CloudPanel is a lightweight hosting panel that can help you have WordPress on a VPS provider for free. The installation is easy and the interface is clean and easy to use. You can install CloudPanel on a ARM architecture or a x86 one over Ubuntu or Debian. This is a light cPanel alternative, if you want to check others you should see: Cyberpanel, WordOps, or Virtualmin.

In this article we will see how we can install CloudPanel on Hetzner VPS and see how the performance is for a WordPress website. If you don’t know Hetzner is a great alternative to DigitalOcean or Vultr at a decent price. You can check this Hetzner Review to find out more about this greater VPS.

CloudPanel Install

For this article and video with the details, we are going to follow Hetzner Installer | CloudPanel | Documentation to install it on Hetzner, we are going to set up it with MariaDB 10.8 on Ubuntu 22.04. The DNS will be on Cloudflare and we are going to point the ADMIN area to an SSL connection and 1 domain with WordPress. If you are interested to see how the best VPS providers compare check the DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner article.

Below is the video with all the steps and performance tests that you can follow:

Step1: Create the Hetzner VPS

You just need to go to Hetzner Cloud console and choose one of Ubuntu 22.04 and one of the shapes with at least 1 vCPU with 2 GB of Memory, this is the minimum recommendation.:

Step2: Install CloudPanel

After the VPS server is created you will need to login to the VPS and start updating the VPS and then install CloudPanel.

Update VPS:

apt update && apt -y upgrade && apt -y install curl wget sudo

Then you should reboot the VPS.

Install CloudPanel:

We are going to install cloudpanel with MariaDB 10.8:

curl -sSL https://installer.cloudpanel.io/ce/v2/install.sh | sudo CLOUD=hetzner DB_ENGINE=MARIADB_10.8 bash

After the installation finishes, you can access the admin interface with https://serverIpAddress:8443, the video will have the details.

Step3: Point Domain to Hetzner IP address

I am using Cloudflare for this, what you need to do is to go there and create an admin A record that you are going to use for accessing securely the admin interface and point the main domain to the IP address as in the below picture:

In the admin area, under settings, you need to add the admin URL as below:

Step4: Create WordPress Website

To add a WordPress website is easy, you just go to Sites and hit Add Site, in there you have Create WordPress website:

After you introduce the details and hit create:

After the website will be created, you can go and edit the PHP setting, manage the database, block traffic to IPs or bots or generate an SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt. The detailed presentation is in the video.

Performance Tests

I wanted to see the performance this panel has for WordPress and created a basic post with a couple of images, and activated WP Total Cache, the results were more than OK:

Conclusions

CloudPanel can be a great alternative for the ones that need something simple without a lot of features. It will help you host any website at very good speeds. The one downside is the fact that does not have email integrated so you need to configure a third-party one. For getting help with that check: WordPress Zoho Setup or WordPress Gmail SMTP Setup