One of our most most promising creations is Leanservers, an NGINX-based web hosting platform developed completely from scratch on top of best-of-breed open source applications. Detailed feature descriptions can be found on its site and will be covered further on this blog.
Today I would like to focus on the most outstanding features of its Control Panel. Why? Well, it has been specifically developed for its platform so there is nothing superfluous. No fat. Everything is absolutely lean and centered on usability and performance, taking on average 2 seconds to completely render any page.
At the time this post is being written, Leanservers’ Control Panel features the following pages: My Account, My Details, My Usage and My Backups.
My Account page
This page gives a snapshot of what services are currently enabled for a user account. Given the modular nature of Leanservers it can be very useful to see what you have and what you could have if you need.
The screenshot shows the page rendered on Google Chrome running on Mac OS X, but it can be opened on any major browser/system.
My Details page
This page allows an authenticated Leanservers user to edit her email address and passwords.
The passwords section opens up the possibility of changing any of the 3 system passwords independently: Control Panel, SFTP or MySQL. By clicking on any of the “change” links the user will be taken to a sub-page where the specific action(s) can be fulfilled. The next screenshot shows the MySQL Password Change sub-page:
The page shown includes an important reminder for the user because modifying the database password may break any running applications. This can be prevented by making sure any application that connects to the database uses the new password.
My Usage page
This page contains detailed information of the account’s disk and bandwidth usage:
The total used disk space is computed by adding up the user’s home folder and the MySQL database size. It can be clearly viewed on the upper part of “My Usage” page along with the maximum allowed for this particular user and the percentage consumed so far.
The bandwidth usage can be divided according to its source into: HTTP, SFTP and PHPMAIL. Leanservers system gathers fine grained data which allows the backend servers to generate such a detailed report. A user can easily understand how the bandwidth is being utilized and even report cases of malicious intrusions into the system which typically manifest as unexpected increases on PHPMAIL traffic (which is typically should be fairly low). Any other unexpected traffic increases should be reported to Leanservers Support who will be happy to help.
Leanservers is able to keep track of each of the emails that the running applications send and link them to the generating user account. This is a very powerful tool to prevent spammers from abusing the system since all the data is being monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The most important value of this page (“USED”) displays in nice green when the usage is under 80% but turns into yellow or red if it goes over certain threshold (80% – 90% yellow, above 90% red). This makes it easy for the user to anticipate the need to increase the monthly bandwidth usage allowance. As stated on Leanservers site, any service can be enabled/disabled/modified anytime, as you see fit. No commitment.
My Backups page
This page allows a user to access one of Leanservers’ most wanted features: automatic daily full backups:
Leanservers takes a full daily backup of the files and all databases of each user and presents it on a friendly way through this page. Obviously the backup files are only accessible from the account they belong to, after the user has been authenticated.
This feature is very powerful because it delivers version control over files and databases and piece of mind for the user. A Leanservers user will never forget to do a backup… because the system will automatically do it on her behalf.