Posted on October 6th, 2009cPanel has been an industry leader in control panel software since 1997. Located in both Houston, Texas and White Haven, Pennsylvania, cPanel.net has made its main mission to produce the best web hosting automation tools available and have succeeded in their cPanel/WHM product.
Designed for all
The cPanel/WHM control panel program is designed with both the experienced and the novice user in mind. For those just beginning in the world of web hosting, the program offers video tutorials and quite a bit of on-screen assistance. Those who are more advanced will be pleased to see a section dedicated to their needs.
The entire design of the program is GUI based (graphical user interface). Throughout the entire panel icons are associated with each task or link. To the left-hand of the screen, sections dedicated to frequently accessed areas, statistics and even a search box can be found. The main section of the initial log in page has all categories pertaining to the hosted account in easy to view boxed sections. The user can access file programs, preferences (which also includes the video tutorials and a handy “Getting Started” wizard), items pertaining to e-mail, logs, domain tasks, security implementations, databases, software/services and an advanced section that includes Apache handlers and MIME types access.
Features
Another great feature to cPanel/WHM is the ability to change the interface to suit the user. If having a lot of icons assigned to links isn’t your thing, you can opt to change to “lite graphics” or even hide the icons altogether. All boxes within the panel can be collapsed as well, clearing up some browser page room. You can also drag and drop all of the boxes within the page. This is a nifty feature to help if some areas are more accessed than others and you’d like to see them at the top rather than the bottom of the page.
cPanel/WHM is designed to be self-monitoring. If any service on your server fails, the script will automatically attempt to restart the service. It can be set up to also notify the server owner by e-mail, SMS or IM of issues that may have arisen. To help ensure security, cPanel/WHM includes virus protection software, rootkit detection and many other tools. cPanel.net constantly strives to bring you the latest in their software to ensure reliability and security.
The control panel can also be set for web developers. PHP PEAR packages, Perl modules and even Ruby on Rails applications can all be installed through the control panel. The ability to change PHP versions is also available as is a code editor which can be found in the file manager section.
As if the above wasn’t enough, cPanel can automatically update itself and software residing on the hosting server. With this control panel, worrying about manually updating is a thing of the past. The interface will allow the user to fine-tune the automatic updates, giving complete control over the process.
Conclusion
An easy to use interface, self-monitoring, development options and auto-update capabilities – all rolled up into one fantastic control panel. It’s simple to see why so many web hosting companies choose cPanel/WHM as their control panel of choice.
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