Writing an article about ApisCP, any particular feature I should mention

[webb]

Hello guys!

I have always used cPanel, but after being introduced to ApisCP I’m really starting to like this control panel.

I run one of them ‘best web hosting’, and informational sites that believe it or not does not currently make use of an affiliate program. I haven’t had much time to write new articles lately but I had a call with one of the hosting providers that introduced me to ApisCP and of course tried to tell me how great it was. Better yet I just noticed that I’m the top ranking search for the above search term, and in the top ten for just web hosting here in Sweden. That’s pretty cool.

Now my website is also using it, and as I’m writing an article about it I was wondering if there is anything in particular that’s special that I should mention, and how I should explain it.

Before all of this I’ve always said that LiteSpeed is the best but it seems I’ve been wrong. Any information on how I could explain this to my readers would be great.

I think this could be great for your business as well since I have pretty good connections with the major Swedish hosting providers and I could help introduce ApisCP to them as well.

So far there’s only one issue I’ve been having. My mail keeps on disconnecting and I don’t know why. My mail app displays this ‘has been disconnected manually’ symbol.

Thank you for your time in reading this! Have a great day everyone

[anatoli]

I guess the best outcome that your article could have is simply for people to try it themselves. Yeah sure, we can argue over and over LiteSpeed vs Apache but since trials are free, anyone can and should get a feeling of the product to actually draw valid conclusions. Other than that, throw in your opinion—what do you like?

Matt’s constantly striving to make a better product every day with every bug we find or every feature we request, so that’s my honest review and something I’ve seen every day for years now. And I don’t get anything for saying this, nor the other guys on Discord do (btw, you should join the server!).

@webb

So far there’s only one issue I’ve been having. My mail keeps on disconnecting and I don’t know why. My mail app displays this ‘has been disconnected manually’ symbol.

Would be better for you to give us some more infos about your client, maybe start a new thread for this issue!

[msaladna]

If you’re using IMAP, then the mail client likely isn’t sending an IDLE command. In Thunderbird for example the setting is controlled by Server Settings > Allow immediate server notifications when new messages arrive.

POP3 will hang up a connection if too many invalid commands are received. I doubt you’re running POP3 and likewise doubt your mail client is spamming invalid commands.

You may be able to workout the disconnection reason by inspecting /var/log/maillog around the time of disconnection.

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As for features to highlight Bootstrapper and Fortification are 2 very unique components.

Bootstrapper is the installation subsystem built around Ansible, a software provisioning/configuration management system. You can run Bootstrapper over and over (upcp -sb is a shortcut to this); only configuration that has drifted since the last run will be corrected. I’ve heard of many success stories of customers unbricking a server by simply running upcp -sb.

A primary design goal of ApisCP is to remove as much human error as possible and that means avoiding hand-editing configuration as much as possible. There’s JSON, UCL, Yaml, ini, shell, oddball formats like Apache, and even straight up PHP that becomes difficult for someone to manage directly if they’re not familiar with syntax; issues like tabs versus spaces or indention depth in Yaml and mandatory quotes around keys in JSON. Scopes tie back into Bootstrapper. Using a Scope requires knowing just one syntax.

For example, if you wanted to change the port OpenSSH runs on, cpcmd scope:set system.sshd-port 42069. These changes can be cloned over to new servers as well by copying /root/apnscp-vars-runtime.yml.

Bootstrapper helps people be sysadmins without becoming sysadmins.

Fortification evolved as a pet project of mine during the early days of Hostineer (Apis Networks at the time). Around 2003 I had a scare with a customer that introduced a trivial RCE. Some generous individual tested the RCE with rm -rf /… Luckily I was tinkering with the server as this happened, noticed the slowdown and could react quickly enough to avoid any damage. After that encounter it spooked me enough to take security seriously. Fortification runs PHP as its own unprivileged user within the account root to limit damage from RCEs or data leakage. Running everything as its own user opens up cool features like audit trails as well.

Defensive programming helps here, we expect a site will get hacked and if it were to get hacked, to make that vulnerable surface area as small as possible. In max mode only wp-content/uploads/ is writeable and that receives special treatment to restrict script access.

Hopefully this gives you some topics to explore. Let me know if you have any additional questions.