Control Panels and why they suck

Over the weekend it appears my “play” FreeBSD / CPanel server decided it no longer wanted to “play”. Although it can still serve up webpage’s, it appears to have lost most of its shared libraries (breaking MySQL / CPanel). Rather then try and restore the machine I am just moving everything over to our core web server. It makes sense to keep everything in one place, right?

This experience as taught me a very important lesson; although I know how to use FreeBSD it doesn’t makes sense to use it in a production environment until I really know it. With Linux I would have been able to get things running again much faster. In this odd situation I decided to call my CPanel vendor to see if they would be able to provide any insight. They were extremely helpful, but had limited experience with FreeBSD. Again a lot of pain could have been avoided had I just used Linux.

I have most of the websites and databases moved over to another server, but right now I am trying to resolve to e-mail issue. CPanel handles e-mail differently then our current mail solution. If I want to completely cut out the CPanel server I’ll need contact people. I’ll probably post my experience making that switch over later. Talking to people sucks.

CONCLUSION

I’ve been playing with control panels for a about a year now, the idea sounds great, but implementing them effectively is another story all together. By giving end-users access to system resources you open up a bunch of stability issues. After careful consideration, the benefits of control panels simply don’t out weight the security / stability of keeping a tight lockdown.

Then again, maybe I’m just bitter because mine crashed and burned.