My favorite ... is the command-line.
In my experience,
any "control panel" can be penetrated, and it usually turns out to be the way that a system
was penetrated. (Unless you're using a "shared hosting" service, and your site was hacked by a next-door neighbor.)
Therefore, when I use third-party servers, they are always virtual private servers and the first thing that I do is to wipe the sucker clean. Nothing there but the bare OS. The first thing to go on is VPN, with digital certificates, and the first things to be removed are things like Telnet ...
and SSH.
You can get to the web server and that's it. The
only way to get to a shell is to go through the VPN tunnel, and the only way to do that is to possess the one-and-only (encrypted) certificate. Thus, it is quite effortless for
me to access the box, and impossible for anyone else. (The tunnel is set up as a "one-way door," such that the remote is "on my local network," but my local network isn't available to the remote.)
I ordinarily prepare configuration files ahead of time, then simply copy them into place on the new box. "Provisioning" is accomplished by a series of scripts, which were tested on local virtual-machines that are similarly configured.
