OpenPanel | Next Generation Network Hosting Panel

OpenPanel was born from our understanding of UNLIMITED The premium hosting panel used by RS's shared hosting and VPS hosting customers is disappointing. Costs are soaring, but these solutions lack the flexibility needed to truly meet the unique needs of customers. In a particularly challenging project, our colleague Č eda once said a famous quote: 'We can also do better.' This statement led our co-founder and CEO Stefan Pej č i ć onto the path of creating OpenPanel.

Over the years, we have collaborated with various hosting panels to understand their shortcomings, limitations, and the reasons why they often cannot be delivered. We believe this is an opportunity for us to create better products - truly scalable and adaptable products.

OpenPanel will begin operations in 2023 and is a basic boot interface with database schema designed to handle 10 to 500 users on a single server without any issues. It was originally a LAMP stack with a fancy but flawed GUI. But as we grow up, our ideas are also constantly evolving.

One of our more ambitious concepts is to use Docker containers to isolate users' websites. However, this method is not scalable for shared servers with hundreds of users. Managing the overhead of memory and disk space becomes a major challenge, especially when a single WordPress website requires at least three containers (database, PHP, and web server).

We ultimately switched to a one Docker per user approach, sacrificing some flexibility but achieving a more stable environment. This method allows hosting service providers to manage resources more effectively, although it requires us to build and maintain custom images instead of using official Docker images.

Over the years, we have received multiple offers from competitors and venture capitalists, but the conditions attached to these offers may harm our vision. We choose to maintain independence and self fund. Committed to doing something unique: modular, stable, and reasonably priced control panels.

Why choose OpenPanel?

The name 'OpenPanel' was originally just a placeholder, but it has been retained. The project was initially released under the. co domain because. com and. org had already been occupied by a similar project nearly twenty years ago. The OpenPanel you are familiar with and using today has no connection to the old openpanel.com project, but we appreciate their selflessness in allowing us to take over the openpanel.com domain in August 2024.

Why not open source?

Although we have considered fully open source, we have decided to retain certain proprietary parts to ensure the quality of our features, accelerate the development of new features, and fix errors faster. This method also enables us to maintain safer products and give users peace of mind.