cPanel Fundamentals

An Overview

The cPanel, or control panel is a popular graphical web hosting and server management control panel. It is a simplified administration of web hosting services and server management. This proprietary utility handles aspects of website administration in its interface. It is designed for use by commercial web hosting service providers and requires monthly service fees.

The cPanel operates on Redhat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and FreeBSD. Alternately, there is a beta version available for Windows Server 2008 which is up for release.

History of cPanel

The cPanel was designed by J. Nick Koston as the control panel for the defunct web hosting company Speed Hosting. It was used by Web King immediately after their merger with Speed Hosting. After the merger, the two transferred their servers to Virtual Development, a now defunct hosting facility. Following an agreement between the two companies, cPanel was made available to VDI clients. During that time, there was little competition in the control panel market, which was then controlled by VDI and Alabanza.

cPanel 3 was released in 1999 with an automatic upgrade with the Web Host Manager being the added feature from cPanel 2.

cPanel 3 tended to be unwieldy and did not have a good user interface. It was improved by Carlos Rego and made it to what is now the present default theme of cPanel. However, due to internal squabbling between VDI and J. Nick Koston, the cPanel spun into two separate programs called cpanel and WebPanel. The WebPanel was run by VDI. With the loss of its lead programmer, VDI was not able to continue work on cPanel and eventually abandoned it completely. Nick Koston continued working on cPanel while working at BurstNET. He eventually left the company and concentrated his efforts on cPanel. It has been updated and improved over the years becoming a stable and most reliable control panel it is today.

cPanel Features

The cPanel provides front-ends for quite a number of operations to clients. These operations include the management of PGP keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.

There are several add-ons that can be added for an additional fee, with Fantastico being one of the more popular add-ons. It is a bundle of scripts that automate the installation of web applications which includes SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, TikiWiki CMS/Groupware, Moodle and over 50 others.

As differentiated from other web hosting panels, cPanel manages software packages separately from the underlying operating systems. It applies upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and other related software packages automatically. This feature ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel. This, however, has been the source of concern to some, as it becomes more difficult to install newer versions of these packages.

WHM (Web Host Manager)

WHM is a web-based tool used by administrators and resellers to mange web hosting accounts on a web server. It listens on ports 2086 and 2087 by default. It is accessible by the root admin. This web-based tool is also accessible to users with reseller privileges. Reseller users of the cPanel have a smaller set of features than the root user. It is generally limited by the server administrator to features which they determine will affect their customers’ accounts rather than the server as a whole. With the WHM, the server administrator can perform maintenance operations including Apache compilation and upgrade of RPMs installed on the system.