tl;dr - 
CYBERPANEL IS GETTING BETTER
After moving from a fully managed VPS host with a limit of 5 sites on the plan, the upgrade options became very expensive, so I looked around for a more affordable solution. Now I am no stranger to unmanaged hosting and had totally bare bones hosting in the past with cPanel, Plesk, but they quickly become unaffordable as you grow.
I experimented with a lot of open source panels like aaPanel, Vesta, Hestia and closed source control panels like CWP and a few others I have since forgotten.
Over all my testing, Cyberpanel free version has more premium features than the so-called premoium panels. Paid solutions are struggling to keep up with the free feature of Cyberpanel. Looking at a list of web panel projects that are no longer active, abandoned or rarely get updated, and it’s a a testament to the Cyberpanel team releasing regular updates. Here is a list of web panels post Cyberpanel is not even listed.
Cyberpanel IMO has a lot going for it. Having an entry level free version and a paid option, is smart business and is the same reason I was drawn to Cloudflare with a similar business philosophy. You grow. We all grow together. Once I build up this hosting platform, I will have no hesitation moving to the Enterprise edition, and that is as it should be. Our developers need to eat.
When I see the posters complaining about Cyberpanel, I look a bit deeper to see if it is really the fault of the developer or the user. My anecdotal research shows that in most cases it is the user not following instructions properly. @usmannasir’s first language is not English, but his tutorials are very easy to follow in his show and tell approach. He understands the nuances of the English language, so every English speaker should be able to follow. If more users RTFM, there would be less issues with Cyberpanel, and we will be freeing up the dev team to work on real stuff that matters. The documentation section is so self explanatory and shoud be the first point of reference. 1,2,3,4…
Here is an example of not following documentation. Staging/Cloning Sites: it is very well explained, and yet I see members struggling that they can’t see the staging site. All they need to do is to create the A Record on their DNS or let Cyberpanel do it automatically. That is the reason users can’t open their staging sites in the browser, and yet it is a source of complaints. The staging and pushing to live feature is amazing if you had to do that manually in a file manager. When everyone is done complaining about this feature, go and see who else offers this in a free panel. Certainly not as well automated. If you do find one, let me know…
So everyone kept accountable, here is an example of me not following Cyberpanel documentation when I got started: I tried to create a website with an ’ (apostrophe) in the title. In Wordpress you can put anything in there, but not Cyberpanel. They have a list disallowed characters and symbols and the apostophe is one of them. It fooled me initially, but then I read the on-screen messages and of course I just changed the title inside Wordpress afterwards.
The fact that Cyberpanel comes fully integrated with the amazing Open Litespeed Technology is the beginning of a good relationship with the developers, and I have ditched Apache in favor of the Open Litespeed Wordpress solution.
So for 3 months, the experience has been good. It is so easy to use and it is well documented. If something is not clear and it is not a stupid question or obvious you have not followed documentation, then you will get real help. If it is is a really stupid question and it’s obvious you haven’t followed documentation, then expect 
and don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer, it will probably be ignored leaving you no alternative but to read the docs.
Hopefully this sort of review experience is helpful to others. One suggestion I would make for the YouTube channel of the women doing tutorials: they are quite well trained, but in many cases the microphone is badly positioned and the audio is difficult to catch every word. There does need to be a studio standard set for audio levels for future video tutorials, and this forum needs to link directly to those thumbnails for immediate solutions. (once the audio problems are solved).
The team is doing a great job and I look forward to the day where my business has grown to the point that it needs to use the Enterprise Cyberpanel with the paid Lightspeed Server. It will be well worth the money. But thanks for a free version of Open LiteSpeed in the meantime.
I was disappointed that features have been changed to paid addons without any warning or explanation, just a page with no links except signin/signup to Cloud service. Following a Youtube tutorial and hitting a paywall instead of a configuration menu is a pretty rude way to say it’s no longer free.
So what do you think? Am I being too harsh? I only gave 4 stars because we all need something to push us to the next level. In this case, that 5th is within reach.
