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In 2005, two Germans from projektfarm GmbH<\/strong>, the same crew that ran HowtoForge, published a panel to manage Linux hosting servers. Twenty-one years later, the ISPConfig<\/a> is still standing. It remains BSD-licensed, with no per-account or per-mailbox fee, and manages sites, email, DNS, FTP, and databases on a single server or multiple servers. This is the story of how a small project survived two decades in which cPanel kept getting more expensive, and why it still matters for anyone setting up hosting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The first public version of ISPConfig, the 2.0.4<\/strong>, was published on SourceForge on 13 July 2005<\/strong>. Behind it were Till Brehm<\/strong> and Falko Timme<\/strong>, from projektfarm GmbH in Germany, the company that still runs the project today. In 2009 the official site presented itself like this: ISPConfig was started by the same people who run HowtoForge<\/strong>. That is the site of \u201cPerfect Server\u201d tutorials with which a generation of administrators learned how to set up Postfix, BIND and Apache.<\/p>\n This origin explains the panel's style. It was built by people who already documented, step by step, how to configure each service by hand. ISPConfig automates precisely that recipe, and from the start it has been distributed under the BSD license<\/strong>. The 2.x line received updates until 2011: the last folder for it on SourceForge is 2.2.40, from August of that year.<\/p>\n In May of 2009, the official site was announcing the new 3.0.1.2<\/strong> and 3.0.1.3<\/strong> versions of the 3 line, and the home page still listed among the supported distributions Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Debian 3.0 to 5.0, Ubuntu 5.04 to 9.04, and CentOS. It is the 3 line that survives to this day, following this model:<\/p>\n That same year, ISPConfig was also a finalist in the \u201cBest Tool or Utility for SysAdmins\u201d category at the SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2009. It is a sign of how widely the project was already used.<\/p>\n A 3.1<\/strong> arrived on SourceForge in 27 September 2016<\/strong>, and this is the stage at which this article was written. When the original post came out, the stable version was 3.1.2<\/strong>, from 25 January 2017. It was already translated into Brazilian Portuguese and included support for HHVM on Ubuntu 16.04, used in the hosting course I was preparing at the time. The 3.1 series received updates until 3.1.15, September 2019.<\/p>\n At that time the project supported Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and OpenSUSE, but already recommended Debian or Ubuntu. I reported bugs for the panel to work properly on OpenSUSE and talked to Falko Timme about that.<\/p>\n A 3.2<\/strong> was published on 15 October 2020<\/strong>, and the official site itself presents it as the \u201cnext generation\u201d of the panel. The 3.2 series received updates up to 3.2.11p1, from October 2023.<\/p>\n A 3.3<\/strong> was released on 25 April 2025<\/strong>. The main new features:<\/p>\n In October of 2025 came 3.3.0p3, a security update.<\/p>\n A 3.3.1<\/strong>, on January 22, 2026<\/strong>, brought:<\/p>\n 3.3.1p1, from March, fixed bugs in that version.<\/p>\n In September 18, 2026<\/strong> came out 3.3.2<\/strong>, and three days later the patch 3.3.2p1<\/strong>. She brought:<\/p>\n The details and the step by step for the update are in our post about the ISPConfig 3.3.2<\/a>.<\/p>\n What sets ISPConfig apart from a \u201cmini-cPanel\u201d is that it does not hide Linux. It does not create a parallel system: it generates configuration files common to the usual services. What appears in the panel is in the files, and when something breaks you debug Postfix and nginx, not \u201cthe panel\u201d. This is a virtue and it is a cost. ISPConfig is not for those who do not know how to administer Linux, but it is great for those who do and want to delegate the day-to-day.<\/p>\n In the current 3.3 line, the panel covers:<\/p>\n According to the announcement at 3.3.2, the supported distributions are:<\/p>\n For a new server, the shortest path is the official automatic installer<\/strong>, in Before running, two precautions:<\/p>\n The 2005: the panel from the ones who wrote the howtos<\/h2>\n
2009: the 3 line arrives<\/h2>\n
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2016 to 2019: the 3.1 line<\/h2>\n
2020: ISPConfig 3.2<\/h2>\n
2025: ISPConfig 3.3 and PostgreSQL<\/h2>\n
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2026: Debian 13, Ubuntu 26.04, and a security round<\/h2>\n
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ISPConfig and Linux<\/h2>\n
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get.ispconfig.org<\/code>. It sets up the entire server, with panel and services, in a single run. It only works on Debian and Ubuntu (without apt-get<\/code>, and stops the script) and, in the current version, supports Debian 11 through 13 and Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, and 26.04. Run it only on a freshly installed machine:<\/p>\nwget -O ispconfig.sh https:\/\/get.ispconfig.org\nsh ispconfig.sh --help\nsh ispconfig.sh --use-nginx --use-php=8.4 --unattended-upgrades<\/code><\/pre>\n\n
hostnamectl set-hostname srv1.seudominio.com.br<\/code>;<\/li>\n--help<\/code> lists the other options, such as --use-certbot<\/code>, --use-amavis<\/code>, --roundcube<\/code> and --ssh-harden<\/code>. The panel is located at https:\/\/SEU-SERVIDOR:8080<\/code>.<\/p>\nISPConfig against the competition<\/h2>\n