Top Free Hosting Control Panel
Hosting Ccontrol Panel Overview
Hosting control panel is the system used to manage your web hosting account such as website management, database management, domain management, email management etc. It also helps system admin configure the server properly in short time. For web hosting provider, hosting control panel is a must to provider qualifying hosting service.
TOP Hosting Control Panels
cpanel, Plesk, Dotnetpanel and Directadmin are the industry leaders till present. When people search for a qualifying web hosting service provider, the four names are always included in their concern because it will save your time to put up your website quickly.
TOP Free Hosting Control Panel Softwares
Yes absolutely, since the paid control panel softwares are mostly used for live hosting services, it's not the ideal choice for personal use for it's complexy and high price. Here I'll introduce four free hosting control panel, they're user friendly and pretty powerful to manage your server system. No matter if you want to use for local environment or live server, they will be the right choice if you would like to save money.
A. VHCS — VHCS is open source control panel for Linux based server management. VHCS manage Web, Mail (POP and/or IMAP), FTP, DNS, Databas, Quota, Traffic and offers graphic user interfaces for the administrators, resellers and domain owners.
VHCS is recognized as free version Cpanel on the web and by far the highest rated free hosting control panel.
VHCS Official site: http://vhcs.net
B. ISPConfig — ISPConfig is an open source hosting control panel for Linux. ISPconfig is capable of managing multiple servers from one control panel. ISPConfig is licensed under BSD license. Based on free software, ISPConfig design has all basic functions included such as Http service, DNS service, Mysql service and SSL service and more which is required for hosting account management. You can also configure ISPConfig for Administrator, Reseller and regular users which will be functional perfectly.
ISPConfig Official site: http://www.ispconfig.org/
ISPConfig Online demo: http://www.ispconfig.org/ispconfig-3/online-demo/
C. Kloxo — Kloxo (formerly known as Lxadmin) is a free, opensource[1] web hosting control panel for the Red Hat and CentOS Linux distributions. Kloxo allows the host administrators to run a combination of lighttpd or Apache with djbdns or bind, and provides a graphical interface to switch between these programs without losing data. Kloxo Enterprise can transparently move web/mail/dns from one server running Apache to another running lighttpd. It is also known as a good free alternative to cPanel hosting control panel.
For Kloxo powerful management and User friendly design, it's included as free add-on service for many VPS or dedicated Hosting service providers.
Kloxo Official site: http://lxcenter.org/software/kloxo
Kloxo online demo: http://demo.kloxo.com:7778/
D. Dotnetpanel — Dotnetpanel (Websitepanel) is a line-of-business application and the benefits of using an open source development model as a more agile and flexible way to meet the growing needs of the web hosting community. dotnetpanel is the only high rated asp.net hosting control panel. If you are dealing with a windows server, dotnetpanel is your best choice.
Dotnetpanel was started as commercial release for web hosting companies. As for it's fast development and their team wish more great ideas to be added, in year 2009 they revised the DotNetPanel codebase and posted that new code under the new name “WebsitePanel” to SourceForge.NET as an open source project. you're welcomed to download dotnetpanel freely and install as many times are you like.
Dotnetpanel Official site: http://www.dotnetpanel.com/
Dotnetpanel Knowledge base: http://help.dotnetpanel.com/
E. Zpanel — ZPanel is a free and complete web hosting control panel written in PHP scripting. Zpanel is compatible for Microsoft Windows and Linux as well as MacOSX servers. It's available as a small installer that can be setup in few minutes by anyone. With only few clicks or commands you will get a light weight but very powerful hosting control panel for managing over all hosting services like Web server/FTP server/Database and all common tasks. Learn more about zpanel at this zpanel review page.
zpanel official page: http://www.zpanelcp.com
VHCS vs ISPConfig vs Kloxo vs Dotnetpanel vs Zpanel
After reading the documentations and user feedbacks, VHCS would be the best if you're going to offer hosting service to other people since it has everything included in order to launch live business and it has great support if you got into any problem, there're thousands of vonlenteers on the web to troubleshoot VHCS related problems.
ISPConfig is really only suitable for personal use for it's simple design.
As for Kloxo, it's great but it has 48 domains limitation for free version license. If you need to host more domains you have to purchase the unlimited domains license. If you're going to offer services to people, a paid version is must required in order to promote your business.
As for Dotnetpanel, it's completely asp.net based and 100% right choice for windows hosting, it's by far the top rated hosting control panel for both commercial and personal use purpose. Especially when their team put it as an open source project, the dotnetpanel users are growing rapidly among the competitors.
Zpanel is completely different from all above softwares. Zpanel can be installed on multiple server platforms according to your management skills. As we see from the software market, most are designed for linux and very few ones are designed for windows OS. Zpanel is outstanding there for it's across-platform compatibility and small size.
Conclusion: The above solutions are designed for different purpose. To determine which control panel is the best really depends your actual needs. After reading the comparison above we should know which one will be suitable for our plans.