slipstream

Self-hosted hosting control panel · AGPL-3.0

A hosting panel that treats slow as broken.

Sites arrive cached, tuned and isolated. Deployments are measured before they go live — and a change that makes your site slower is refused, not shipped.

Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 · one command to install · no hosted plan, no per-site fee, no phone-home

9,840req/s
cached, sustained at 500 connections
83ms
p99 latency under that same load
8,051req/s
under a 2,000-connection flood, zero errors
79s
from bare server to a running panel

Measured on a 2 vCPU, 1.9 GB server running WordPress and WooCommerce. Read the method →

The Slipstream dashboard showing CPU, memory and disk headroom, a 24-hour capacity chart, service status and recent activity. The Slipstream dashboard in dark mode.

Safe Push

The deployment that makes it slower never lands.

Clone production to staging, make your change there, then let Performance Guard compare the two. It measures p50 and p95 latency, error rate, database query count and peak memory — then decides.

A pass promotes the code as an immutable release. A regression is blocked and production is left untouched. Rollback is one command, because the document root is a symlink.

How Safe Push works →
Performance Guard, refusing a real regression
$ slipctl safe-push 4

measuring production  (baseline)
measuring staging     (candidate)

BLOCK  p95 268ms → 1551ms (+479%)
       production was not modified

What you get

Sites in one step

WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, Laravel, static and reverse proxy. A WooCommerce site arrives with WooCommerce installed and its pages resolving — not a blank WordPress you have to finish.

The Velocity Engine

Full-page caching in nginx with precise invalidation from a WordPress plugin, request coalescing, and stale-while-revalidate. Responses are stored pre-compressed, so a cache hit costs no CPU to gzip.

Tuning that reads the hardware

Workers, OPcache and the InnoDB buffer pool are sized from the memory actually available. On a small box that is the difference between staying up and swapping.

Backups you have tested

Encrypted, deduplicated, off-site backups via Restic — with scheduled restores that prove the snapshot works, and a recovery-time estimate measured from your own data.

Isolation by default

Every site gets its own Unix user, PHP-FPM pool, socket and open_basedir jail, plus chrooted SFTP with no shell. One compromised site stays one compromised site.

Drift detection

Managed files are hashed. Edit an nginx vhost by hand and the panel tells you, instead of silently overwriting your change on the next render.

Measured against CloudPanel

The trap in any panel comparison is hardware — two “identical” servers of the same spec measured 2.5× apart for us on the same workload. So both panels ran on the same physical server, one at a time, OS reinstalled in between, with the same WordPress and WooCommerce content and both tuned to their best.

Metric Slipstream CloudPanel Difference
Cached throughput, 500 connections 9,840 req/s 2,495 req/s 3.9×
p99 latency at that load 83 ms 6.46 s 78× tighter
2,000-connection flood 8,051 req/s 163 req/s 36×
Install, bare server to running panel 79 s 410 s 5.2×
Disk footprint 0.92 GB 4.83 GB 5.3× smaller
Uncacheable WooCommerce render 189 ms 168 ms 12% slower

Slipstream 0.1.0 vs CloudPanel CE 2.5.4, measured July 2026. CloudPanel is actively developed and these figures describe two versions on one day — the suite is in the repository, so re-run it rather than taking the table's word for it.

Before you install it

We spend 12% on isolation

That last row is the price of the open_basedir jail: an strace under load put 72 ms of a 301 ms render in newfstatat, because the jail re-checks every path component on every file operation. CloudPanel is faster there because it does not have one. We keep the jail.

It is a release candidate

It runs cleanly on both supported Ubuntu releases with a 43-check suite green on each, and it has had one deliberate internal security pass. It has had no external audit and is not yet carrying production traffic. Run it on servers you can rebuild.

It does hosting only

No email, DNS, domain registration, billing or resellers. Each is a product in its own right, and a panel that does all of them badly is worse than one that does hosting well.

Install it

On a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 or 26.04 server with 2 GB of RAM. Slipstream takes over nginx, PHP-FPM and MariaDB, so give it a machine of its own.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Sulaiman-Dauda/slipstream/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sudo bash

That is the whole install. It checks the machine, installs nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, restic, certbot and wp-cli, verifies each Slipstream binary against its published SHA-256, generates the secrets and starts the services.

It prints a one-time setup URL. Open it, create your administrator account, add a site. Full walkthrough →