Slipstream

slipstreampanel.com · Documentation · Benchmarks

A hosting control panel for people who care what their sites' p99 looks like.

One command installs it. One click launches a WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, Laravel, static or reverse-proxy site that is already cached, already tuned, already isolated, and already backed up off-site. Deployments are measured before they go live: if a change makes the site slower, the promotion is refused.

Slipstream runs on your own server. There is no hosted plan, no per-site fee and no phone-home.

Status: release candidate. It installs and runs cleanly on Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, with its 55-check end-to-end suite green on both (3 September 2026). Two client sites have run on it on a single 1 GB server since August, which is a start rather than a track record, and it has had no external security audit. Run it on servers you can afford to rebuild, and read SECURITY.md before pointing it at anything that matters.

Why it exists

Most panels treat performance as the operator's problem: they give you nginx, PHP-FPM and MariaDB with distro defaults and a settings page. Slipstream ships opinionated, measured defaults and treats a performance regression as a deployment failure.

Benchmarked against CloudPanel on the same physical server, one panel at a time, with an identical WordPress + WooCommerce workload and both panels tuned to their best (CloudPanel with Varnish, a hand-written WordPress VCL, Redis object cache and OPcache JIT):

	Slipstream	CloudPanel
Cached throughput, sustained 500 connections	9,280 req/s	2,259 req/s
Requests completed in that minute	570,864	135,661
p99 latency under that load	85.5 ms, 1 timeout	385.9 ms, 319 timeouts
2,000-connection flood	8,018 req/s, no errors	455 req/s, 1,619 timeouts
Static assets, 1 KB	12,636 req/s	2,767 req/s
Install time	105 s	460 s
Disk footprint	+0.61 GB	+4.58 GB
Peak RAM under load	880 MB, no swap	1,315 MB, and it swapped

Where CloudPanel wins, honestly: uncacheable dynamic rendering, by 2× on loopback and 4× over a network (5.4 req/s against 22.0). That gap is the measured cost of running every site inside an open_basedir jail (72 ms of a 301 ms render), which we keep on purpose.

Both panels' numbers, the method, and the two directives we tried and rejected because they measured worse are in docs/benchmarks.md. The suite is in bench/ and scripts/, so you can re-run it rather than take our word for it.

What you get

• Sites in one step. WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, Laravel, static and reverse-proxy site types. A WooCommerce site arrives with WooCommerce installed and its pages resolving, not as a blank WordPress you have to finish.
• The Velocity Engine. Full-page caching in nginx with precise invalidation from a WordPress mu-plugin, request coalescing, stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error. Cached responses are stored pre-compressed, so a cache hit costs no CPU to gzip.
• Tuning that reads the hardware. PHP-FPM workers, OPcache and the InnoDB buffer pool are sized from the memory actually available, not from a fixed number. On a small box that means it stays up instead of swapping.
• Safe Push. Clone production to staging, make the change there, then let Performance Guard compare the two. A candidate that regresses p95, query count or error rate is blocked, and every release is one command away from rollback.
• Backups you have actually tested. Encrypted, deduplicated, off-site backups via Restic, with scheduled restores into a scratch directory to prove the snapshot works, not just that it uploaded.
• Isolation by default. Every site gets its own Unix user, PHP-FPM pool, socket and open_basedir jail, plus a chrooted SFTP account with no shell.
• Config drift detection. Managed files are hashed, so a hand edit to an nginx vhost shows up in the panel. Rules you want to keep go in a per-site include directory that Slipstream never writes, so they survive every re-render.
• HTTP/3. Enabled automatically where the OS ships an nginx built with it (Ubuntu 26.04), off where it doesn't (24.04). No custom nginx build to maintain.
• Let's Encrypt, per-site cron, a jailed file manager, a database console, one-click login to wp-admin, and a self-update that health-checks the new binaries and rolls itself back if they fail.

Requirements

OS	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or 26.04 LTS
Architecture	amd64
RAM	1 GB minimum, 2 GB recommended
Disk	10 GB free
Ports	80 and 443 must be free, because Slipstream owns them

It configures nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB and systemd on the machine, so give it a server of its own.

Install

Slipstream takes over system configuration. Install it on a fresh server, not one already running something you care about.

On a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 or 26.04 server, as root:

curl -fsSL https://get.slipstreampanel.com | sudo bash

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗