Lightweight Nginx Control Panel?

Question

I’m new to DigitalOcean as of about 4-5 months ago, but I’ve really only configured the default setup (SSH, Wordpress, security, etc), and now need to move on. This is my first VPS setup, and I’ve thus far only used the command line.

I’m now to the point where I need to set up SSL, and some email accounts, and I feel like that may be a bit of a pain with just command line, though I don’t actually know. Here’s what I need / care about:

-Set up multiple email addresses for 2-3 domains. -Forward email from those addresses to my primary gmail address. -Does a lightweight panel effect performance (site load times mostly) on low / mid traffic websites? (Especially on a highly optimized, lightweight Wordpress site) -Set up SSL for domain(s).

That’s roughly all I need to do now, but I have ZERO experience doing those things via command line, without a control panel (my history consists of cpanel and Hostgator up until now). Performance is important to me, but I’m not going to flip out over 5%~ or less impact for convenience. I’m just wondering if a lightweight panel is right for the above tasks (and future general use), or if I should stick with the command line (while I respect the simplicity, I don’t share the elitist mindset that comes with 100% command line, so keep that in mind). If I do add a panel, what’s a great option for a LEMP setup?

Raul Cruz · Answer

Checkout Vesta Control panel it’s free and they use nginx out of the box. The only problem you are going to have with any control panel is that you cannot install it on top of the server you already have running. It would need to be a fresh droplet with nothing but the OS.

You can always install cpanel if that’s what you are familiar with. In my experience control panels do not affect performance very much. I have a $10 droplet running Cpanel and about 15 of my client’s website. But I also have nginx running as proxy server, varnish for my cache, and mod_pagespeed to help with html best practices.

Hope this answers your questions.

Good Luck!

Ardakilic · Answer

I’m using Ajenti + Ajenti-v for about a year. It’s free and open-source. It’s written with Python, it uses system’s packages, it supports nginx+fpm natively, you can even run and manage nodejs, python and PHP websites at same droplet with one unified panel. The best part is that you can edit almost any configuration (nginx settings, fpm settings etc.) from virtualhost’s panel directly.

Check it out:

http://ajenti.org/, http://ajenti.org/#product-ajenti-v