People who I should be thanking

I went trough a lot of hell, the company server was configured well, but it lacked a mail server, and I didn't quite know how to configure one, so I wanted to learn and do it like most server administrators out there.

I succeeded in configuring a simple good old unix-fashion mail server, but that was entirely not what I needed, the server is for web hosting, I can't afford to give everyone user to the system just for mail, so I decided to dig deeper. I've eventually found an ubuntu complete mail server tutorial, but failed while doing it since it was incomplete, this I learnt after I posted it to the ubuntuforums.

Sadly no other person replied than the one that told me that the tutorial is bad, so I got desperate and when I'm desperate I go to places like IRC for answers, there I found someone who told me to use an integrated solution rather than doing everything entirely by hand like vhosting and so on. I said OK but what should I use? they are integrated solutions out there but most are not open source and/or very expensive. He recommended me EHCP (Easy Hosting Control Panel) and gave me a howtoforge installation page. I said it's fine and all but I should really at least really read what the developers have to say about this control panel.

When I opened the site, I was delighted, the title was "Easy Hosting Control Panel for Ubuntu and alikes...- Free Fast Opensource web hosting control panel for your server". Reading "ehcp is the first control panel in this field with its unique features such as: complete php based, object oriented, opensource and free. even install is using php, so it is extremely easy to learn and extensible.. " afterwards really put a smile on my face.

It's a shame their site is not as good as EHCP itself, this forum post contains more information then the site itself.

At first almost everything worked except the smtp, which was because the config files weren't "clean", but the best thing was that since EHCP was written in php and has a feasible code structure, I found what I wanted to without problem. I done the smtp procedure by hand since, I didn't want to reinstall the working parts, and it all worked. EHCP is true to it's name and has quite a few features that make webhosting a lot easier, without having to pay infinite amount of cash.

These are most of the features of EHCP:
"
* php and apt-get based simple install,
* automatically installs and works: dns, apache, mysql, ftp, email, domains,
* most easy install: copy & paste in console and watch
* ready to use after install - at ubuntu
* adodb and phpmyadmin included
* object oriented programming using php,
* easily extendable/modifiable..."

The best thing is that the code is really understandable, even by inexperienced programmers, you can even re implement, or use parts of the code yourself, I encourage everyone to try this out, you can even learn how to do these setups yourself.