CyberPanel Review & Tutorial: Is It the Best Server Control Panel? (2023)

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Considering using CyberPanel to host your WordPress sites (or other types of sites)? Then you should read our CyberPanel review and tutorial to learn more about this server control panel and whether it’s right for you.

CyberPanel is a popular server control panel that makes it easy to spin up secure servers powered by LiteSpeed Web Server. You’ll also be able to create sites, install SSL certificates, manage DNS, manage emails, and much more.

It fills a similar niche as the popular cPanel server control panel, along with DirectAdmin and Plesk. It can also compare favorably with the newer generation of SaaS server control panels built for WordPress users including RunCloud, GridPane, SpinupWP, and so on.

But is CyberPanel the right server control panel for you? Well, there are a couple of features that make it stand out:

1. CyberPanel uses LiteSpeed Web Server, which a lot of people like because of its performance. CyberPanel has a tight integration with LiteSpeed and is the only hosting panel that natively supports OpenLiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Enterprise right out of the box.
2. It has a free, open-source version, which is great if you’re on a budget. If you’re ok with using OpenLiteSpeed, you can manage unlimited servers with unlimited sites for free. A lot of people have switched from cPanel to CyberPanel as a result of cPanel’s price increases.

However, there are also some drawbacks. Most notably, the interface could do with some improvements in terms of user experience and some users report bugs, especially around software updates.

In our CyberPanel review, we’ll help you decide if it’s the right solution for your servers and sites. Along the way, we’ll also share a CyberPanel tutorial so that you can learn how it works and how you can set up your own server.

📚 Table of contents:

CyberPanel review: A quick look at the features

CyberPanel is a server control panel. You install it on your server – e.g. a VPS that you’ve purchased – and it helps you configure key packages, manage various actions, create websites, and so on.

Basically, it takes most of the technical complexity out of creating, configuring, and managing your own hosting server.

As we mentioned above, CyberPanel uses LiteSpeed Web Server instead of the more popular Apache or Nginx web servers. A lot of people like this because LiteSpeed Web Server offers excellent performance.

In terms of features, CyberPanel offers everything that you’d expect from a server control panel including the following:

• Automatic software installer for WordPress, Drupal, and some other software.
• ModSecurity to protect your server/sites.
• One-click Let’s Encrypt installer for SSL certificates, along with automatic renewals.
• FTP server management.
• Database management, including phpMyAdmin.
• DNS management, including a Cloudflare integration.
• Email support, including webmail powered by Rainloop.
• Automatic backups, including real-time incremental backups.
• Staging/clone site functionality for WordPress.
• Git deployment to your CyberPanel sites.
• Containerization, including support for Docker containers.

CyberPanel tutorial: How to install and access CyberPanel

One thing we want to achieve in this CyberPanel review is show you what it’s like to use CyberPanel (and how you can set it up yourself), let’s go over the process of launching a server and installing WordPress with CyberPanel.

How to install CyberPanel

To install CyberPanel, you’ll first need a web server. You can install it on any Ubuntu or Centos server, but I like the cheap cloud VPS providers such as DigitalOcean and Vultr.

Typically, you’ll need to install CyberPanel via SSH – you can find the instructions here.

However, some cloud VPS providers, including DigitalOcean, offer built-in CyberPanel installers. If you’re not a very technical person, these pre-installed packages are the absolute easiest way to get started with CyberPanel.

I’ll show you how easy it is to spin up a new DigitalOcean droplet powered by CyberPanel.

To begin, create a new droplet in DigitalOcean. Then, go to the Marketplace tab and search for CyberPanel. You can then choose the pre-configured CyberPanel app.

Then, just configure the rest of your droplet settings and create the droplet:

How to access CyberPanel

Now you have CyberPanel installed on your DigitalOcean server. To access CyberPanel, you’d first want to point a domain name to your server by creating an A record that points to the DigitalOcean server IP. Or, you can go directly to the server IP address.

If you visit the domain name, you’ll see that LiteSpeed Web Server is working properly, though you’ll get a 404 error for now because you haven’t created a site yet:

To access your CyberPanel dashboard, append :8090 to the end of your domain name. For example, yoursite.com:8090. You can also just enter the direct IP address of your server, if you prefer.

If you’re using Chrome, you’ll get an SSL warning. Just open the advanced settings and click to proceed.

Now, you’ll be prompted to log in to CyberPanel:

So – what’s your CyberPanel username and password?

Well, if you installed CyberPanel via SSH, the default access credentials are as follows:

• Username: admin
• Password: 1234567

However, if you used DigitalOcean’s CyberPanel installer, your credentials will be different. The username will still be admin, but you’ll need to access the password by connecting to your server via SSH. Thankfully, DigitalOcean includes its own in-browser console, which makes this pretty easy.

Go to the Access tab in your droplet’s settings and launch the droplet console as root:

Then, run the following command and you should see your CyberPanel dashboard password appear in the console:

sudo cat .litespeed_password

In this example, the admin password is yPMEZtsiose4HcV4. It will obviously be different for your install.

Now, you can log in to your CyberPanel dashboard using admin as the username and the password from your console. It should look like this:

And that’s it! One of the advantages of CyberPanel is that it’s very easy to get started, even if you’re not a developer. I’m certainly not a developer and I had a working server up and running in a very short time and without hitting any roadblocks.

How to use the CyberPanel dashboard

Now that you know how to install and access CyberPanel, let’s shift gears in our CyberPanel review and briefly look at what it’s like to use the CyberPanel dashboard to manage your sites.

One thing to note here is that CyberPanel’s user interface isn’t always the most user-friendly. It’s plenty functional, but I’ve used better-designed server control panels.

This is one of the downsides of CyberPanel in terms of user experience – it definitely feels more like an open-source project and less like the slick SaaS dashboards you get with something like RunCloud.

Still, once you get the hang of it, you should have no issues.

How to create a website

To create a new website with CyberPanel, you head to Websites → Create Website:

If you check the SSL box, CyberPanel will automatically install an SSL certificate for the site from Let’s Encrypt, which is convenient. CyberPanel should automatically renew the SSL certificate every three months. However, I’ve seen some other people post about having issues with the automatic renewal, so your mileage may vary here.

Once you set up your website, you can open its settings to install WordPress on it using the application installer. CyberPanel will also install LSCache along with WordPress, which lets you take advantage of LiteSpeed Web Server’s caching:

You can also install other applications such as Drupal – you aren’t limited to WordPress only.

And that’s it – you now have a working WordPress site powered by LiteSpeed Web Server and CyberPanel. You can see that the SSL certificate is also working properly:

How to manage DNS

CyberPanel gives you two ways to manage DNS:

First, it ships with its own DNS server that you can use to create nameservers and manage records:

Second, there’s a DNS sync option to let you integrate with Cloudflare. With this, you can use Cloudflare to manage your DNS while still syncing local records to Cloudflare. This is convenient because it means you won’t need to manually apply DNS changes in both CyberPanel and Cloudflare.

How to manage FTP accounts and databases

To manage FTP accounts, you can head to the FTP tab.

For databases, you go to the Database tab. To work with databases, CyberPanel includes phpMyAdmin, along with a convenient auto-login feature that lets you log in to phpMyAdmin just by clicking a link.

CyberPanel pricing

CyberPanel offers three pricing options:

1. A free open-source version called CyberPanel. This version is 100% free forever for unlimited domains. For a lot of people, this is one of the most attractive things about CyberPanel.
2. A paid version of the server control panel called CyberPanel Enterprise.
3. A paid service called CyberPanel Cloud that gives you one cloud dashboard to manage all of your CyberPanel installations.

CyberPanel free vs CyberPanel Enterprise

Let’s talk about the differences between CyberPanel free vs CyberPanel Enterprise first.

The main difference is the version of LiteSpeed Web Server that you get.

The free version of CyberPanel ships with OpenLiteSpeed, which is the free, open-source version of LiteSpeed Web Server.

CyberPanel Enterprise, on the other hand, ships with LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server at no extra cost. That is, you don’t need to purchase a separate license for LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server; everything is included in the CyberPanel Enterprise price.

The enterprise version of LiteSpeed includes a more powerful caching engine, fuller Apache compatibility, and commercial support. Another advantage is that the enterprise version will automatically detect changes to the .htaccess file and adjust without restart, while the open-source version requires you to restart the server to load a new .htaccess file.

You can view the CyberPanel Enterprise pricing below – there are two additional higher-tier plans that I wasn’t able to fit in the screenshot:

CyberPanel Cloud

CyberPanel Cloud is the newest offering from the CyberPanel team. It offers a simpler way to manage your CyberPanel servers from one unified dashboard.

If you manage a lot of servers (e.g. for client sites), you might like this service for the convenience that it adds.

You can see the CyberPanel Cloud pricing below:

CyberPanel pros and cons

To finish out our CyberPanel review and tutorial, let’s look at the pros and cons.

Pros:

It uses LiteSpeed Web Server, which is rare in a server control panel. Most other panels are only for Apache or Nginx and/or don’t offer native LiteSpeed support.

It’s free and open source. If you’re ok with OpenLiteSpeed you get unlimited usage at no cost.

It gives you all of the core features that you need to manage sites/servers, along with useful features such as WordPress staging sites and site cloning.

Cons:

The interface/user experience is not as nice as some other popular tools, especially SaaS server control panels.

It can have issues with bugs, especially around new releases. It’s generally a good idea to wait before applying updates.

Final thoughts on our CyberPanel review

Overall, CyberPanel doesn’t have the most polished user interface, but it does make it very easy to create and manage a server powered by LiteSpeed Web Server.

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I’m nowhere near being a developer, but I still had no issues installing CyberPanel on a server, accessing the CyberPanel dashboard, and setting up a working WordPress site, complete with SSL certificates and backups.

One common criticism of CyberPanel that you’ll see relates to stability. I personally didn’t encounter any issues, but I did read posts from some people complaining about stability, especially related to new updates.

Overall, though, if you want to use LiteSpeed Web Server and/or you’re on a budget, CyberPanel can be a good option.

For some other options in this space, you can check out our cPanel vs Plesk vs Webmin comparison. Or, if you’re creating WordPress sites and are open to going the SaaS route, you can consider tools such as RunCloud, GridPane, or SpinupWP.

Do you still have any questions about CyberPanel or our CyberPanel review? Let us know in the comments!

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