ServerPilot - new hosting control panel for hosting PHP sites on VPSes

[Justin-ServerPilot]

Hi everyone,

After years of managing VPSes running Plesk or cPanel for developers who wish they had a secure, lightweight alternative, we've created ServerPilot. ServerPilot is a new control panel that is optimized for running websites on VPSes.

https://serverpilot.io

It's free for the basic control panel and has paid extras like stats and monitoring.

I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions, just let me know.

Thanks,

Justin

 

[shovenose]

Curious to know if your company is incorporated. Thank you. Other than that somewhat odd question, looks interesting and potentially useful.

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

Curious to know if your company is incorporated. Thank you. Other than that somewhat odd question, looks interesting and potentially useful.

Hi, yes we are.

And, Mike, is that you?? We spoke about a year ago when Kevin and I were doing early customer development, talking to people about their workflows, their software, their customers, and the problems they run into. We met over in the WHT forums. We were called FreedomCP at the time but thankfully Kevin came up with a better name before we launched.

Shoot me an email sometime. We'd love to chat again.

Justin

 

[shovenose]

Hi, yes we are.


And, Mike, is that you?? We spoke about a year ago when Kevin and I were doing early customer development, talking to people about their workflows, their software, their customers, and the problems they run into. We met over in the WHT forums. We were called FreedomCP at the time but thankfully Kevin came up with a better name before we launched.


Shoot me an email sometime. We'd love to chat again.


Justin

wow, the internet is a small place!

 

[shovenose]

Anyway, just signed up for an account. I will add the first server tomorrow but I have a question - do you offer some sort of either


-API


-Downloadable version of ServerPilot that I can run on my own master server, if you will? I'm planning on using this to deploy a Point of Sale system but while its not that I don't trust you guys, I would feel better being in control of the infrastructure.

 

[shovenose]

Sorry to triple post but do all servers need to be on the same plan? Or could I have some on the free and some on the $10 plan?


I'm done asking questions now, I swear!

 

[nunim]

No demo?

So your "Master" server holds all SSH passwords?

How much memory does this use as a default install?

 

[DeanClinton]

Sorry to triple post but do all servers need to be on the same plan? Or could I have some on the free and some on the $10 plan?


I'm done asking questions now, I swear!

I'd like to know aswell please, also does the SSL one support multiple-cert single IP (I've forgotton the technical name)

 

[InertiaNetworks-John]

I'd like to know aswell please, also does the SSL one support multiple-cert single IP (I've forgotton the technical name)

SNI

 

[scv]

SNI

I'm having deja vu!

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

Thanks for the feedback and questions, everyone. I'll respond to everything here in a couple of hours. I just wanted to respond to this question first:

So your "Master" server holds all SSH passwords?

We don't store plaintext SSH passwords at any time.

When a user sets an SSH/SFTP password in ServerPilot, on our side we immediately hash the password. We then transmit the hashed password over SSL to your server. On your server, the hashed password is then used as an argument to the command "usermod --password HASHEDPASSWORD USER", which is a way you can set a password on Linux using a already-hashed password.

 

[marlencrabapple]

So this is a remote control panel? I've always wanted make something like that. I was thinking of putting together a little panel that ran locally on your PC or phone so you wouldn't have to worry about others even having a chance to compromise the panel.

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

do you offer some sort of either


-API


-Downloadable version of ServerPilot that I can run on my own master server, if you will? I'm planning on using this to deploy a Point of Sale system but while its not that I don't trust you guys, I would feel better being in control of the infrastructure.

We do have an API, but it's in beta and we aren't letting too many people use it yet. We're in the middle of changing our API and don't want to break things people have written. We should have it public in the next few months.

We don't have a version of our centralized component that you can run on your own infrastructure. It's something we're keeping in mind for the future.

Sorry to triple post but do all servers need to be on the same plan? Or could I have some on the free and some on the $10 plan?

Right now the only way we have to handle different servers on different plans is to have users create separate accounts for each plan. We do get this request a fair bit and we'll be working on a better solution. We greatly value simplicity in our interface and we need to figure out a way to do this but keep things very simple.

 

[jhadley]

The concept (a remote CP) is great and an idea I've been pushing with a few of the companies I work with for some time since Parallels dropped theirs (or at least since I can't find many companies using it).

However, your website is quite basic and the plans don't really seem to work ($49/month just for logs?!)

I also can't find any terms etc. on your site, nor any business information.

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

No demo?

How much memory does this use as a default install?

We don't have a demo because we have a free plan that comes with a free trial of the paid plans. Signing up is quick and easy (no credit card is required). So, we encourage users to sign up, spin up a new server at their host, connect it to ServerPilot, and really see ServerPilot in action. It only takes about a minute to connect a new server.

The ServerPilot agent uses 20MB of memory. Other than that, there's some usage by services we install: Nginx (2MB), Apache (10MB), MySQL (45MB), and PHP-FPM (35MB).

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

I'd like to know aswell please, also does the SSL one support multiple-cert single IP (I've forgotton the technical name)

Yes, we do support SNI. While we're talking about SSL, I should mention we also support SPDY.

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

So this is a remote control panel? I've always wanted make something like that. I was thinking of putting together a little panel that ran locally on your PC or phone so you wouldn't have to worry about others even having a chance to compromise the panel.

Exactly, it's a remote panel. We sometimes call it a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) hosting control panel, but that only resonates as a good explanation to people very familiar with SaaS software.

The security benefit of not having a control panel frontend running on each server is one of the main motivations for this architecture. I was a security researcher (e.g. Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems, Attacks on Package Managers) before I founded ServerPilot. Over the years, I've been managing Plesk and cPanel servers for dev agencies and hosting companies and I just knew that if I put together an amazing team, we could revolutionize the control panel industry. We're one year in and it's been going great so far. We've got huge plans for the next five years.

 

[Justin-ServerPilot]

The concept (a remote CP) is great and an idea I've been pushing with a few of the companies I work with for some time since Parallels dropped theirs (or at least since I can't find many companies using it).

However, your website is quite basic and the plans don't really seem to work ($49/month just for logs?!)

I also can't find any terms etc. on your site, nor any business information.

It's definitely the case that our paid plans are missing many features that some users need. We just launched a few months ago and we wanted to launch as soon as our system was production ready. We'll be adding a lot more features over the next couple of years. In the mean time, we try to talk to every user to find out what features they'd like to see and how ServerPilot could make their life easier and their business more profitable.

Here are our terms of service, which are linked at the bottom of every page.

https://serverpilot.io/tos.html

It's also linked from the account creation, which makes me think you didn't create an account yet.

 

[Adduc]

Do you have a public list of IPs that ServerPilot is expected to connect from, for those who have a whitelist policy for sensitive ports?

 

[DeanClinton]

I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions, just let me know.

I have to say I am impressed with it; and replies to emails are pretty quick too and fixes implemented!

+1 from me!

Wishlist:

• Quotas for sites
• Not needing multiple accts for different server levels (for example I may need SSL now but not in 6 months which means i'd need to delete the server and lose control of it)
• Dedicated IP options
• Customization of the default pages uploaded (for example I have a skeleton directory i'd like to have automatically copied in with every new acc)
• WHMCS module
• Ability to add SFTP and ServerPilot users and assign to specific sites (so that can backup sites without need main acc login).
• A version I can install on my own server.
• Affiliate scheme so I can refer people in and earn some cash if they upgrade from free ;-)

Concerns:

• If you guys get hit with a DDOS/hardware failure, I can't add/remove sites.
• If you guys disappear, I can't get to the panel.