Last week, while waiting at Daxing Airport, I saw the news of BuyVM Luxembourg restocking. The prices were very cheap, only 3.5 Canadian dollars per month for a VPS with 1C1G and unlimited bandwidth, and only 1.25 Canadian dollars per month for 128G block storage. This price was much cheaper than using AWS S3, and since I needed a VPS with a large hard drive to store some files, I decided to buy it.
To make things easier, I installed the Baota panel. However, soon after, problems arose. I didn't mind the backdoor and security risks of Baota, but it was too much for this small machine to handle. The CPU load remained at full capacity for a long time, although the memory usage was fine.
Originally, I bought this machine to store a few DEVONthink databases using WebDAV for convenient multi-device synchronization, and to offload some Docker containers from other machines. However, due to the high CPU load, the machine was running very slowly, and there was a delay when using SSH.
Yesterday, I saw 阿杰 Jack talking about 1Panel, so I decided to reinstall the system and give it a try.
Last year, the author of the Typecho coal ball mini-program mentioned 1Panel to me. At that time, I only knew that this panel was open source on GitHub and developed by a Chinese team. Since I was familiar with Baota, I didn't switch. Unexpectedly, I ended up using it after all.
The installation process was very simple, as described in the documentation of 1Panel. I will only talk about my experience.
First, the CPU is no longer running at full capacity and is stable at around 10%.
Second, the memory usage is higher compared to Baota, which was around 30%, while 1Panel maintains around 40-50%.
Third, the installation is modular and requires readjustment.
After installing the Baota panel, it directly asks to choose between installing the LAMP or LNMP server environment. After installing 1Panel, there was no choice, and the containers needed to be installed from the application store when necessary.
Baota is a widely used Linux panel. Compared to Baota Linux panel, the characteristics of 1Panel are open source and modern.
- Open source: 1Panel emphasizes openness, actively gathers community feedback, and iterates quickly.
- Modern: On one hand, 1Panel adopts the latest front-end technologies and provides better user experience through carefully designed UX interactions. On the other hand, 1Panel uses mainstream container technologies to make Linux server operation and maintenance management simpler and more secure.
For example, if I want to build a website and need to use the Nginx web server, Baota directly installs Nginx when installing the server environment, while in 1Panel, I need to download OpenResty from the application store. For the runtime environment, whether it's PHP or Node.js, I also need to find and install the required PHP or Node.js versions from the application store.
The advantage of this modular approach is that I don't need to install so many programs on the server at once. I can install them as needed, making management more convenient.
Fourth, website configuration and firewall settings are more intuitive. Although Baota is already user-friendly for "novice" users, 1Panel is even clearer.
Fifth, the UI is really beautiful. If Baota is old-fashioned, 1Panel is fresh and modern.
Overall, I am quite pleased with my experience trying out 1Panel, and I plan to replace the panels of my other two VPS with 1Panel. However, there are still some issues. For example, although the machine has block storage mounted, the containers cannot be installed on the block storage.