A modern hosting panel
for the next decade.

Every few months a new VPS provider launches with $4/mo plans that have more compute than a 2015 dedicated server. At the same time, the hosting panel ecosystem has stayed expensive and clunky. cPanel charges per server. Plesk charges per server. DirectAdmin charges per server. The free options exist but they look like they were designed by accident.

Solo developers and small resellers end up with one of three bad options:

• Pay $25+/mo per server for cPanel and tolerate its UI
• Run a free panel that's missing the features you actually need
• Roll your own with raw nginx + custom scripts and maintain it forever

We wanted a fourth option: a panel that's free for personal use, cheap when you grow, and built with the stack of the next decade rather than the last one.

Most panels are sprawling PHP/Perl/Python codebases that are painful to install, painful to update, and painful to debug. The whole panel is one process, one file on disk, one systemctl restart away from sane state.

Both web UIs (admin + customer) are embedded in the binary. Database migrations are embedded. The license public key is embedded. There's nothing to copy alongside the binary, no node_modules to keep in sync, no PHP version to upgrade.

Updates are atomic: the panel downloads the new binary from our license-gated CDN, verifies the SHA against a manifest signed by us, and swaps in the replacement via a transient systemd unit. If anything goes wrong, you keep the old version.

The panel itself is closed-source — that's how we fund continued development. But the parts that matter for trust are public:

• The installer is public on GitHub — read every line before you run curl | bash.
• The license server's API is documented and predictable. You can verify tokens offline against the embedded public key — your panel keeps working even if our license server goes down.
• Binaries are SHA-pinned per release. Customers can independently verify they're running unmodified software.

We ship continuously — small things land in the changelog the moment they're live. The bigger picture is on the roadmap: actively being built right now is migration tooling for cPanel and Plesk imports, an onboarding wizard for first-time installs, and public API + CLI documentation. Beyond that we're considering Docker-based app hosting, multi-server fleet management, and an extension API — but only if the demand actually surfaces.

We prioritise based on what real users ask for. If there's something missing that would unblock you, drop into our Discord or email hello@novapanel.dev. Features asked for repeatedly tend to get pulled into the in-progress bucket; one-offs usually stay in "considering" until a second person asks for the same thing.