Enhance, the alternative control panel in the market making big moves against cPanel, DirectAdmin and Plesk. With cPanel constantly squeezing web hosts out of every penny they can make, DirectAdmin upsetting users by no longer including previously supported features, and Plesk also owned by the same group as cPanel (WebPros) so who knows what the future holds for Plesk. Maybe you’re a solo server administrator looking for a new panel? Maybe you’re looking to reduce costs? Maybe you’ve never heard of Enhance? Maybe you’re a large hosting company looking for independent thoughts of the Enhance Control Panel from past users? Well, let’s get started; we’re going to cover what Enhance is and our experience with it.
What is Enhance?
Enhance is a next generation website control panel that is making big moves in the web hosting industry with it’s easy to use interface, top tier security using Docker containerisation, multi-server cluster environment with unlimited scalability. The Enhance control panel offers features that are usually chargeable or need multiple other third-party products to achieve the same end product as what the Enhance control panel offers by default.
Multi Server & Scalability
Enhance offers a new architecture to hosting, gone are the days of archaic ways of thinking of things where all services are hosted on the same server. Enhance allows you to add as many servers as you want to your cluster, these don’t need to be physical servers either – they could be virtual machines hosted in your own datacenter or even a public cloud provider, giving you the flexibility of where your data is hosted! The good news is Enhance’s pricing model isn’t per server too therefore, scaling your cluster to have more servers doesn’t cost you a penny.
Each server within your cluster can host a ‘role’ or multiple ‘roles’ which are broken down into:
- Control Panel: The control panel role is the centralised management dashboard for you and your customers. You will login to your control panel to manage your servers, add new servers, remove servers, configure your web server, PHP settings, MySQL/MariaDB settings, Mail settings… basically, everything. The customers access the same control panel but their view is specifically only for their own website management.
- Application: Any servers with the Application role installed become the web servers within your cluster and you can choose from either Apache, NGINX, LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed. Other things such the users PHP processes and Redis Cache instance served from the Application server, also.
- Database: Will host your MySQL or MariaDB instance, whichever you choose.
- Email: Pretty self explanatory that this will host the email server and customers mailboxes.
- DNS: Servers assigned with the ‘DNS’ role become the DNS servers for your nameservers within the cluster.
- Backup: Offering scalable, super fast, incremental backups of websites, databases and mailboxes for your customers.
Each server is not limited to the amount of Roles it can host, therefore you could host your Application and Database Roles on the same server; or even all roles on the same server, but really, why would you do this? The recommended approach would be to split out some of this load between servers, so we could end up with:
Server-1: Control Panel
Server-2: Application & Database
Server-3: Email
Server-4: DNS (First nameserver)
Server-5: DNS (Second nameserver)
Server-6: Backup (Hosted somewhere offsite)
As mentioned, you’re not limited by the amount of servers you can have, either – So, you’re running out close to maximum CPU and Memory on Server-2? Don’t worry, add a new server to your cluster to ease the load.
The servers which are assigned to customers can be changed on the fly. For example – You can migrate the customers website to another server, or migrate their backups to another servers, all within seconds!
Security & Containerisation
The Enhance control panel utilises Docker containerisation for each role that is utilised, this massively reduces the attack vector on the server as the attacker cannot move laterally within the server.
CloudLinux is popular among web hosting businesses who utilise the cPanel and DirectAdmin control panels to isolate users directories and processes from other users on the server, it also allows web hosts to limit the amount of CPUs, Memory, IOPS, Disk IO and Processes a user can utilise for their website. CloudLinux is a great OS for these reasons, it was revolutionary at the time and still is. However, it’s a extra cost and a third-party piece of software on top of the cost of a control panel. Enhance has all of this built-in, by default, for no extra cost.
Customer Backups
As previously mentioned, there is a backup role within Enhance that offers incremental backups. Other website control panels have backups built in also, but Enhance takes these backups to another level. They are compressed and securely transferred to another server in a incremental format to save on disk space, meaning only changes since the last backup are actually taken – We see websites with 10’s of GB’s of data and incremental backup sizes within MB’s. The backups can then be restored yourself, or by the user within seconds. Again, this is something that Enhance offers by default and at no extra cost. Backups can also be stored on any S3 compatible service.
Advanced WordPress Toolkit
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, and hosts millions of websites. Enhance has a built in WordPress Toolkit which allows customers to seamlessly manage their WordPress installation directly from the control panel. From installing WordPress with a couple of clicks, to adding new users, automatically updating your WordPress installation, install plugins, automatically update plugins, install & update themes all without the need to login to WordPress.
cPanel and Plesk importer
Moving from cPanel or Plesk to Enhance is a breeze with the provided built in importers to Enhance. There are 2 methods to import websites to Enhance from cPanel, you can either download an account backup including websites files, databases and emails, upload this file to Enhance and migrate the account. The more advanced and more recently added method is to provide details of a WHM account which streams all the accounts from the cPanel/WHM server to Enhance.
Future Features
Enhance has a comprehensive roadmap which can be viewed by the public and is constantly updated, here. I won’t go into the roadmap as it is subject to change.
Conclusion
As you can see, Enhance is a next-generation control panel that is making a big different in the web hosting industry while also negating the need to have to fork out the cost for third party software.
SharedGrid a web hosting business which is proud to offer the Enhance control panel on our Shared and Reseller plans. If you’re interested in trying out our services, feel free to use discount code ‘NEWCUSTOMER’ during checkout to receive your first month for £0.99.
We are a UK based web host offering the fastest Ryzen 9 7900 CPUs, DDR5 Memory and NVMe storage. All our services include Litespeed +LSCache and advanced security. Check out our main website for more information.