The server consists of dozens of separate services, each dedicated to a specific task, each developed and maintained by different development teams, each with its own configuration files and without its own configuration interface.
Managing each service separately is cumbersome and error-prone. Something as simple as registering a domain on a server involves reconfiguring dozens of domain recognition services.
cPanel – the industry’s leading hosting control panel
To solve this huge management problem, there are so-called control panels, which are nothing but unified graphical interfaces that allow you to interact with all the services and subsystems of the server in a much friendlier and easier way.
The control panel is responsible for abstracting all this complexity and simplifying it into a single, easy-to-understand graphical interface that provides quick and easy access to all services related to the hosting server.
The case of cPanel consists of two parts, on the one hand cPanel itself is responsible for managing all things related to a specific domain, and on the other hand to provide us with WHM.
WHM is a tool responsible for managing aspects that are outside the domain, one level up, and allows you to manage multiple domains at the same time from the same account.
For this reason, WHM is ideal for managing resale hosting accounts, as it allows you to share hosting resources between multiple domains, allowing each to have independent resources such as disk space, monthly transfer, number of email accounts, etc. can assign.
cPanel features
document management
All account files are grouped in the same user folder, these files can be accessed via FTP or through a web file manager that includes cPanel, a very handy file editing tool, with which we can create files and folders, compress and decompress, upload and download files to and from our computer, as well as edit files directly from the server using a web text editor.
In the user folder we can find almost all the files related to our website, this includes the files of the website itself, email, web log files and the account settings database and the website is omitted from these files because they are part of the MySQL database server iu are managed in their own directory so there is no direct access to the files.
There are other system log files that are centralized and also stay outside of our folder, such as: B. Email logs, although cPanel offers us a simple graphical interface to view statistics and monitor emails.
Database
There is practically no website that does not have a database implemented because it is the easiest way to store data in an ordered and structured way. There are many types of databases, and SQL-based servers are the most popular due to their robustness, security, data integrity, and longevity, supporting large workloads.
The default database management system in cPanel is MySQL and from cPanel itself you can create a database, create users and assign permissions to those users, it supports both MyISAM and InnoDB tables.
To be able to interact with the database, cPanel includes phpMyAdmin, an administrator that allows you to create, delete and update tables and records, import and export databases, design and create the entire structure and run any SQL query and much more.
domain management
It allows you to register independent domains, each with its own cPanel and allocated resources, or allows you to register domains as additional domains within another that share the same resources.
Since in domain management you can add additional domains, create aliases, create subdomains and manage all DNS records for any domain, be it the main or secondary domain, you can also create redirects.
Domains can also be parked, a parked domain is an additional domain without its own website, which has the purpose of referencing the main domain without occupying resources or creating its own e-mail accounts.
Allows creation of mailboxes, uses Dovecot and Exim as email services by default and allows email access via POP, IMAP, SMTP protocols or via embedded webmail, supports Roundcube or Horde, previously also included SquirrelMail but due to due to the lack of updates, the latter has been removed from official support, although it can be installed separately.
It also includes SpamAssassin and RBL lists to reduce and combat spam, and ClamAV to scan email for malware and viruses. Includes Mailman for creating and distributing email accounts.
It also offers email tracking statistics, email forwarding to redirect email to other internal or external accounts, an auto-responder to schedule automatic replies, and an advanced filtering system to help you organize your email.
software installation
Installing the software in cPanel is relatively simple, although it can be a bit complicated for inexperienced users. Not only do we have a manual installation option where we have cPanel tools available to make the task easier, but we also have cPanel plugins that offer repositories full of installable software.
Two of these most famous installer repositories are Fantástico and Softaculous, these are plugins that contain hundreds and hundreds of installers and their automatic installation scripts that make installation much easier. In most cases, you just ask where you want to install it, at which URL, and the install script will do the rest
Among the packages and installers that can be installed, the most famous are WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop, Magento, Moodle, but they contain hundreds of other packages where you can also choose the desired software version.
fuses
An extremely important point in all systems are backups, they are essential during catastrophic hardware failures, attacks, hacking and malware infections or simply migration between servers.
The backup system allows the server administrator to schedule regular, daily, weekly, and monthly backups, automatically rotate them for better disk space utilization, and create another copy of this backup on another external server.
On the user side, cPanel allows you to download those copies or create new partial or full copies. Full backups include site files, email, databases, users, passwords, DNS entries, SSL certificates, and any related site configurations that may be required to perform a full restore on both the same server and another.
At the same time, it also allows partial copies and restores, such as databases that change much more often than others and are faster to back up and restore, so it can be done more often and uses fewer resources than downloading everything together.
statistics
The system offers complete web traffic statistics, detailing not only the number of views, but also which URLs are most visited, which files are most frequently downloaded and the bandwidth consumption of each resource, organized by hour, day and month to analyze traffic peaks and visitors and their evolution over time,
At the same time, the statistics discriminate traffic separately according to HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP and IMAP traffic and thus offer a better overview of monthly transfer usage. Statistics and email tracking are also available, although many hosts disable this as it consumes a lot of resources and can be destabilizing on high-traffic servers.
security
It is one of the most secure panels out there, although as with any other software, and even more so in the case of a group of packages from various vendors that avoid cPanel maintenance, bugs and exploits are always a risk for this reason. Keeping cPanel and the add-on system up to date is key.
An optional system and cPanel can be added together with CloudLinux to harden and secularize the system, this adds several layers of security because although cPanel is secure at the server level, the weakest point is the websites, and on a poorly protected and misconfigured server, it can happen privilege escalation.
At the SSL/TLS encryption level, cPanel supports many different types of encryption, both the latest ones and old ones that are kept for backward compatibility to clients.
advantages and disadvantages
The main advantage of cPanel is undoubtedly its popularity, when choosing a control panel there is a fundamental point and that is undoubtedly the user, every user who already has or had a website is certainly familiar with cPanel and falls as an ordinary user it is difficult to switch and learn a new panel.
Another extremely important point is that it covers every single aspect of server hosting, from web servers to email services, FTP, antivirus, antispam, security, statistics, and a long list of related services. .
It has a simple and clean interface, groups functions in a way that is easy to find, and almost all tasks can be performed through the GUI provided by cPanel without resorting to the command line.
It allows to replace Apache with LiteSpeed or Nginx (still in the experimental stage) as a web server to increase server performance, it is very configurable and flexible, especially for shared environments where each site has an independent configuration to use.
The disadvantage is the consumption of resources, which although not so high, is not recommended for cloud VPS services with few resources, even if the version of cPanel for VPS is implemented, which is a reduced version of the version for dedicated servers.
cPanel price
The main disadvantage is that cPanel is not free, although if we buy a cPanel hosting service (usually multidomain hosting) it is included in the service details and the license can actually be paid for by the server administrator if the server belongs to us instead, the payment is borne by us.
Although the license is not cheap, at least compared to other competitors, it is worth noting that its price includes cPanel technical support for every problem, which is undoubtedly worth it, the support is good, fast and above all efficient.
Recently there has been controversy surrounding cPanel license changes creating uncertainty for the future, after cPanel was sold the new government changed pricing policy by increasing costs instead of paying a fixed price it is moving to a variable cost model, possibly increasing payments depending on the number domain.
More detailed information about these changes can be found on the cPanel blog at We announce prices based on invoices This first post caused so much controversy that there was a second post that tried to tone down the tone of the first post Update to bill-based pricing
This has caused controversy among hosting companies, especially those that offer plans with unlimited domains, which would seriously affect the cost per server. It is not yet known how this will affect the industry, although many companies are considering switching to a different board. if that doesn’t change
cPanel installation
Installing cPanel is relatively simple because the installer takes care of everything, it can be installed on both dedicated servers and cloud VPS services.
The main difference is the license and that with cloud servers the features and configurations are slightly different to save resources.
It is possible to install it on CentOS 6 and CentOS 7, at the resource level, cPanel itself does not consume too many resources, but when installing the services it installs such as web server, mail server, database, etc. the minimum requirements are:
- At least 2 GB of RAM
- 1 CPU core (at least 2 GHz).
- 20GB hard disk HDD or SSD.
- CentOS 6 or CentOS 7, always 64-bit.
These requirements are minimal for operation, however, the number of web pages hosted, the amount of traffic and the size of the database increase the resources required for normal and smooth operation.
As for disk space, it only refers to the disk space occupied by cPanel and services, then you have to consider the disk space required for websites, for backups and the important margin of free disk space for cPanel to function normally, since it occasionally uses a lot of space in temporary files, for example during backups.
To install cPanel and WHM you just need to run this command as root:
cd /home && curl -o latest -L https://securedownloads.cpanel.net/latest && sh latest
Then you have to follow the steps it tells you there until the installation is complete. If you have questions, you can follow it official documentation by cPanel Inc.
Alternatives to cPanel
There are several alternatives to cPanel, but none are as complete as cPanel, both because of the features it covers, the technical support behind it, and its popularity in the web hosting world.
The next panel in terms of properties is Pleskboard born in 2001, developed in PHP language and available in more than 30 languages.
Although it does not reach the worldwide popularity of cPanel, Plesk in some points in Europe exceeds cPanel in the number of installations, in very small points on the map in the global ranking it has dropped to second place.
Both allow you to perform the same tasks, but an important difference between them is the family of operating systems they support. Plesk is compatible with Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Linux, CloudLinux and Windows while cPanel is only compatible with RHEL/. CentOS/CloudLinux
A free, open source alternative to cPanel is ISP Configboard with a much friendlier interface than other alternatives and ideal for low-resource cloud deployments due to its small resource footprint.
At the site administration level, it successfully performs the same tasks as cPanel.
The main difference is on the server admin side, which doesn’t offer the same tools as cPanel, so you’ll need to use the console more often and supplement it with tools like Webmin. However, the availability of plugins and extensions is not that great. This is one of the best cPanel replacement alternatives
Another not so well known alternative is Directadmin, a paid control panel, just like cPanel, although very complete with a very modern and clean interface, a great candidate to replace cPanel in professional services and hosting.
Conclusion
There are many alternatives to cPanel, but none can match the range and variety of options, features, enhancements, compatibility and flexibility that cPanel offers, accompanied by one of the best and most efficient technical support in the industry, the best for nothing popular panel in the world of web hosting .
Despite the already mentioned changes in license prices, it seems extremely unlikely that another board could replace it, at least in the short term.
