Why We Run Our Own Control Panel (and Why It's KarnakPanel)

If you've had a website before, you've probably used cPanel. It's the orange-and-grey dashboard that most shared hosts hand you, and for a long time it was simply what hosting looked like. So when people log in to SwiftNest for the first time and see something different, a fair question follows: why?

The short version is money, speed and control, roughly in that order. The longer version is below.

The licence fee you never see

Back in 2019 cPanel moved to pricing per account. A host now pays a monthly fee for every customer on every server, and the price has gone up more than once since. That cost doesn't disappear. It goes into your hosting bill, quietly, every month.

KarnakPanel has no per-account fee and no per-domain fee. There's no licence server at all. That one decision is a big part of how our Bronze plan sits at £3.99 a month without being an introductory price that jumps at renewal.

It's quick without us having to bolt things on

A lot of panels give you Apache by default and leave the speed work to the host. KarnakPanel is built around OpenLiteSpeed with LSCache, which is the setup we'd have chosen anyway. Each website gets its own PHP pool, and you can run PHP 8.3, 8.4 or 8.5 per site.

That last part matters more than it sounds. If one of your sites has a plugin that eats memory, it doesn't drag your other sites down with it.

Email is treated as a first-class job

Email is where small businesses feel hosting problems first. A quote that lands in junk is a lost job. KarnakPanel ships with Exim, Dovecot and SpamAssassin set up, plus a DKIM wizard, DMARC reporting and a deliverability score out of 100. We still check every new domain ourselves, but we're starting from a good place rather than a blank one.

Security we can actually look at

Updates to the panel are signed. Logins can be protected with two-factor authentication. Passwords are checked against lists of known breached passwords, and Fail2ban watches SSH, web, mail and FTP for people trying to guess their way in. FTP itself is TLS-only.

None of that is unusual on its own. What we like is that the code behind it is readable. When something behaves oddly, we can open the script that manages it and see why, rather than raising a ticket with a vendor and waiting.

What this means if you're a customer

• You log in at panel.swiftnesthosting.com. It's our installation, on our servers, and we look after it.
• Websites, email, DNS, databases, files and backups are all in one place.
• You can edit your own DNS records without asking us, and turn on DNSSEC with one click if you want it.
• If you'd rather we did any of it, ask. That's what the support inbox is for.

And if you resell hosting

KarnakPanel has proper reseller features: packages with limits that are actually enforced, usage per client, and suspend and unsuspend. It also works directly with HostBMS.com, a billing system we include with reseller accounts. When one of your clients pays, their account is created on the panel without you touching it.

Is it right for everyone?

No panel is. If you've spent ten years in cPanel, the first ten minutes in anything else will feel slightly off, because the buttons are in different places. Most people stop noticing within a day. If you're moving to us and want a walk-through, we're happy to do one.