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 making big moves in the web hosting industry with its easy-to-use interface, top-tier security, and multi-server cluster environment with unlimited scalability. The Enhance control panel offers features that are usually chargeable or require multiple third-party products to achieve, all included by default.
Multi Server & Scalability
Enhance offers a new architecture for hosting. Gone are the days of all services being hosted on the same server. Enhance allows you to add as many servers as you want to your cluster. These can be physical servers, virtual machines in your own datacenter, or even public cloud servers, giving you flexibility in data hosting. Enhance’s pricing model isn’t per server, so scaling your cluster costs nothing extra.
Each server within your cluster can host one or multiple ‘roles’, broken down into:
- Control Panel: Centralized management dashboard for you and your customers. Manage servers, configure web server settings, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, mail, and more. Customers only see their own website management.
- Application: Web server role. Choose Apache, NGINX, LiteSpeed, or OpenLiteSpeed. Hosts PHP processes and Redis Cache instances.
- Database: Hosts MySQL or MariaDB instances.
- Email: Hosts email servers and customer mailboxes.
- DNS: Provides DNS servers for cluster nameservers.
- Backup: Offers scalable, fast, incremental backups for websites, databases, and mailboxes.
Servers can host multiple roles. Example recommended setup:
- 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 offsite)
You can dynamically adjust servers. Migrate websites or backups to different servers within seconds if CPU or memory load becomes high.
Security & Containerisation
The Enhance control panel uses cgroup and namespace containerisation for each website, massively reducing attack vectors as attackers cannot move laterally within the server.
While CloudLinux is popular for isolating user directories and limiting CPU, memory, IOPS, disk I/O, and processes, Enhance has all of this built-in by default at no extra cost.
Customer Backups
Enhance includes incremental backups via its backup role. These backups are compressed, securely transferred to another server, and only capture changes since the last backup, saving disk space. Backups can be restored by the admin or user within seconds and stored on any S3-compatible service.
Advanced WordPress Toolkit
Enhance includes a built-in WordPress Toolkit. Customers can manage installations directly from the control panel, install WordPress with a few clicks, add users, update WordPress, install/update plugins, and manage themes—all without logging into WordPress.
cPanel and Plesk Importer
Moving from cPanel or Plesk is simple. There are two methods:
- Upload an account backup including files, databases, and emails.
- Provide WHM account details to stream accounts directly to Enhance.
Future Features
Enhance maintains a public roadmap, constantly updated, which can be viewed here. Details are subject to change.
Conclusion
Enhance is a next-generation control panel transforming the web hosting industry while eliminating the need for costly third-party software.
SharedGrid is a UK-based web host offering Enhance on Shared and Reseller plans, featuring Ryzen 9 9950X CPUs, DDR5 memory, NVMe storage, LiteSpeed + LSCache, and advanced security. Visit our main website for more information.
