I’ll start off right away: if you’re using cPanel – stop before it’s too late! Backup your website and wipe your server clean.
That’s perhaps a very rude and not the most elegant intro to my cPanel overview, but that was for the many lazy readers out there.
Up to this day, I have to state the obvious every day in multiple conversations.
If you have been using 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. Yes. Fast to hack and not fast page speed.
Let’s see why I had to put those bold statements above.
cPanel is just slow because…
It uses Apache.
That should be enough for technical users to understand why it’s slow. nGinx is the lightweight counterpart to Apache. It performs better and takes fewer system resources.
It is extremely bloated.
cPanel is a bloatware. It is actually more like a root-kit software because it puts its evil roots deep inside Linux system. Eating up precious RAM and CPU resources, it makes servers crawl to a halt. cPanel tries to address your every “management” need and includes too many unnecessary components.
Easier to hack
cPanel is de-facto the most widely used control panel for web servers. But it’s propriatery software. What happens when many people are using proprietary software? Ta-da! It gets hacked once in a while.
Why it’s less secure.
cPanel is more prone to hacks because it has to have full access to the Linux system. The more unnecessary software you’re running on your system, the more is the chance for server to be easily ruined by script kiddies. By running cPanel, you’re providing hackers an additional, more vulnerable gateway for your website data and server resources. You really should only have SSHD running for root management.
How the hell should I manage my server then?
Wake up alarm! You shouldn’t. Set it up once properly and that’s it. You should manage your website content, and not your server.
- If you have problems with initial server configuration – hire a dedicated engineer to set it up for you. That is, if you’re serious about running your website. No need to pay extra hidden fee for a server with cPanel. Now you can run perfect server setup with Vultr, DigitalOcean or Linode – save big and make your website really fast.
- If you really need server management, which means proactive server changes, then I’d say that your project should be big enough and requires a dedicated sysadmin.
Still inclined to use cPanel? You must have a lot of free time then, because building websites with cPanel is a hobby, not a business.