Serverpilot Alternative: Improved, Managed to Self-Hosted

This is my research on ServerPilot alternatives for deploying, and managing web applications on popular cloud servers; both small & large projects in 2024.

From free self-hosted, to web-based and completely managed solutions.

ServerPilot Alternatives

Still thinking of giving ServerPilot a try? Register with this link to receive $10 in free account credits; you can trial coach plan features for a month for free.

ServerPilot Alternatives

The best alternative would be RunCloud (link activates a free 5+15day pro trial) — which is actually an improved version of ServerPilot with the capability to handle large volumes of servers and websites under the same account/subscription; making it cheaper (or free with less features). They also support GIT deployment.

RunCloud Features:

Connect with the following cloud hosting providers: Vultr, Rackspace, DigitalOcean, Linode, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform.

RunCloud Server Management

  • Free SSL/TLS Certificates (Let’s Encrypt powered), HTTP/2 Support
  • Push new code directly from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or your own GIT Server
  • Apache2, nginx, and FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) — automatically configured; change PHP version as needed.
  • Unlimited servers & domain names
  • Easy script install of WordPress, Joomla and a growing list of CMSes
  • Detailed transfer stats and server health checks
  • Web based database management
  • Automatic firewall which can be configured as needed
  • Custom repository for security updates with minimal interference
  • Fail2Ban security from DDOS and brute force attacks

And the list goes on…!

Fully Managed Alternative with Support:

If you are looking for something totally different; Cloudways offers a free trial of their fully managed and 24h live chat supported services.

Server deployment on Vultr, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, Kyup supported. With easy to install WordPress, and other CMS environments or a ready configured PHP stack (& GitHub support). You can even migrate between different servers as needed and manage large operations worry free.

Self Hosted Alternative:

There are a few self hosted solutions to manage your server loads; here’s a list of free options available so far worth considering:

  • EasyEngine — WordPress On Nginx Made Easy
  • CentminMod — LEMP Fully Optimized Nginx web stack for CentOS
  • Trellis — WordPress LEMP Stack

ServerPilot VS Runcloud

I asked RunCloud about the differences between them and ServerPilot — I had an interesting conversation & they had this to say:

Both of us (ServerPilot and RunCloud) built on top of Nginx and Apache to deliver your websites. Us (RunCloud) is a former customer of ServerPilot and cPanel. But there are many things that are missing from both their services. Which is why we created RunCloud.

We are using ServerPilot before this not because we don’t know how to manage the server, but manually managing it would be a problem in the long run, and they don’t have what we needed, GIT deployment.

Furthermore, their pricing is per server which makes us, who is not used to USD currency feel that is a very high price to commit each month and their features are unusable for us, except for SSL.

So we are building what we want to use, with features that make it easier to manage tons of servers since we are also a web development agency. Each of our customers requires their own server. So it is hard to manage it manually or with ServerPilot.

For now, we offer free support using chat box inside the landing page. But later on, we need to change to paid support since our solution is cheap enough and we can’t afford to pay people to do support.

Any experience with RunCloud; please, let us know in the comments!

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7 thoughts on “Serverpilot Alternative: Improved, Managed to Self-Hosted”

  1. Cloudways is NOT managed hosting or managed servers….. they are just UI same as Runcloud or Serverpilot

    And warning to readers that all of these “panel” Saas is not open source, you have no idea what is happening in configuration and if security malware or something will happen in future can be a disaster for the entire network……

    Reply
    • Thanks for your comment but I largely disagree with you.
      Please, let me elaborate.

      1. Cloudways and Serverpilot, Runcloud, etc. are NOT the same.

      What Cloudways provides is very similar to what a web hosting company would offer on their VPS & cloud plans, except that it’s much cheaper.

      They have managed security, backups and quality 24h support to name a few things that server management panels don’t have. And reason, why I would not recommend Serverpilot to novice users without any Linux understanding.

      2. Serverpilot alternatives such as Runcloud are not a security risk.

      This is a minuscule view of an entire system. Saas is a large platform that joins an entire network of servers and keeps update and tracks the configuration of each and every member of that distributed system.

      Thus, releasing of updates is very easy as a single point control for all the servers in such distributed systems.

      A good example of a venerable system is VestaCP, which had exposure to Linux/ChachaDDOS. Here all the users that had VestaCP installed had the vulnerability. But the updating needs to be done individually on each and every server.

      On contrast for Saas, such vulnerability is minimal, you only have to do the update once, and all the servers running will be secured.

      Also there will be always a security module such as a firewall that will be responsible to detect/prevent security vulnerabilities. And in the case of RunCloud, they have Fail2Ban which prevents any brute-force attacks (details).

      Saas is vibrant because of the fact that users have the advantage of operability and there is a control panel to work with.

      Saas operates as a distributed system where all the servers are able to access via the panel. This is a great utility for maintenance.

      Reply

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