zVPS.uk

The ZPanel originated in the United States of America nearly 10 years ago, It was originally developed by Kris Anderson and as far as we are aware the first stable release of the software was ZPanel 2.0 which was developed for servers running both *NIX and Windows operating systems. Kris Anderson and his small group of developers later released a fully re-coded version of ZPanel (ZPanel 2.5) which incorporated new features including template support and was the ‘stable’ release for over 5 years.

In 2004 Kris Anderson decided that he did not have enough time to work on the project any longer so the development split into two channels, Kris Anderson handed the project over to Chris Learmouth from Newcastle (England, UK) who took control of ZPanel (The Microsoft Windows Version) and Meisam Mulla a developer who worked along side with Kris Anderson forked a Linux only control panel which was renamed ‘RapidCP’.

In 2007 Bobby Allen (of whom had been involved as a developer since 2003) joined forces with Chris Learmouth and between them they released a brand new version of the ZPanel software (ZPanel 3.0.0) which Bobby Allen had completely developed from scratch, ZPanel 3.0.0 used completely new code and was released as a truly ‘stable’ release.

The new features in ZPanel 3.0.0 included Apache Virtual hosts, Email management both Mailboxes and Mail forwards where implemented into the software.

On 28th November 2009 The ZPanel team released there brand new version of ZPanel after being in Beta a week, ZPanel 4.0.0 included an ‘all-in-one’ installer similar to cPanel’s in which it would completely install and configure ZPanel 4.0.0 with Apache, PHP, MySQL and FileZilla Server.

On the 10th of December 2009 Project Dalas was announced, Project Dalas is the code name for what is known as ZPanel 5, The development team are currently hard at work writing a completely new code base to support even greater functionality.

On the 24th January 2010 the ZPanel staff had an online meeting and we had a restructure of the team. The main changes was that Bobby Allen now comes off providing support and will now concentrate his talents on development of Zpanel, Vantz Stockwell is now head of Technical support and will report directly to the Zpanel Chief of Staff Chris Chambers (no longer associated with the project). Vantz now has two new members, Bob Trollop and Andy Phillips who are now working in Support in various places such as the forums, IRC and our other support based systems.

On the 1st February 2010, The first Beta release of ZPanel 5 was released for public testing.

At 16:00 GMT on the 5th of February 2010, ZPanel 5.0.0 was released as the first stable release of ZPanel 5. After being in constant development by Bobby Allen since the 16th of January 2010, ZPanel 5 brings with it some lovely new features that have not yet been seen in previous ZPanel releases such as ‘Reseller’ support and translation support. The ZPanel team are very excited about the new release and believe that this release really is the next generation of ZPanel!

On the 9th of February 2010 Vantz Stockwell left full-time involvement on the Zpanel Project, his previous position has now been filled by Bob Trollop as Head of Technical Support for the Zpanel Project. Vantz remains as a contributor to the project.

On the 19th of February 2010 at 12:00 GMT, The ZPanel team launched their new hosted service called OSSDC (Open-source software development community) “Not More Available” which hosts a community forum for discussing Open-source software, development and operating systems; overtime OSSDC.net will also offer development tutorials too! One of the main features of OSSDC.net however is the project hosting service where members of the public can register an Open-source project and will then get all the services for managing, developing and distributing their software to a global audience.

On the 3rd of July 2010, Bobby Allen (Head of ZPanel development) announced new features that will be shipped with the latest major release of ZPanel (ZPanel 5.1.0) which would enable a master server to centrally monitor multiple ZPanel servers) the new software (which is separate to that of ZPanel) and is currently in development is aimed at premium hosting companies running one or more ZPanel servers. One of the many new features in ZPanel 5.1.0 allows the server admin to specify a ‘Master Server hostname/IP address’ of where hourly statistics are then sent too which are then nicely formatted in the new central monitoring software.

On the 7th July 2010 the ZPanel team released ZPanel 5.1.0 which included some features enabling Server Admin’s and/or Resellers the ability to ‘Shadow’ client accounts as well as recursive deletion of client accounts and full bandwidth restrictions also included several bug fixes and features that were previously missing from ZPanel.

On the 26th March 2011 the ZPanel team released their first update to ZPanel in 2011, ZPanel 6.0.0 contained more than 43 bug fixes/features as well as a completely new theme which is the first release of ZPanel which makes use of jQuery in its core codebase.

On the 14th of May 2011, Bobby Allen releases the first ZPanel install shell script for Ubuntu Linux to the development team to enable a quick ‘development environment’ automated install direct from the new SVN repository that is being used for ZPanelX development. This is the first known time that a version (greater than 2.5) has been run on Linux as versions past 2.5 was developed to work with Microsoft Windows only. This is a great break through as we are now aiming to have ZPanelX supported on Windows, Linux and UNIX (Including MacOSX and the BSD’s).

On the 21st of May 2011 we migrated the website (wiki) from one of our VPS servers and migrated it to use Sourceforge hosted services to provide protection against recent DDoS attacks we were experiencing. Bobby Allen has announced that ZPanel X will be released under the GPL license and source code will be hosted on Sourceforge.net’s SVN platform. We also made use of the downtime and configured zpanelcp.com as our new primary domain replacing the old zpanelcp.com domain. Automatic re-directors have been put in place to forward visitors to the new domain.

On the 12th of June 2011 the first official release of ZPanel (6.1.0) that is now fully supported on Linux was released; ZPanel 6.1.0 also provided as an improved Windows installer package with fully updated versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Webalizer and 7-zip. The release was provided as both a Windows installer package and source download (for Linux installs etc.) an automated install script for both CentOS 5.6 and Ubuntu 11.04 was also provided as part of the source download to enable simple installation on Linux.

After several months in development, The team announced the closed public beta (to that of those that recently had donated to the vBulletin forum software) will be released on Friday the 16th of March 2012.

December 2012 has been a busy month for the ZPanel team, we’ve been had at work working on bug fixes and new minor functionality for the next version of ZPanel (10.0.2) as well as designing the new ZPanel website and a brand new logo. ZPanel 10.0.2 is due to be released on the 1st of January.

ZPanel 10.0.2 has since been released and a few upgrades since. Our current version is 10.1.1 and are working on another bug fix update. We have also switched back to MyBB for our forums since vBulletin turned into nothing but a spam collector. Forum spam has dropped to almost zero with this change!

2014 ZPanelCP Project and Servers transferred to new ownership. Opensource development was forked into a new project at sentora.org