Enhance Control Panel Hosting: the cPanel Alternative

Enhance is a web hosting control panel, the software you log into to create websites, mailboxes, databases and SSL certificates. It does the same job cPanel does, but it was designed from scratch around clusters of servers rather than one box, and its developers say it is written in Rust. Devoster runs its shared web hosting and WordPress hosting on Enhance. We do not offer cPanel anywhere.

For a site owner, three design choices matter more than the logo in the corner:

• One panel for everything. Websites, domains, DNS, email, databases, SSL, backups and WordPress tools sit in a single interface. There is no separate WHM-style admin screen to learn on top of the user screen.
• Every website is isolated. Enhance runs each site in its own lightweight Linux container. Its security documentation says every PHP process, user SSH session and cron job runs inside that site's isolated namespace, and that sites cannot read each other's files, even when they belong to the same subscription. A hacked plugin on one of your five sites does not get a free walk into the other four.
• Hard resource limits. CPU, memory, IOPS and process counts are enforced by the platform, which is where the figures on each Devoster plan come from (Lite: 768 MB memory, 0.7 vCPU, 2,000 IOPS). A neighbour's traffic spike runs into its own ceiling rather than into your share.

Our VPS plans are a different product: unmanaged KVM servers with full root and no control panel installed. Everything on this page is about the Enhance-based web hosting.

Sources: enhance.com and enhance.com/product/security, checked 2026-10-28.

Both panels run websites well. The differences are in architecture and in which features come built in versus as paid add-ons that a cPanel host may or may not have bought. The cPanel column describes cPanel itself, so any given cPanel host can be better or worse depending on what it bundles.

Sources: enhance.com/product/features, enhance.com/product/wordpress-toolkit, docs.cpanel.net Git Version Control, cPanel's WP Toolkit Lite vs Deluxe comparison, all checked 2026-10-28.

cPanel is licensed per server and priced by how many accounts (roughly, customers or websites) the server holds. These are cPanel's own list prices, excluding VAT, as published on cpanel.net/pricing and checked on 2026-10-28:

Two things follow from that table. If you are searching for a cPanel VPS or a VPS with cPanel, the licence is a separate monthly bill on top of the server: a Solo licence alone costs more than ten times a Devoster Lite plan, which hosts five sites with its control panel included. And if you buy shared cPanel hosting, part of what you pay covers that per-account licence.

Enhance prices differently. It charges the hosting company per hosted website ($0.15 a site per month for the first 5,000 sites, with a $10 monthly minimum) and does not charge for servers or for staging sites, according to enhance.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-28. You never see that line: the panel is part of the plan price.

Git integration is the feature cPanel users most often ask about, and it works differently from cPanel's .cpanel.yml approach. In Enhance you connect a GitHub account once, which creates an app on your GitHub account that can see only the repositories you choose. Then, per website:

• Pick the repository and the branch or tag to track.
• Optionally set a build command (for example npm ci && npm run build) and a publish directory, which becomes the site's document root.
• Deploy manually, or turn on continuous deployment so every push to that branch triggers a new release through a GitHub webhook.

Each deployment is cloned into its own directory, and the site only switches to it when the clone and build succeed:

~/deploys/
  <uuid-1>/   previous release
  <uuid-2>/   new release
  current     points to the latest successful build

A failed build leaves the live site on the previous release, and pushing again cancels a deployment still in progress. Enhance supports this for PHP, Node.js, Laravel, static and custom applications. Three limits worth knowing before you plan around it: the built-in integration is GitHub only; it does not apply to sites created with a one-click installer such as WordPress, so to keep WordPress in Git you create the site from scratch and deploy your repository to it as a PHP app; and the GitHub connection is not carried over when you clone a site or restore a backup. Staging websites can be connected too, so a common setup is develop deploying to staging and main to production. Our hosting for developers page goes further into that workflow.

Source: Enhance GitHub deploy documentation, checked 2026-10-28.

What you gain

• Container isolation between your own sites, without paying for an add-on.
• Git deployment with atomic releases instead of a pull-then-copy task file.
• A staging site for every website slot on every Devoster plan, rather than staging locked behind WP Toolkit Deluxe.
• Granular restores from Devoster's daily backups, kept for 7 days: a single file or the whole site, from the panel.
• A cleaner interface. Enhance's panel is a single responsive app with dark mode and global search, not a grid of icons.

What you lose

• Familiarity. Most hosting tutorials still show cPanel screenshots, so expect a short adjustment period. The concepts (domains, mailboxes, databases, cron) are the same; the menus are not.
• Softaculous, if your old host had it. Enhance's one-click installer covers WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla and OpenCart rather than a catalogue of hundreds of scripts. Anything else is installed by upload or by Git.
• cPanel-specific automation. Scripts written against cPanel's UAPI or WHM API will not run against Enhance, which has its own REST API.
• WHM. If you resell hosting to clients and they expect a WHM login, Enhance's reseller features live in the same panel instead.

Enhance ships a cPanel importer that reads a full cPanel account backup (the .tar.gz you generate under Backup in cPanel). According to Enhance's documentation it brings across the website files, all MySQL databases, installed applications, email accounts with their passwords and messages, forwarders, the existing SSL certificate, cron jobs, FTP accounts, and the MX and SPF records. Addon, sub and parked domains become mapped domains of a single website.

Some things do not come across and need redoing by hand: PostgreSQL databases, wildcard subdomains, catch-all addresses, autoresponders, calendars and contacts, Mailman lists, directory privacy, error pages and old statistics. Check that list against your account before you move.

At Devoster you do not have to run any of this yourself. Website migration is free: open a ticket with your current host's details, and our team moves the files, databases and email while your old site stays online. You test the copy, then switch DNS when you are ready. If you would rather understand every step first, our guides on migrating to Devoster and changing web hosts cover the DNS and email side in detail.

Source: Enhance cPanel importer documentation, checked 2026-10-28.

• You specifically need cPanel. Some agencies train clients on cPanel, and some commercial software or support contracts assume it. If that is you, buy from a cPanel host; we would rather say so than sell you something you will resent. Our cPanel hosting roundup is a fair place to start.
• You want a VPS with cPanel installed for you. Our VPS plans are unmanaged KVM servers with full root and no panel. You can buy a cPanel licence and install it on an OS cPanel supports (AlmaLinux is among our templates), but the licence, setup and upkeep are yours. See our cPanel VPS guide for what that involves.
• Your code lives on GitLab or Bitbucket and you want push-to-deploy built in. Enhance's integration is GitHub only.
• Your site needs root-level software such as Docker, Elasticsearch or a custom daemon. Shared hosting cannot run it on any panel; that is a VPS job.
• Regulated data. Devoster holds no compliance certifications and does not sign business associate agreements.