What's Web Hosting Control Panel

A Control panel in web hosting refers to the interface provided by the hosting company for their customers to manage and monitor a web hosting. Usually, the first thing you need to know after openning your web hosting account is to learn how to use your web hosting control panel. A powful and easy-to-use control panel will definitely ease your maintenance tasks.

There are more than 50 web hosting control panels you can use, but generally, those control panels will have some modules in common:

• Access to server logs
• Details of available and used webspace and bandwidth
• Email account configuration
• Maintaining FTP users’ accounts
• Managing database
• Visitor statistics using web log analysis software
• Web based file manager

In below, we will introduce some popular web hosting control panels in industry.

cPanel

cPanel is a unix based web hosting control panel that provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. As for the rich features from cPanel, it has become the most popular one in web hosting industry, and extremely popular in a shared hosting. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that most of the shared web hosting users are not experienced webmasters and with few knowledge in server management, this icon-based tool is so easy to use that there is almost no learning curve, which has brought great convenience to them.

cPanel is not free control panel, but in most case your web hosting vendor will give you as free in shared hosting or VPS hosting as the license cost has been shared by the other users who host the domain in the same server as you. But if you purchase a dedicated server, you ask for around $20-$30/month to use cPanel.

cPanel need 256MB memory to run with, this is not an issue for a dedicated server or shared hosting, but for VPS hosting, if you plan to use cPanel, you will need to make sure your hosting momory is over that number.

Plesk

Parallels Plesk Panel is another great control panel which can be installed in both Unix and Windows. Server administrators are allowed to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts, and DNS entries through a web-based interface. Some other functions including: files manager, database management, etc.

Plesk is not free as well, considering it requires less in memory and also a little bit cheaper than cPanel, Plesk is used widely in VPS hosting and Dedicated server hosting.

H-Sphere

H-Sphere is a web hosting Automation Control Panel for shared web hosting services with both Linux and Windows versions. H-Sphere have highest rating in terms of security and reliability compared with its competitors. But its disadvantage is that Licenses for H-Sphere accounts is much more expensive than the others, which make it's less preferable by most of web hosting vendors.

Self-Developing Control Panel

Some web hosting vendors (such as GoDaddy) would like to choose developing the control panel by themselves. This will reduce their cost and enhance their control on the features of this tool, but looks like in most case, the control panel they develop is less convenience than what we have listed in above.

Summary

Control Panel of a web hosting is very important for a in-experience webmaster, and for an experience webmaster, it's not less important as it will largely save your time when managing your server. So, before signing up a web hosting, you should check what control panel it will provide, and in general, we will recommend one with cPanel or Plesk.