From the team

The HostPane blog

Guides, deep dives and product news for people who run hosting — from in-place conversions to DNSSEC, resource limits to AI agents.

Featured

Letting an AI agent work your panel — after a dry run

HostPane now speaks the Model Context Protocol. An agent gets a short, closed list of tools, a token that reaches no further than its owner, and a dry_run on every change that shows the checks and the exact request without touching the server. Here is why we built it that way, and what we deliberately left out.

The HostPane team · 13 October 2026 · 9 min read

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Fresh off the press

Latest articles

Practical writing on the systems that keep websites, email and DNS running.

BoxTrapper without the backscatter

Challenge-response mail filtering has a bad reputation, mostly earned by servers that answer forged senders. We walk through the rules that decide when HostPane sends a confirmation — and the long list of times it stays quiet.

Priya N. · 8 October 2026 · 6 min

Security

Resource limits without a kernel add-on

Give a plan a CPU, memory and process ceiling and every account on it gets its own systemd slice — PHP-FPM master included. How it works, what it covers, and why an unlimited plan is left completely alone.

Marco D. · 2 October 2026 · 7 min

Websites

Apache and .htaccess, behind the same edge

Customers ask for Apache for one reason: .htaccess. HostPane can now serve sites with it, still behind Caddy's automatic HTTPS — and with a carefully limited set of overrides, so one tenant's file can't reach another's PHP.

The HostPane team · 25 September 2026 · 6 min

Migrations

Plesk joins in-place conversion

Plesk keeps sites under /var/www/vhosts and mail in its own store, so converting it meant serving both from where they already are. What carries over, and the one thing that doesn't: mailbox passwords Plesk never stored as hashes.

Priya N. · 18 September 2026 · 8 min

DNS

DNSSEC on BIND, and IPv6 per account

DNSSEC now works on both DNS engines, with a safe way to turn it off while a DS record is still at the registrar. And an account can hold a dedicated IPv6 address whose AAAA records follow it.

Marco D. · 10 September 2026 · 6 min

Reseller

Sub-resellers, and who controls what

Resellers can now have resellers of their own — one level down, with caps, permissions and branding that nest inside the parent's. We walk through the rules, and the DNS, mail-queue and IP tools that came with them.

The HostPane team · 3 September 2026 · 7 min

Backups

Imports that bring the data, not just the structure

The backup importer now copies site files, mail and database dumps too. Why it only reads from a staging folder, never follows a link, and restores each dump with a login that can reach only that one database.

Priya N. · 27 August 2026 · 6 min

Websites

Node.js and Python apps, one unit each

The Application Manager runs each app as its own systemd service under the customer's user, proxied to a URL path, with its secrets kept out of the unit file. Here's how to set one up — and why it's off by default per plan.

Marco D. · 20 August 2026 · 5 min

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