Also in your opinion what do you think is better i.e. a Virtual server, dedicated or using cloud which I think is the same as virtual.

Also – we’d love to sponsor you with a copy of any of our other themes. So drop us an e-mail and we’ll hook you up!

Congrats on the move and fantastic to see you basing the new design on one of our WooThemes templates.

Live Wire was one of my designs and I always get really excited seeing it being used in an innovative way.

Keep up the great work.

Nice article! We’re happy you found Webmin helpful. I will point out, however, that if you’re comparing Open Source tools to cPanel, you’d want to compare to Virtualmin. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful than cPanel (even in the GPL version), while providing the ease of use for virtual hosting tasks that cPanel has always been good at.

Webmin is more targeted to general purpose system administration tasks, and is certainly the top of the field in that regard (nothing else really tries to address as wide a range of tasks as Webmin, so nothing is really comparable), but it’s not really designed to make managing a virtual hosting web server easy. Virtualmin is by the same folks who created Webmin (Jamie wrote most of the code in both, and I work on themes, docs and UI work), and it runs on top of Webmin and uses Webmin extensively as a library of general functionality, but makes common tasks like “build a website” really easy–instead of having to use the Apache module to setup the VirtualHost, the BIND module to setup the zone, the Postfix or Sendmail module to create virtual maps and aliases, the MySQL or PostgreSQL module to create databases and assign them to the new virtual server owner, you merely click “Create Virtual Server” and fill out a form with a few fields…which then does all the other stuff for you. It’s a pretty big shift towards abstracting away the complexities of managing your site, while still keeping most of the strengths of Webmin (like the ability to hit the command line without fear of confusing Virtualmin or Webmin, since they both work directly with the configuration files rather than generate them from a database on each change, as most configuration GUIs do).

I made a chart comparing Virtualmin GPL and the commercial version to cPanel and Plesk here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/compare.html

And, of course, we support all of our projects and products on the Webmin mailing list, and the Virtualmin.com forums…we don’t concern ourselves with whether someone has bought any of our commercial products. We’re always happy to have new users.

Regards,
Joe