A lightweight hosting control panel
A control panel should be the smallest thing on a hosting server. Dashmox's own two services use about twenty megabytes of memory between them, and everything else on the machine is there to serve your websites.
Measured
These are readings, not adjectives.
Taken from two servers actually running Dashmox, one of them hosting real websites. Anybody can take them again with the commands below.
Memory used by the panel and its privileged agent together, idle, on a server hosting websites with email and authoritative DNS.
The same two services for a few minutes after somebody signs in, because checking a password is deliberately expensive. It is given back on its own.
The database on the same machine at the same moment. The database is the part of a hosting stack that actually costs memory, on every panel there is.
The whole installation on disk, including the panel's own web interface.
The download. One signed archive, fetched once, checked against a published checksum before anything runs.
How these were measured, and the one that will confuse you
Every figure above was read on 4 October 2026 from release 0.97.155, on an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS server hosting nine websites with email and authoritative DNS, so that the set is comparable. The memory is what systemd accounts to each service (systemctl show -p MemoryCurrent) and the disk is what du reports for one installed release.
Take the reading yourself just after signing in and you will see about about 100 MB, not 26.7 MB. That is real, it is expected, and it is worth explaining rather than hiding, because otherwise the first person to check these numbers concludes they are invented.
Dashmox hashes passwords with Argon2id, configured to use 64 MB of memory for every single hash. That is the whole point of the algorithm: making a guess expensive in memory is what stops somebody who steals the password file from trying billions of them on a graphics card. The panel takes that 64 MB, uses it, and hands it straight back, but the Go runtime holds the pages for a few minutes before returning them to the system. So the panel's memory is about 26.7 MB at rest, rises by roughly 64 MB when a password is checked, and settles again with nobody doing anything.
It also means the figure is not a limit. The 1 GB a server needs to install Dashmox has room for this several times over.
Earlier readings, kept because several days on different machines say more than one day does: 29 MB on 27 September 2026 from release 0.97.65, nine websites, Ubuntu 26.04. 18 MB on 19 September 2026 from 0.96.29 on a machine no longer running. 24.7 MB on 29 September 2026 from 0.97.128, on an Ubuntu 24.04 server hosting thirty-five websites. Four times the websites and less memory, which is the point: this does not scale with what you host.
What a server needs
One gigabyte of memory, two gigabytes of disk.
Not a suggestion: the installer reads both before it starts and refuses rather than half installing a panel on a machine that cannot hold it.
| Published minimum to install | Memory | Free disk |
|---|---|---|
| Dashmox | 1 GB | 2 GB |
| The most widely used hosting panel | 2 GB, and 4 GB recommended | 20 GB, and 40 GB recommended |
| Another widely used panel | 1 GB, plus 1 GB of swap | 20 GB |
Each figure is the minimum that panel publishes for installing on Linux, read from its own documentation on 19 September 2026. Not a measurement and not a benchmark: it is what each maker says a server should have before you begin. It is compared because it is the one number every panel states in the same terms, and the number you pay for when you rent a machine.
Where the weight actually is
The database engine uses several times what the panel does.
On the server above, the database was using 356 MB while the panel and its agent used 26.7 MB. Nginx and PowerDNS account for most of the rest. That is the ordinary shape of a hosting server, and it is the argument for a small panel: the memory your websites and their databases need is the memory that does the work, and a panel spending hundreds of megabytes is spending it on itself.
Dashmox keeps its own part small by being two Go programs and a SQLite file rather than a stack of services. The panel answers the browser, a separate privileged agent does the work that needs root, and the panel's own records live in one file rather than in a database server of their own.
What it buys you
The machine you already pay for goes further.
- A smaller server runs a real hosting business. A lightweight hosting control panel leaves the memory and the disk for the websites, which is what your customers are paying for.
- Installing is mostly Ubuntu. Most of a first install is the distribution fetching PHP, the database and Nginx. Unpacking the panel itself is a 21 MB download and a few seconds of work.
- Less to go wrong. Two services and a file is a short list of things that can break, and systemd restarts either service on failure without anybody being woken up.
- It updates in one piece. One signed archive replaces the panel, with a snapshot taken first and a rollback if the new release does not come up healthy.
Every figure on this page can be taken again on your own server. The memory readings are systemctl show -p MemoryCurrent dashmox-api.service and the same for dashmox-agent.service, and the disk is du -sh /opt/dashmox/current.
Questions
What a server needs, and what it is asked.
What do I need to run Dashmox?
A fresh Ubuntu 24.04 LTS server with root access, at least 1 GB of memory and 2 GB of free disk, and a hostname pointing at it. Any provider works. The installer checks the memory and the disk and refuses rather than half installing. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is supported as well, with one thing worth knowing before you pick it: it carries PHP 8.5 and cannot add another version, because no third-party archive publishes for it yet, so choose 24.04 if anything you host needs an older PHP. Ubuntu is what Dashmox installs on today; more Linux distributions are planned. Hosting email needs the server to have a name, not only an IP address.
What does the installer ask me?
Nothing. One command installs a working panel: it works out the address to answer on, gives itself a certificate, installs PHP, MariaDB and phpMyAdmin, and prints a single-use token to create your account with. The first time you sign in, a setup wizard asks for the rest, such as the name to answer on, a real certificate, email hosting, authoritative DNS, Node.js and container websites. Everything it offers can also be turned on later.
See what it does with the room it leaves.
Websites, email, DNS, SSL, databases and backups, in one panel priced per server.