The control panel for high-stakes sites

Cito is our fastest web hosting platform, tuned and tailored to keep PHP and NodeJS applications running smoothly and securely. It combines smart web hosting with an agency-friendly control panel. By that, we mean that it’s easy to navigate, and not bogged down with a tonne of features you’ll never use!

Yes – 30 days, free, and flexible if you need a little longer. We’ll set the server up, and you can move a real site onto it and see how it behaves before you commit to anything.

We can also give you a personalised walkthrough of the panel first if you’d rather see it driven before you drive it. Book a call and we’ll arrange one.

We built Cito to provide a bloat-free alternative to cPanel for digital agencies, online stores, and other businesses with high-demand sites. It runs Nginx rather than Apache, carries no per-account licensing, and includes a page cache, cloning and preview URLs as standard.

cPanel is an industry legend and it does some things Cito deliberately doesn’t – mailboxes and DNS hosting being the two big ones. There’s a line-by-line comparison further up this page.

Cito is designed for demanding PHP, NodeJS and Docker applications. You can use Cito to manage hosting services for sites on:

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Laravel
• CraftCMS
• Symfony
• Drupal
• PrestaShop
• Joomla
• Magento
• NextJS
• and more…

Node applications run behind Nginx and Passenger, and you can also run Docker containers or proxy pass to anything else you’ve got running on the server.

As many as the server’s resources will carry. Cito has no per-site or per-account licence fee, so there’s no commercial cap on the number of sites – only a physical one. When you need more headroom, you move up a plan.

Each site gets its own system user and home directory, so sites on the same server stay isolated from one another.

Yes. Cito has three roles: Owner (the account linked to your Prostack portal), Admin (access to every site on the server) and Guest.

A Guest is scoped to the sites you name. Someone with access to one site can only see the files, settings and databases for that site – so you can hand a client their own site without handing them the server. You manage all of it from the Team page; see user management.

Mailboxes, no. Cito sends mail but it doesn’t receive it, so it isn’t a replacement for a mail host. Most customers pair it with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, which is where we’d point you anyway.

Outbound sending is fully supported: PHP’s mail() works out of the box, and the dashboard has a delivery log showing what was sent, what bounced and why. You can generate DKIM keys per domain in the panel and verify the DNS record from there too.

No – Cito isn’t a DNS host, and your domains stay wherever they are now. That’s usually what agencies want, and it means a migration doesn’t have to touch your registrar until you’re ready.

We integrate with Cloudflare if you want DNS, caching and WAF in one place, and we’re happy to help you get the records right either way.

We back up every Cito server nightly to off-site storage and keep seven days of snapshots as standard. That covers site files, MySQL databases and the server configuration.

File restores are self-serve: open a snapshot in the dashboard, browse it like a normal directory, then restore the files or directories you picked – choosing whether to skip or overwrite what’s already there. You can also download a zip if you just want to compare an old version rather than restore it.

Database restores go through support on purpose: we take MySQL backups from the InnoDB files on disk, and restoring those by hand breaks MySQL. Ask us and it’s done. If you need longer than seven days’ retention, we can arrange that too – there may be a charge.

We want Cito to be the best web hosting control panel out there, so we’ve built it on a well-tuned stack and keep optimising it:

• MySQL configuration tuned to each server’s specification.
• PHP-FPM tuned to handle high traffic levels.
• PHP Opcache enabled by default.
• Redis installed by default for object caching.
• TCP stack tuned, including BBR congestion control.
• A built-in page cache, Boost, on a per-site toggle.

Absolutely. We’ll plan and run the migration from your current host free of charge, with no downtime and no crossover billing – you won’t pay two hosts at once while we move you.

In practice: we take a copy of your sites onto the new server, you check each one on its preview URL before anything is pointed at it, and DNS moves only when you’re happy. Your registrar and your mail stay exactly where they are.

If you’d like to see how it goes in practice, read our case study with digital agency Lionhouse. We migrated 7 of its cloud servers from AWS to Cito and cut Time to First Byte by 36.56%.

When you choose Cito as your web hosting platform, you’ll get the following services as standard:

• A 100% uptime SLA on power and network.
• 24/7 support from our in-house team. No outsourcing, and no nights off.
• Real-time monitoring from 40+ alerts and real humans, around the clock.
• Security that never sleeps, with hardened firewalls and WAF, automatic patching, and more.
• Off-site, nightly backups. We retain everything from single files to whole servers for 7 days, as standard.

And that’s not all. See what comes with our managed hosting services here.

If you’d like to learn more about Cito, we recommend looking through Cito’s documentation – every feature on this page has a page there. There’s also a public changelog if you want to see what we’ve shipped lately, and a feedback site where customers post and vote on what we build next.