What Are The Major Web Hosting Cpanels

By Author: Amy Armitage
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If you have a website, you need a way of managing it. This means setting up e-mail accounts, adding e-commerce capabilities and doing all the other big and small tasks required for maintenance (and success). Hosting providers now give their customers what is called a "cpanel," which stands for "control panel," and they come with every kind of account these days. For shared accounts you'll normally get client-side access with your cpanel, while a more advanced version will give you more power and control when you have a dedicated server.

Conventional wisdom used to suggest that you consider the platform your site was hosted on (Linux, Windows, etc.) and decide on administration tools with that in mind. This was because, as is still the case, certain software runs on certain systems and not others. However, cpanels are now used via web browsers, making the server operating system (OS) transparent, and essentially immaterial in most cases, to the site owner. The migration of these administration tools to the browser also accounts for the greater ease of use and universal access now available. You can be anywhere in the world, ...
... and as long as you can get on the Internet, you can administer and manage your web site.

Top tools

There are two main categories of cpanels, and they are not differentiated by the OS anymore. Now the difference is in whether they are commercial software packages licensed by the hosts, or control panels distributed under the Gnu Public License (GPL) or other free licensing method.

Notable commercial products popularly used as web-based control panels include

- cPanel
- Cortex from EMS-cortex
- DirectAdmin
- H-sphere and Plesk from Parallels
- InterWorxMachPanel from MachSol, Inc.
- Hosting Controller from Hosting Controller, Inc.

Some of the better free and open source software (FOSS) web-based control panels include

- DTC (Domain Technologie Control)
- ISPConfig
- Gnupanel
- Usermin
- ispCP
- Openpanel

Important considerations

A cpanel's job is to make it easier to administer/maintain your web account, or a whole server if that's the kind of account you have. Ease of use starts with the interface itself, a GUI (graphical user interface) that controls complicated administrative duties with user-friendly icons and procedures. Not all GUIs are the same, and some are easier to use than others. You need a tool that is appropriate to your technical skill level, although you should use any website tool without at least a decent understanding of what it is you are doing. You can get in trouble with these tools quite easily if you are unschooled.

Since just about all of the cpanels popularly used are browser-based, that is the way you must access them for use. There are no reports that any particular cpanel is incompatible with any particular browser, and the fact you are working on a Windows PC through a cpanel to maintain a Linux-server-based site is no problem. That is the one of the great advantages to browser-based tools, in addition to being able to work on your site from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

Final thoughts and extra "oomph"

Some of the cpanel tools even offer that "little bit extra" if you opt for a dedicated server or you decided to do "reseller hosting." In these cases you should consider getting a control panel that will allow customers and other approved users to maintain and manage their own, discrete hosting environments. The Plesk and cPanel packages are two of the most capable control panels and make it fairly easy for you to manage multiple users while empowering them to administer and maintain their own respective accounts.

Like any other decision, you have to choose a cpanel based on your specific needs, the kind of hosting you have (or want), your technical skills and your ability to get up to speed quickly with new applications. Although all cpanel tools share functionality and purpose, they go about their duties in different ways. Getting comfortable enough to use the tool effectively is a business decision, as well, because time is everything (it's been upgraded from being just "money" to being, well, everything).

This is the reason that user-friendliness and ease of implementation are hugely important to many people, the majority of site owners, actually, who do not work in command-line interfaces and write their own software. If that sounds like you, take a look at some demo versions and start reading up on cpanels, from independent sources that will tell it like it is. Once you find the tool that works for you, your site-related work will seem far less arduous, and pretty quickly, too.
About Author:
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from linux virtual private servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit online for more information.