KeyHelp — Free Server Control Panel

KeyHelp — Free Server Control Panel

It is no secret that many server owners and SSD VDS prefer to use various control panels for their daily tasks. Indeed, this is justified in most cases and allows one not to delve into the details of web server settings, backup systems, and databases. We have previously reviewed several options for free panels (Vesta, Ajenti, CWP), and now we will focus on another option for a free panel — KeyHelp.

Installation

Let’s immediately note a certain limitation — KeyHelp can be installed on a dedicated server or SSD VDS managed by Debian-based operating systems. Ubuntu versions (12.04, 14.04, 16.04) and current versions of Debian (8 and 9) are supported. We will use Debian 9.0 and try out this administration panel in action.

Installation poses no problems — immediately after installing the operating system, you should start your favorite SSH client and execute the following commands to download and run the script:

wget --no-check-certificate https://install.keyhelp.de/get_keyhelp.php -O installkeyhelp.sh; bash installkeyhelp.sh

Note that for administrative access, a standard root access is not used; instead, the user keyhelp with a generated password is employed. If you don’t save this password, which is provided during the installation process — don’t worry, as KeyHelp saves this data in a file named /root/keyhelp_login_data_*.

Important Points

We noted some important points:

• Specify the correct hostname in the operating system; otherwise, there may be issues with SSL certificate generation.
• When changing the interface language, you need to specify an email in the user or administrator properties — this field may initially be empty.
• Localization is unfortunately not complete — but sufficient.
• PHP-FPM is supported, and there are settings for basic PHP-FPM parameters.
• The built-in PHP selector allows you to use various versions of PHP.
• There is a built-in user notification system — with message templates, newsletters, etc.
• Documentation in the panel is available in the form of a fairly large PDF file, while a decent knowledge base is available on the website.
• The antivirus package ClamAV is installed — this is justified if the server will be used as a mail or file storage.
• The installation script adds Midnight Commander to the system. The purpose of this is a mystery :)

Conclusion

Let’s summarize our brief acquaintance with KeyHelp. This product can be used for organizing small hosting projects or for managing your own websites; the panel has its nice features and, importantly, is constantly evolving with new versions and updates. We hope that over time KeyHelp will become as popular a solution as Vesta — and it’s worth trying out this product in action and sharing your opinions and wishes with the authors of KeyHelp.