I'm currently in the process of moving CMS Report and some other sites I manage to a new VPS.  The original reason for the change was to move my sites off of a legacy version of Linux (Fedora Core 2).  However, I'm also making the server change because of too much bleeding edge experimentation by yours truly that has brought my server's stability into question.  Believe it or not, a reboot of the server doesn't fix everything!

I was also hoping that the transition between servers would be an opportunity to move my control panel from cPanel to Virtualmin.  Virtualmin is actually a module for the web-based system administration application, Webmin.  More importantly, Virtualmin is used for "managing multiple virtual hosts through a single interface, like Plesk or Cpanel" and the open source GPL version is a free for the using.  My hope was to shave off the $10 extra I'm from my monthly fee for the VPS.

When I originally started hosting my own sites on a server (VPS/VDS), I opted for the easy way to manage those sites by using an online control panel. I originally started with Plesk but eventually moved to cPanel. cPanel at the time seemed to be the control panel everyone was talking about. However, I quickly found that although I liked cPanel it seemed to be dated by the fact that its primary web server support was for Apache 1.x. Support for Apache 2.x was promised in the next version of the control panel, cPanel 11, so I waited patiently for its arrival.

After waiting for months, I found myself waiting even more for a stable version of cPanel 11 to arrive. I began to wonder if it was not time to take another look at Plesk. So just when I've almost given up on cPanel, the company has finally started to publicly announced that cPanel is coming soon.

cPanel 11 promises to bring a lot of improvements for users. The following are some of the highlights I am most excited to see in cPanel 11: