What is the best free control panel for cheap VPS?

I was struggling with big TTFB times on my shared hosting service so I decided to change to VPS hosting. But my budget is low so I searched the internet and found a relatively good server configuration for only 3 euros per month. But what is the best free control panel for cheap VPS? A normal subscription of CP costs 10 euros per month so I needed to find a free alternative.

What are the aspects of a VPS?

Ram: The most important aspect is Ram. Some years ago I had a VPS with 1 Gb and I had many problems so I would suggest 2GB minimum if you want to have all the options like mail server with scanning and antivirus, etc.

CPU: This is the point that companies are very opaque about. Almost all of them only say the number of cores. But this is not sufficient for someone to be able to evaluate the performance of the server. 1 core of an old CPU does not equal 1 Core of newer models. You can look at clock speed but it’s also not sufficient, better than knowing only cores. This is important for having a short response time, especially if you have many scripts on your website or you are using many plugins on your WordPress.

Storage type: While every company says they are using SSD disks, but SSDs are so different. This is a less important aspect for load time of a website. But you definitely want to look for an SSD disk when choosing a good VPS.

My VPS details:

CPU: Intel xenon 2.2 Ghz (single-core)
Ram: 2Gb
Storage: 25Gb SSD
Price: 3 Euros per month
Provider: MVPS

What is the best free control panel for a 2GB ram single-core VPS?

Let’s see what are the options first. I have tested these 3 control panels with GTMetrix and from same location:

1. Virtualmin
2. CentOS Web panel
3. Cyberpanel

The results? well, The results were shocking! At least for me.

Virtualmin vs CentOS web panel vs Cyberpanel

Virtualmin (Apache webserver): The installation was easy with a single command from ssh connection. However, I don’t like the UI. It’s so complicated and hard to find my way around it. The text is small and the file manager is not very nice. I performed a test with wordpress+Elementor install and nothing else, to see the TTFB time and load time. I did not get a good result and the TTFB was almost 1 second and the total load time was about 5 seconds.

Centos web panel(Apache webserver): Installation was easy on CentOS 8 and I really like the user interface. I am using CP for a long time and CentosWebpanel looks like CP very much. I could easily add new user accounts, add email accounts, etc. On the free version, they only show you ram usage, and if you wanna see CPU usage you need to pay for the pro version which is almost free, 10$ for a year. However, the performance was not very different from Virtualmin and I got almost similar results. Also, I needed to configure ModSecurity rules for elementor to be able to save the page. This took me some 2 hours.

Cyberpanel (Openlitespeed webserver): The installation was easy like others. The user interface is the best among these 3. Buttons are big and I could easily add new websites and emails. Everything is working out of the box so I did not need to change anything. The loading speed was amazingly fast. I could get a fully loaded time of about 1.6 seconds. After a bit of investigation, it seems that Openlitespeed (a free version of LiteSpeed ent.) is performing very well with CMSs like WordPress. It also has a tool to add Docker containers which is super useful if you want to use your VPS for example as a VPN server.

Therefore, I am definitely going to use Cyberpanel for my server and I think it is simply the best free control panel for cheap VPS.
I hope you like this article and please write me what do you think in the comments.