ZPanelCP / Sentora

Our involvement with open source projects

A brief history

Sentora started out as ZPanelCP a free webhosting control panel for Windows developed as a hobby project by Bobby Allen. For a history of the original ZPanel project please see here.

Starting in version 6 Linux support was introduced with the vision of supporting both Windows and Linux, and so the first cross platform free webhosting control panel was released.

Version 10 of ZPanelCP saw a complete rewrite onto a new framework with vast code improvements, however much of the module code was reused from version 6 to speed up the rewrite.

After a sale of the project the development and support team forked the project to Sentora.org.

Our Involvement

Our founder Kevin Andrews developed the bandwidth tracking and limiting features in ZPanelCP 5.0.5 and went on to join the core development team with Bobby Allen.

Having a vested interest in the project and it's security most of our contributions went into improving security of the panel, including implementing MySQL Bound Queries, PHP open_basedir site restrictions, function whitelists and other infrastructure improvements.

After the project experienced heavy load and DDoS attacks we helped host their forums used by many for support and collaboration.


Current and Future Involvement

Currently we have stepped back from the project to concentrate on our own systems, and other commitments, however we are actively researching into a new and improved web hosting control panel.

The new system is in very early stages of infrastructure design and implementation with no control panel yet. We are actively using the new server design with manual administration of all configurations with many nice features, including:

  • Separate Linux users
  • PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1
  • PHP versions configurable per site.
  • PHP FPM with chroot and running under the linux users for tight access restrictions.
  • Multi MySQL to give users their own root mysql instances, making access controls more fine grain.
  • LetsEncrypt for SSL across all websites and applications
  • SCP/SFTP
  • log rotate configured to look after all Apache/PHP/MySQL logs for all users.
  • Separate Linux user to hold all configurations and run the hosting control panel.

We are excited about this new project and the directions it will take us!