Since few months ago I am using ServerPilot.io I even contributed a bit to the community How to install APCu.
What’s ServerPilot?
Its a SaaS control panel for your VPS or dedicated server if uses Ubuntu. It will install a LEMP stack really optimized and they take care of the updates! It’s super simple to install and you can start for free. If you need more features like SSL certificates, logs or advanced stats you will need to pay $10 per server month. Which is really good if you consider how much can cost you a sysadmin.
They also provide a great customer service support that will help you with anything to setup your server.
How do I get started?
If you want to test it or you want to start using it, you are going to need a recent installed instance of Ubuntu LTS 12.04 or 14.04.
- Create a new droplet at vultr ($5 month a 1cpu 768MB 15GB SSD),
- Choose Ubuntu 14.04, really important
- Register at serverpilot
- Connect your server (paste the code)
- Add your first app
- Running!
Here a video showing how to use it on DigitalOcean.
Things that I am missing
- The community is missing, so there’s many nice tutorials but unable to comment on them
- Payments via paypal
- Automated backups
- Remember me login
- Missing a forum to discuss tips and tricks with others
- Able to choose the root of the host files (root of an app)
- Site down notification
- 1 click installations, WordPress, OpenClassifieds etc.. 😉
- 1 click add modules, APC, memcached…
- PHPmyadmin integration
- Deploy from git (I recommend dploy.io)
Conclusion
A sysadmin can be really expensive and a control panel like cpanel will add a lot of things you dont need running in your server. If you want to host your PHP projects in VPS or Dedicated server, this is an excellent choice that you won’t regret. Theres some features missing but sure they will be adding them soon.