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Web Hosting Control Panels

When you sign up for your first hosting plan your provider will most likely also provide you with a web hosting control panel. The web hosting control panel is an extremely useful tool that will make managing the backend and particular behind the scenes activities of your site much easier to do.

Some of the things you’ll be able to do in your web hosting control panel are manage your email accounts, ftp accounts, manage pointer and add-on domains, access your sites statistics, manage files, build pages for your website, install certain scripts with the push of a button, MySQL database management and a multitude of other functions.

As you can see, these control panels are extremely powerful and will make your day to day website operations run much more smoothly. I don’t think a day passes that I don’t log in to most of mine for one reason or another.

There are four quite common control panels that you’re likely to encounter while you’re out comparing web hosting plans. They are all designed to ease your backend operations and vital website operations. You’ll find the most common are CPanel, Plesk, Helm and DirectAdmin. Additionally you may also come across CPanel with WHM which is designed for providing you with reseller options.

Let’s take a quick look at the two most common.

CPanel: This is probably the most common of the UNIX web hosting control panels out there. It’s extremely powerful and provides many functions that you may never even use, or, that you’ll use only once yet at the same time you’ll find that there are some things in CPanel you’ll use on a daily basis. One of the really nice things about CPanel is that almost always comes packaged with the Fantastico module that includes one click installation of a majority of the most popular scripts websites may find a use for.

We have personally used the following web hosting providers both of which utilize CPanel:

In addition, CPanel is very user friendly, customizable and easy to get used to using.

Plesk: Plesk is quite similar to CPanel in that it offers you a backend control panel to manage aspects of your UNIX web hosting account. Many users who choose Plesk over CPanel do so because they feel the interface is smoother and much easier to navigate within. However, as far as functionality the two are almost similar for basic website operations.

When one is deciding between Plesk and CPanel, or any other web hosting control panel for that matter, it really comes down to personal preference as they are often similar in functionality.