Hosting Control Panel cPanel Features Explained

September 20, 2008 · Print This Article

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cPanel (control Panel) is a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel, designed to simplify administration of websites. cPanel handles aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is proprietary and distributed by cPanel, Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services, so the company does not offer a reduced-cost personal use license; however, owners of non-profit organizations such as educational institutions and charities can request a license at a free or reduced cost. Reduced prices are frequently available from dedicated-server companies, who install it along with the operating system.

cPanel runs on RPM-based Linux distributions including SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as FreeBSD. The company claims preliminary support for Debian, although this version has been in “beta” state for several years and is not supported. cPanel is commonly accessed on ports 2082 and 2083 (for an SSL version). Authentication is either via HTTP or web page login.

History

cPanel was originally designed as the control panel for Speed Hosting, a now defunct web hosting company which the original author of cPanel, J. Nick Koston had a stake in. It quickly became used by Web King after their merger with Speed Hosting. After Speed Hosting and Webking merger, the new company moved their servers to Virtual Development Inc, a now defunct hosting facility. Following an agreement between J. Nick Koston and VDI, cPanel was only available to customers hosted directly at VDI. At the time there was little competition in the control panel market with the main choices being VDI and Alabanza[1]. cPanel 3 was released in 1999 with an automatic upgrade and the Web Host Manager being the main features over cPanel 2.

cPanel 3 tended to be buggy and did not have a good user interface. The interface improved when Carlos Rego of WizardsHosting made what became the default theme of cPanel. Eventually due to internal problems between VDI and J. Nick Koston, cPanel split into two separate programs called cPanel and WebPanel. WebPanel was the version run by VDI. Without the lead programmer, VDI was not able to continue any work on cPanel and eventually stopped supporting it completely. J. Nick Koston kept working on cPanel while also working at BurstNET. Eventually Nick left BurstNET on good terms to focus fully on cPanel. cPanel has been updated and improved over the years. It is now a stable and reliable control panel.

Features

To the client, cPanel provides front-ends for a number of common operations, including the management of PGP keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.

Several add-ons exist for an additional fee, the most notable being Fantastico, a bundle of scripts which automate the installation of, but not the update of web applications such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, TikiWiki CMS/Groupware, Moodle and over 50 others.

Unlike some other web hosting control panels, cPanel manages some software packages separately from the underlying operating system, applying upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and related software packages automatically. This ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel, but has become a cause for consternation to some, as it becomes more difficult to install newer versions of these packages.

WHM (Web Host Manager)

WebHost Manager (WHM) is a web-based tool used by server administrators and resellers to manage hosting accounts on a web server. WHM listens on ports 2086 and 2087 by default.

As well as being accessible by the root admin, WHM is also accessible to users with reseller privileges. Reseller users of cPanel have a smaller set of features than the root user, generally limited by the server administrator, to features which they determine will affect their customers’ accounts rather than the server as a whole. From WHM, the server administrator can perform maintenance operations such as compile Apache and upgrade RPMs installed on the system