Hello everyone, I’ve been running my website on a VPS with Virtualmin for a few months now, but I keep hitting roadblocks that I can’t seem to resolve. The site itself is a restaurant-related site (mostly menu pages, coupons, and blog content), and while it generally works, I’m experiencing recurring issues with SSL, DNS resolution, and overall site performance. I wanted to explain everything in detail to see if someone here can point me in the right direction.
The first issue is SSL. I’ve set up Let’s Encrypt through Virtualmin, and while the certificate installs correctly, I often get browser warnings from visitors that the site is “not fully secure.” After digging deeper, I noticed that some subdomains (like www. vs. root domain) don’t always get included in the certificate. I tried reissuing certificates and manually checking the “Request certificate for domain and all subdomains” option, but it doesn’t always stick. This causes trust issues with visitors who expect a secure connection on every page.
Second, DNS propagation seems unreliable. I’m using Virtualmin to handle the DNS zones, but some users report that the site doesn’t resolve for them, especially internationally. When I run DNS checks, sometimes it passes, and sometimes I see failures on specific resolvers. I’ve double-checked my registrar settings to ensure the nameservers are pointed correctly, but I’m still not confident the way Virtualmin is serving DNS is consistent. I’m wondering if I should offload DNS to a third-party provider like Cloudflare instead of relying on the built-in BIND setup.
Performance is another headache. Despite enabling PHP-FPM and tweaking Apache settings in Virtualmin, the site feels slow during peak hours. Occasionally, I’ll even get 502 or timeout errors, especially when multiple users are trying to access the menu or coupon pages that rely on database queries. I’ve checked server load and memory usage, and while the spikes are noticeable, they shouldn’t be high enough to crash the site. I’m unsure if Virtualmin’s default configuration is optimized for WordPress-based sites, or if I should be switching to Nginx for better performance.
Another odd problem I’ve run into is email deliverability. I set up email through Virtualmin with Postfix, but outgoing emails (like contact form notifications or user registrations) often land in spam. I’ve enabled SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in the Virtualmin panel, but it doesn’t seem to fully solve the issue. Some testing tools even say my DKIM record is malformed, even though it was auto-generated. I can’t tell if this is a misconfiguration on my part or something specific to how Virtualmin handles DNS and email.
Finally, I keep seeing minor inconsistencies in Virtualmin’s UI compared to the actual system state. For example, the panel says Apache is running when it’s clearly down, or it shows quota usage incorrectly. Restarting Webmin/Virtualmin sometimes fixes these, but not always. It makes it harder to trust what I’m seeing in the dashboard. Has anyone else experienced these types of issues? Should I be focusing on fine-tuning Virtualmin itself, or is it better to let it handle the basics and outsource things like DNS and email to specialized providers? Any guidance or step-by-step troubleshooting would be hugely appreciated, because right now I feel like I’m constantly patching one issue only for another to pop up. Sorry for the very long thread.
Near everyone here have SSL, PHP-FPM, and the mail stack working …. This is the very basics , If it was not 98% of the community wouldn’t be here 