panel Control Panel absolutely not suitable for production sites or systems and to be even more precise, despite the Cyber Control Panel Developers Panel distribute it as a stable release, as far as I'm concerned it should be considered alpha or to be good beta as a release but nothing more.

I also agree with you that in terms of image / marketing for the Developers of the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server it is absolutely not good that there is this link even if only external and partial with a Control Panel such as Cyber Panel which is obviously unusable in contexts professional or for production, in fact it seems that the Developers of the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server finance through contributions and donations, as a third party and only in part, the development of the Cyber Panel Control Panel which is developed separately as a separate project by part of one of their employees and so just to be clear, the Cyber Panel Control Panel is absolutely not Developed directly by the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server Developers.

Having said this, I would like to point out that we must in no way confuse the Developers of the excellent LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server with the other Developers of another project, namely the Cyber Panel Control Panel.

To date, and just do some research on Google, the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server is unquestionably the fastest of all, including NGINX, in whatever field it is analyzed or used and is absolutely safe and reliable in terms of security and with a code exceptionally clean and the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Developer Team is an excellent and very responsive Developer Team.

Obviously it always remains to specify that the LiteSpeed Web Server is a paid commercial version while the OpenLiteSpeed Web Server is a totally free Open Source version.

Here I leave you the official link from the developers of the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server where you can easily compare all the differences (which are not that many):

https://www.litespeedtech.com/products/litespeed-web-server/editions

Hoping to have been useful, as always I wish you a good day and a good job.

JohnB

bgeek Exactly. The fact that its a high level employee or owner makes it worse. I dug further (years ago) and found that cyberpanel uses underpaid low skill/experience developers from Pakistan and similiar countries. There ARE good developers in those countries but they clearly haven't found them. If you look at the code its...horrible.

If litespeed uses the same level of programmers its only a matter of time until a very bad exploit comes to... lite. (Sorry couldn't resist).

bgeek

JohnB To tell the truth, it's the first time I really tried Openlitespeed when I started testing Enhance. I was hosting everything with Nginx before. I was, and I still am a huge fan of Centminmod, and I know that when properly optimized Nginx could be faster and handle more requests than Litespeed, in the WordPress hosting field. As currently I've already found some inconveniences with OLS in Enhance, I guess I pretty much would stick with Nginx.

MediaServe

I'll add a few other things:

Roles distributed to up to six servers or more for nameservers (application, databases, email, 2+ nameservers and backups.) Huge selling point for us!
Ease of installing Ubuntu and Enhance compared to cPanel (which needs at least a couple hours of installation, configuration and hardening.)
Ease of migrating roles within your estate.
Speed and efficiency of backups.

8Dweb

All well said. For us, the backup solution was the first thing that sold us. We have struggled with Plesk backups for several years, on a fleet of Plesk servers.

Once we tested Enhance backup (we utilize a dedicated backup server in each data center, which is then block-level copied to another data center several times a day), with some of the problem Plesk sites, it was a game changer.

We realize that Enhance has some areas of weakness, but the ability to teach a customer how to backup and restore with such ease is a game changer for us. I have utilized many methods of backups for years, and thankfully, have not lost customer data completely, due to multi-level backup solutions, but, Enhance just does it well. We have already had about 5 total restores of larger sites either by customers or our web-dev partners, and each time, the backup has just worked flawlessly.

JohnB

I would add that the S3 backups are not in some stupid propietary format. Its a simple tar.gz of the files and sql dump.

If something really went wrong with Enhance I have a script that can take the S3 backups and restore the site without Enhance. Perhaps I'm paranoid but past experiences before Enhance has taught me to never be at the mercy of a software/hardware provider if at all possible.

Oldschool

FabioP I know it's not chatgpt and you wrote it yourself, but reading your reply was like reading my chatgpt responses lol it made me laugh.

John-P

FabioP To date, and just do some research on Google, the LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed Web Server is unquestionably the fastest of all, including NGINX,

I think you will find some benchmarks, and a lot of NGINX users, who will definitely question that.

For the record, I like a lot of things about LiteSpeed, but some of their benchmarks, and the settings that are used for other compared servers are very questionable indeed.

FabioP

Oldschool

Hi oldschool, if only I were ChatGPT, at least I would be able to write shorter posts :-)

FabioP

John-P

Hi John-P,

I respect your point of view but I remain of my opinion, from the benchmarks and proof tests that have been available for years on the WEB as far as I am concerned the best Web Server in terms of performance, speed, resource management, security, stability, etc. , etc., to date it is and remains LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed both for general use and for specific and particular use cases, obviously NGINX always remains an excellent Web Server but the Web Server LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed beats it and also by a lot in every single point of view and this is my opinion based both on its use and on the benchmarks and tests available for years on the WEB.

bgeek

FabioP I actually don't want to argue on this. Everyone has his own and prefered way of optimizing the servers. And in the real world, web server is only one piece of the puzzle, we still need to take care of the databases and much more. So, just use what we are used to and what we are good at, that'll just be fine.

JohnB

FabioP obviously NGINX always remains an excellent Web Server but the Web Server LiteSpeed / OpenLiteSpeed beats it and also by a lot in every single point of view

Litespeed will lose to properly configured nginx/php under heavy load if pages are uncachable. Litespeed is slightly faster with caching.

I would encourage anyone to do their own benchmarking if qualified or read the fine print of benchmark results you can find online. Litespeed's own benchmarks are not correct because they don't optimize nginx and in some cases don't even use the same OS configuration / hardware so they can skew results.

There is also realworld performance vs "we found specific php code that executes 400% faster than the competition so we can claim our entire product has 400% better performance"

FabioP

bgeek

Hi bgeek, I'm perfectly agree with you :-)

John-P

bgeek And in the real world, web server is only one piece of the puzzle, we still need to take care of the databases and much more. So, just use what we are used to and what we are good at, that'll just be fine.

Absolutely agree as well 🙂