cPanel alternatives in 2026 — DirectAdmin, Enhance, or something else?

Doubtful. Evolution is just CSS and JS served by the same OpenLiteSpeed or Apache process. Skin does not change the daemon footprint. Your 220MB delta is CSF+LFD plus maybe CustomBuild options I stripped out.

I run minimal: no ClamAV, no SpamAssassin (Rspamd instead), no webmail roundcube. Just pure mail + web + dns. That is how I hit 1.08GB.

@SamAlvi Contabo Singapore to Jakarta is decent latency? I would worry about the subsea routing for Indonesian end users. Hostinger has a Jakarta DC now, probably better for JokoNord's clients.

Thank you @SamAlvi and @pieter_rtm for explain. I check Hostinger, my VPS is already in Jakarta DC, ping to my friends house 12ms very good.

I find DirectAdmin personal license page. $2/month but need credit card, I only have local bank transfer. Maybe I ask my uncle in Malaysia to help.

@RAJ sir, your lawyer client story give me hope. I worry my clients run away if panel change. But if old man can learn maybe my clients too.

Still scared of migration. My HestiaCP has 14 accounts. If I move to DA, can I do one by one? Or must all at once?

Yes. Stand up DA on a fresh VM, migrate one account, repoint DNS for that domain only. Zero downtime if you stage it right. I did exactly this for our 14 VMs, took six weeks because I waited for each client's DNS TTL to expire before cutting over.

@pieter_rtm your backup speed numbers are interesting but misleading for small shops. Enhance's 112 MB/s requires the controller VM plus worker nodes. At JokoNord's scale that is one VPS trying to be both. The architecture assumes horizontal scaling, which is why it is expensive below 50 accounts.

@hankels on your cost per GB: you are not amortizing your time on Docker nodes. Portainer updates, CrowdSec decisions, Traefik certificate edge cases — I spend more hours per VM on our two Docker experiments than on ten DA nodes. Your $0.09/GB becomes $0.14 if I add my hourly.

Small shop perspective from Amsterdam: I tried Enhance for six months, left because their support is Zendesk tickets with 48-hour turnaround. When a client's WordPress gets defaced at 9am Saturday, I need answers by 10am, not Monday.

DirectAdmin has a Discord where the lead dev actually answers. Not a community manager, the actual developer. That is worth $2 to me.

Also @wendy you mentioned Plesk on Windows — do you run MailEnable or hMailServer? Plesk's bundled mail stack on Windows is still SmarterMail last I checked, and their licensing got weird around 2024.

SmarterMail for new installs, yes, but grandfathered MailEnable licenses still work if you had them before 2024. I am on Obsidian 18.0.57 with MailEnable 10.23, no issues. The licensing "weirdness" was Plesk trying to force SmarterMail upgrades for antivirus features, but I just use ESET Mail Security separately.

@FlowSana you are right about Docker time cost. I tried Portainer for three months, spent more time in compose files than with clients. Plesk is expensive but it is a time purchase, not a software purchase. At my hourly rate the break-even is surprisingly fast.

Also for the ASP.NET Core crowd: Plesk's Git deployment to IIS with web.config transform is still unmatched. Enhance has nothing comparable, DA has nothing comparable.

DNS perspective from Buenos Aires: whatever panel you pick, check how it handles glue records and child nameservers. cPanel does this automatically, DA requires manual editing of named.conf, Enhance does not support it at all last I checked.

This matters if you run your own NS1/NS2 and want clients to point domains to them. A lot of resellers skip this, then wonder why .ar registrations fail at NIC Argentina.

@JokoNord if you stay on HestiaCP, at least use v-export to pull zone files before any backup. I have rebuilt from those when v-backup corrupted the tar.

Following this thread closely. Amsterdam here, running 200+ shared accounts on DA since 2022.

One thing not mentioned: DirectAdmin's "Login as User" feature is broken in Evolution if you use 2FA on the admin account. You get an infinite redirect loop. Workaround is disable 2FA for admin, which is obviously bad. Bug reported 14 months ago, still open.

Small thing but if you manage client sites daily it is maddening. I keep a separate non-2FA admin just for logins.

Also Buenos Aires, also DNS work. @Diego is right about Enhance and child NS — I opened a ticket about it in January, they said "on the roadmap" and closed it. Roadmap items do not pay my rent.

I moved four nodes from Enhance to DA in March. The migration was: export client list to CSV, recreate manually, rsync public_html. Took a weekend. Not elegant but it worked.

For Argentine peso reality: cPanel is impossible, Plesk is impossible, even DA $2 is painful after conversion. I run one DA node for clients who pay USD, HestiaCP for local peso clients who get what they pay for. Two-tier hosting, not proud of it, but the economy is what it is.

Only if you bill yourself hourly, which is an accounting fiction. My Docker nodes run unattended for months. The time cost is front-loaded, not ongoing.

@Digital17 two-tier hosting is honest hosting. Better than overselling cPanel dreams on HestiaCP nightmares.

@lol32 that 2FA bug is nasty. I reported similar on Keycloak once, they fixed it in a week. Open source velocity versus commercial velocity is not always what people assume.

Confirmed, just tested on my staging box. Infinite redirect exactly as described. This is the kind of real-world detail you never find in docs.

@FlowSana six weeks for 14 VMs is patient. I have 8 VMs and impatient clients. Did you run parallel DA installs or sequential? And did you use the transfer tool or manual rsync?

@Digital17 respect for the honesty. I have one client who pays in INR, one in USD, I feel the friction. The USD client gets cPanel for now, INR client gets DA. Same server quality, different panel, different price. Market segmentation is not a crime.