Think connecting to a git repo from the UI. connecting to a domain to create development urls: projectname.domain.com, that sort of things.
I'm not sure what to look/search for online to find what I'm looking for.
If you want ease-of-use, running your own server is not the way to go. You can get pretty far with AWS/GCP/Azure free tier.
When setting up a server on VPS what exact 'dashboards'/'control panels' are available?
Like op, I want to keep an eye on things manually in one place, similar to what I get pre-set up in cpanel shared hosting. Disk space usage, total traffic used that month, tracking server load, pages visited, and by what IPs, etc.(ideally without using google analytics script tag on page)
I wan't to analyse the performance of my webapp really, relative to the amount of people signed up.
I am going to be using LEMP stack.
For me the 'sea of icons' of a control panel is a headache, I much prefer command line and saving my history for when I learn something crucial.
I used to be a linux shell only person but I am quite keen on having ssh windows in the IDE nowadays with git and rsync for getting code and 'assets' from dev machine to the internet. Connecting to remote databases via the IDE is pretty good too.
It is easier to Google how to do something and copy/paste command line commands than it is to follow a GUI tutorial.
Edit: Doh! Except for the admin panel, which was a pretty major part of your question :) Dokku is CLI-based, though I seem to remember there being a third-party web ui for it, can't remember. Either way, it might still be worth checking out.
I run probably 12 Kirby sites, and it’s amazing, but content backups is a major issue.
You can provision a subdomain and clone whatever repo into the root directory and be functional pretty quickly.
Cloudron
Really liked it when I was testing it a while back but reluctant to use it if it's going to sunset on me
We use VirtualMin on our servers for all of our commodity hosting (it is based upon WebMin). There is an open source version and a pro version. We use the pro version — I don't personally know what the exact differences are, as it was my colleague's choice historically, so I can't comment specifically on the open source version's features. But we've found it pretty good, and cheap enough ($6/month/server).
It takes literally seconds to set up a new domain, provides config info to copy across to our DNS provider (we don't do DNS on the same machine, other folk can provide a far more reliable service at no extra cost: FWIW, we use Joker), it has support for autocerts from Let's Encrypt, and has fairly up-to-date app bundles for a lot of well known web apps.
I'm a developer, and have no issues with command line, but using a control panel for day-to-day basics is just so easy, pretty much a total no-brainer, and also allows us to have more technically minded folk manage their own domains/subdomains and services (if you wish to share/resell).
I've used Plesk before, and didn't like it much, for a variety of reasons (including when it borked an update, and was all kinds of hell to fix)
It might be a little finniky for you to wrap your head around at first, but it does work well once you do that.
There is a free version available for non-commercial projects.
