February 1, 2007
VHCS rocks
VHCS, the Virtual Hosting Control System, seems to be a full-featured and stable OSS alternative to Confixx, Plesk and Co. I don‘t use it myself (yet), but did set up an installation for a friend who needed a simple to use yet complete solution to administrate his eMail and Websites.
Installation on a freshly-installed Debian Sarge system went absolutely smooth - a new release with full support for Etch is on the way.
The feature list is quite impressive, you can completely manage everything commonly needed in a LAMP environment, even a webmail client is included. As far as I can see, no „dirty hacks“ are used, besides VHCS itself you only need common and official Debian packages.
Not that there aren‘t drawbacks: With the basic installation, everything runs unencrypted - no SCP, only FTP, and Postfix, Courier Imap, Apache and MySQL all running in non-SSL mode. I did not yet find the time to have a closer look at the configuration, looks like those can be enabled.
VHCS is actually designed to provide a complete hosting solution, including the management of resellers which in turn can completely manage their users, and those user can completely manage their Web/Mail/Database environment. But it already makes sense if you have only one user and this user is you (or, as in my case, a friend of yours who knows a bit about LAMP but not wouldn‘t be able to set up everything from scratch himself).
Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 8:52 am under technology, linux
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