A KVM Panel That Won't Drain Your Hosting Budget

If you run a hosting business, you know the pain of picking a virtualization control panel. The established options are expensive, and the cheaper ones often buckle under load. Convoy is a KVM server management panel built with PHP and React that's aiming to change that math, with licensing that starts at $6 per node per month.

What It Does

Convoy is a modern KVM server management panel designed specifically for hosting businesses. It handles the day-to-day work of provisioning and managing virtual machines, giving you a control layer on top of proven virtualization technology. The project leans on Proxmox under the hood, which means you're not betting your infrastructure on an unproven stack—you're layering a nicer interface and management experience on top of something that already works.

The frontend is built with React, and the backend runs on PHP. That combination matters for a couple of reasons. React gives you a responsive, modern UI that doesn't feel like it was designed in 2009. PHP, meanwhile, is everywhere—most hosting companies already have people who can read and maintain it, and it slots neatly into existing infrastructure. The README makes a point of this: Convoy is designed to be easier to drop into an existing system, rather than forcing you to rebuild your whole operation around it.

Why It's Cool

• The pricing is the headline. Most panels in this space charge significantly more per node, and the README is blunt about the pitch: stop paying hundreds of dollars for software that's slow and unreliable. At $6 per node per month, Convoy is positioning itself as the option you can actually scale with. If you're running a growing fleet, that per-node cost compounds fast, and this is a meaningful difference.

• It's built on Proxmox, not reinventing virtualization. Rather than writing their own hypervisor management from scratch, the Convoy team built on top of technology that's already proven in production environments around the world. That's a sensible engineering decision—you get the reliability of a mature virtualization platform with a panel that's designed to be faster and more pleasant to use.

• The install is genuinely one command. A lot of self-hosted software claims to be easy to install and then buries you in dependencies. Convoy's install is a single curl piped to bash onto a dedicated host. Whether that's the right tradeoff for your security posture is your call, but the simplicity is real.

• Local development is taken seriously. The README documents a full local dev workflow using ddev with Postgres 17, including composer install, artisan migrate, and npm build steps. Projects that document their dev environment this clearly tend to be projects that expect contributors—or at least expect you to customize things.

• The docs are split sensibly. There's a deployment doc covering requirements, TLS, upgrades, and running against an external database, plus a configuration doc covering every supported setting. That's the kind of thing you only write when you've thought about how people actually run this in production.

How to Try It

Convoy installs onto a dedicated host. The README gives you a single command:

curl -fsSL https://install.convoypanel.com | sudo bash

Before you run that, check the deployment documentation for requirements, TLS setup, upgrade paths, and how to run against an external database. For every supported setting, the configuration doc is the place to look.

If you want to hack on it locally, the project uses ddev with Postgres 17:

ddev start
ddev composer install
ddev artisan migrate
ddev npm install && ddev npm run build   # or: ddev npm run dev for HMR

The app serves at https://convoy.ddev.site. There's an AGENTS.md file in the repo covering how to run Artisan, Composer, and npm commands, plus how to regenerate typed frontend artifacts and work with database snapshots—worth reading if you plan to contribute.

You can find the project at github.com/convoypanel/panel, and there's a Discord community linked from the README if you want to ask questions before diving in.

Final Thoughts

Convoy is clearly aimed at hosting businesses that have outgrown the free-and-open options but don't want to hand over a significant chunk of revenue to a panel vendor. The Proxmox foundation is a smart bet, the PHP and React stack is approachable, and the $6/node pricing is aggressive enough to make people reconsider their current setup. The catch is that it's proprietary—this isn't an open-source project in the traditional sense, and you'll be paying for a license. If that tradeoff works for your business, the one-command install and clear docs make it easy to evaluate on your own terms.

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