You don't need a control panel

You do not need a control panel. CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, whatever your flavor, these are bloated middlemen between you and your server. For what it's worth, I have managed mail infrastructure for fifteen years and never touched a panel for DNS, SPF, DKIM, or DMARC. The panel abstracts just enough to make you dangerous without teaching you anything.

You want to add a TXT record? Learn your zone file syntax. You want to create a mailbox? Postfix and Dovecot configs are documented. The "convenience" costs you performance, security surface, and lock-in. The learning curve is a feature, not a bug. It keeps you honest.

The virtualization tax applies to control panels too. Every panel installs its own PHP stack, its own web server, its own database. On a 1GB KVM you are giving fifteen percent of your RAM to something that generates HTML forms for shell commands. I have seen OpenVZ nodes where the panel consumes more than the customer workloads. For cgroup limits this matters.

• Learn systemd units
• Learn nginx configs
• Learn certbot

The panel is a crutch that becomes a dependency.

I got a cheap VPS from OVHcloud and I can barely use ssh without breaking something. Is there a guide somewhere? I dont want to be dependent but I also dont want to ruin my server!

Haha I understand you @sarahjey. 😂 when I start I use only panel too. But now I manage 30 servers with ansible and terraform is very good. The first time is hard but after we make a test and see is better. No click click waiting load. Just write and deploy. But I understand, the jump is big. Maybe start with cockpit? Is light, not full panel!