Python support is available on premium hosting as part of CloudLinux. It might be possible to offer this on free hosting too. But I personally find the cPanel experience for anything other than PHP to be quite frustrating, due to the harsh limitations caused by trying to fit the language to a web hosting platform.
The only benefit to cPanel’s implementation is that it’s much cheaper to find cPanel hosting with Python support than it is to host an application on a proper application hosting platform like Heroku. Because in terms of features and easy of use, cPanel’s implementation doesn’t come close.
A lot of time and effort, primarily. As in, many thousands of hours.
Well, as with what the Admin said, it pretty much not really possible right now. But you could have a compiler which turns python into PHP for execution.
From what I’ve seen VistaPanel (cPanel used by InfinityFree) used to have multiple themes, based on screenshots of it made for mofh resellers. However I guess it was removed long before I started using it.
VistaPanel was created by iFastNet specifically for ByetHost (a free host by iFastNet) and resellers of MOFH (like Infinity Free). This was done to save costs, since it’s free hosting it would be ridiculous to use cPanel or another paid panel. VistaPanel is designed to match the looks of cPanel so users can use something they’re familiar with.
A cPanel license is dirt cheap in comparison to the massive investment of time and effort required to build a custom panel. A large proportion of most businesses expenses are caused by staff, like salaries, taxes and insurance. Building a panel takes effort, effort takes people, and people cost money.
But most of the biggest free hosting providers in the world use a custom panel. That’s because a custom panel allows you to design the system from the ground up to work well for free hosting, and implement security features and cost saving measures which are necessary to provide free hosting sustainably.
There are free hosting providers who use cPanel. But most of them have signup restrictions, country restrictions, or are fly-by-night hosts with great ambitions today who will be gone tomorrow.
And last summer, cPanel changed their billing, so it’s no longer a flat fee per server. Hosting providers also need to pay them at least $0.10 per account per month now. Which is no problem for a premium account of $5 per month, but definitely a problem for free hosting.
I don’t understand that request? How would you suppose a plugin like would work? And what would it “plug in” to? How do you propose a plugin could add functionality like SSH, but also not doing anything (i.e. not offering any SSH like facility)?
Taking your description literally, it sounds like a dummy terminal which does nothing at all. But there are plenty of those already online, which are equally unhelpful as any dummy terminal we would offer.
And while SSH itself is simple, the power unlocked through a remote shell could be MASSIVE. So without knowing what you actually want to do over SSH, it’s not easy to build a mock terminal.
And I already explained before why a web terminal is probably not what you’re looking for:
What about this. You know how everybody using your hosting each has an allocated sector of memory within the server. What about within the server, you add a new partition, allowing us to access only that that one partition. We have SSH access to that one partition with some lightweight version of Linux. The Linux partition is very small, which only holds Linux itself and acts like a centralized bridge to all the other partitions with only a few commands, something like Busybox. Each one of the partitions are encrypted. We can login to Linux with our username and password which we use to login into the VistaPanel. Once we login to access the our partition we have to input a password to unlock it. Once we do that it will then unlock that partition, and now we can now use the other commands using probably symlinksstored on our user directory or some other kind of implementation. Using the symlinks will allow us to pass the commands from this small partition to the other, saving all our data not on the small partition but on the other, bigger user partition. Will this work?
To start, I would like to state clearly that we do whatever we can to increase account density on servers. Some exotic tweaks have been made to systems in order to reliably increase the number of accounts on servers. We do this because servers are expensive, and we need to keep costs down in order to be able to offer our hosting for free.
One way we do that is by not allocate any memory or other server resources to specific accounts. We load balance accounts based on current usage on the servers, and place limits on how much each account can use. But there is no reserved capacity for any account. It would be weird to let server power go unused because some lightly used accounts don’t use up their reservation, while simultaneously enforcing more harsh restrictions on other accounts.
Also, the entire thing you’ve described sounds a lot like Linux Containers of some kind. With a Linux Container, you get a group of isolated processes locked to your own account, backed by a virtual file system which may mirror the host file system. This technology has various applications. Docker, and related technology, is one popular application of containers. OpenVZ and LXC are container platform typically used to offer VPS. And VirtFS from cPanel and LVE from CloudLinux use container technology to isolate hosting accounts.
Containers are great because they allow isolation without the overhead of a full virtual machine. But while the overhead of containers is small, there is overhead. And while this overhead is not apparent with a few dozen containers, it’s definitely noticeable with tens of thousands of containers.
For this reason, shell containers are only available with iFastNet’s VPS and Business Hosting services. iFastNet’s premium hosting and free hosting platforms don’t have this and won’t get it.