Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions

Short answers. Each links to the page with the long one.

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Hosting on Windows

Can I host a Node.js app on Windows Server? Yes. Run it as a Windows Service on a loopback port and put a reverse proxy in front for the domain and the certificate. No IIS involved. → Node.js hosting on Windows Server

Do I need IIS? No. IIS is a web server for ASP.NET; your Node app is already a web server. If IIS is installed it only has to stop holding ports 80 and 443.

Do I need a web.config? No. That file exists only to configure IIS.

Is iisnode still worth using? No — nine years without a release, and it still lists Windows Server 2012 as a prerequisite. → iisnode alternatives

How do I keep a Node app running after a reboot or after I sign out? Register it as a Windows Service. A terminal window or a scheduled task will not do. → Run a Node.js app as a Windows Service

Can I run several sites on one server? Yes. One port and one service each, with the proxy routing by domain name.

Do WebSockets and Socket.IO work? Yes, with nothing to configure — Caddy upgrades and proxies the connection.

Does ASP.NET Core work the same way? Yes. Published, run through Kestrel as a service, proxied identically.

Is Windows slower than Linux for this? Only measurably for file-heavy work such as large installs, and excluding your sites folder from Defender removes most of that. → Windows Server vs Linux

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The panel

What does it cost? Nothing. No paid tier, no per-site or per-mailbox charge, no licence key.

Is it open source? The source is public and you may read, change, run and share it. It is source-available rather than open source, because one use is withheld: building a substitute for WinPanel itself. Everything else an open source licence allows is allowed.

Can I host clients on it and charge them? Yes, explicitly. What you may not do is sell or rebrand WinPanel itself.

What Windows versions does it need? Server 2025 or 2022, or Windows 11. It is not restricted to Server editions — there is no edition check anywhere, and everything it relies on exists on desktop Windows too. → Host a website from a home PC

Do I need a domain to start? No. Every site gets a preview address on http://<server-ip>:<port> immediately, and the panel itself is reached by IP.

Do I have to use Cloudflare? No. It is what makes DNS manageable from the panel and lets certificates be issued over the DNS challenge. Without it you edit your DNS wherever it lives, and certificates are issued over port 80 as usual.

If the panel stops, do my sites go down? No. The proxy and each app are separate Windows Services; the panel configures and supervises them but is not in the request path. Updating or restarting it does not interrupt traffic.

Does it support PHP or WordPress? Yes. PHP sites run on a supervised pool of PHP workers, a repository with an index.php is recognised automatically, and WordPress is a one-click install on a bundled MariaDB database. Each site gets its own databases, with a browser built into the panel. → WordPress on Windows Server

Is it production ready? It runs real commercial sites, but it is young. Take backups and read the release notes.

How is it different from installing Caddy myself? For one site, barely. The work it saves is everything around it — ports, services, deploys with rollback, certificates, DNS, mailboxes, quotas, customer logins, and the Windows settings that quietly break Node hosting.

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When things break

"Port 443 already in use" / the web server dies a second after starting. Something else owns the port — usually IIS, sometimes a mail server, sometimes an orphan of the web server itself. → Fix port 443 already in use

The service says "stopped" but the site is still up. The supervisor was killed without a clean stop and the app underneath survived, still holding the port. Every restart then fails to bind. WinPanel detects and clears this automatically. → Run a Node.js app as a Windows Service

www gives a certificate error but the bare domain is fine. www.example.com is a separate name and must be listed on the certificate. Add it to the site's domains.

Cloudflare 525, handshake failed. Cloudflare reached your server but could not complete TLS — usually no certificate for that exact hostname. Same fix as above.

npm install fails with ENAMETOOLONG or EPERM. The 260-character path limit. Enable long paths and reboot.

spawn EINVAL when something runs npm or pnpm. Node 20.12+ refuses to spawn .cmd files without a shell.

My email goes to spam. One of SPF, DKIM, DMARC or reverse DNS is missing or wrong. → Host your own email on Windows Server

Webmail works but Outlook will not connect. The mail server is presenting its self-signed certificate. It needs the real one.

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Still stuck?

Ask on Discord, or open an issue with your WinPanel version, your Windows build and the exact wording of the error.