A Review Of The Most Popular Web Hosting Panel Packages

Web hosts use what is called a web hosting control panel in order to run their business. Whether to sign on actual clients, or to segment one’s server, these panels vary in degree of learning curve, licensing fees, and functionality. There are a number to choose from, so the decision won’t be easy.

It’s hard to review web hosting panels without mentioning one of the giants: cPanel. The cPanel development team have created a fine Unix-based platform for all web hosts to take advantage of. The only problem for some is that the licensing fees can be a bit steep for those just starting out- several hundred dollars each year. Some discounts may apply during promotions or when buying in bulk, however.

Webmin is a free, open source, alternative for Unix-like systems. It has the ability to allow developers create plugins for the system, making custom installations entirely possible for specific needs. Webmin was created by a now-current employee at Google, so it has received much attention in the upstart web hosting world.

It’s good to see that some web hosting panels are working in modern features into their inner core. An example would be with GNUPanel, which allows hosting managers to accept online payment processors automatically. Other packages such as cPanel may be able to do this with third party software, but it isn’t built into the system. GNUPanel is based on PHP 5, so it’s also a rather mainstream and easy to pick up code base. GNUPanel supports many features cPanel does, such as one-click installation of Joomla!

Plesk is a popular proprietary alternative to cPanel. Plesk is mentioned as more user-friendly to the end user, as it has an interface much like you would see in the Windows operating system. Creating and managing users is painless, technical support is integrated, and statistics and monitoring are all available in the administrator interface. Overall, it’s a tight package that competes directly with cPanel as a licensed web panel.

A large website will quickly grow out of the shell that most web hosting panels create. A large website needs to be able to balance a load of traffic among many servers- perhaps hundreds or thousands in some rare cases. This is done through special web hosting panels such as that of InterWorx. This web hosting panel specializes in clustered servers and managing them to create a stable environment. InterWork and panels like it are only for the leaders in Internet industry, however, and common website owners don’t need it.

Final Thoughts

Web host control panels are many in number. Depending on what you need, you could side with one over the rest and do better with it. Thus, it is best to use demos available by each software package to see which one will best suit the needs you had in mind.

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