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Web based control panels are required to manage your web server. Web based control panels play a vital role in setting up a website. Web based control panels give you control over your web server, with easy to use graphical interface to setup and manage your websites easily. There are many web based control panels available to administrate your web server. Selection of a web based control panel depends on your website and web server requirements.

No matter you have shared hosting account or dedicated server, you need to have a web hosting control panel, in order to prepare and operate your web server & websites effectively.

Today we will overview a few of the most popular web server administration panels available.

CPANEL/WHM
CPANEL is one of the most popular control panels. We have been using CPANEL to manage our web servers from almost a decade. CPANEL is licensed software, available on most of the web hosting servers. It has the ability to handle multiple servers, resellers, and end users to handle their individual web. In other words it’s a complete system.

CPANEL is suitable for parties who need to handle multiple sites, resellers and end user accounts. Novice users may find it over crowded and complex in order to find out what all the options in CPANEL do. Also that it’s not free software and one has to pay the price for using it. However most hosting companies, offering shared hosting, provides CPANEL to handle the websites and its price is included in their monthly/yearly charges.

CPANEL is available for both NIX and Windows Server. For more information on CPANEL, you can visit http://www.cpanel.net

DirectAdmin is the 2nd best choice for us to manage a webserver. DirectAdmin Is an easy to use control panel and does almost everything that cPanel does but I find DirectAdmin working way faster than cPanel. cPanel sometimes slows down your machine which I’ve never seen has been ever an issue with DirectAdmin. Moreover what I like about DirectAdmin is its cool look which is attractive.

The pricing of cPanel and DirectAdmin is another factor to choose which web hosting manager you want for your webhosting company. You can get a cPanel license for 425$ / year directly from cPanel which makes it about 35$ a month. Other distributors of cPanel’s license take up to 45$ a month. While on the other side DirectAdmin gives out their monthly license for 29$ and their yearly license is for 200$ which makes it very affordable for all type of consumers (Administrators/Resellers/Users). The life time license for DirectAdmin is for 299$ while a life time license for cPanel is for 1499.99$ and that’s for only ONE server. See the huge difference? Since cPanel is in market for a long time and many of the existing BIG companies are using cPanel and most of them are used to it so cPanel is cashing out their time spent in market out of everyone while there is no reason to use such a costly Control panel for your websites while you can get one in a cheaper price.

If you are so much conscious about price, there’s another option if you don’t want to pay for a control panel, You can use “Webmin”. Webmin is largely based on Perl, running as its own process and web server. It defaults to TCP port 10000 for communicating, and can be configured to use SSL if OpenSSL is installed with additional required Perl Modules. It is a proper and a very strong server administration panel which gives you all the webhosting options too such as FTP server as well as mail servers, proxy servers, databases and many more. I’ve used it for many years as well and I still use Webmin where I don’t want to spend my money on any webhosting control panel.

DirectAdmin Website: http://www.directadmin.com/

There are many other competing software’s which I have never used such as:

• H-Sphere ( http://www.parallels.com/en/psoft )
• ISPConfig ( http://www.ispconfig.org )
• ISPmanager ( http://ispsystem.com/ )
• Plesk ( http://www.parallels.com/plesk/ )
• HSPcomplete ( http://www.parallels.com/products/hspcomplete/ )

If anyone have experience about these panel’s I would like to have a feedback.