About cPanel

cPanel is the grand daddy of web hosting control panels for Linux. In order for a web host to use cPanel as their control panel, they must pay a licensing fee to cPanel.

Hate it or love it, it dominates the Linux Web Hosting market and covers all of the standard LAMP hosting management needs.

Since their beginnings in 1997, cPanel has been setting the standard for web hosting automation.

Advantages of having a standard

While it may be controversial to call cPanel a "standard" in web hosting control panels, no matter what the case, its widespread use comes with many advantages.

No vendor lock-in

cPanel doesn't make it particularly painful to move all of your files, database information, e-mail address, and so on to a different control panel. However, staying with cPanel gives you the freedom from being stuck with a web host. Many people have undoubtedly experienced how quickly a web host can go from wonderful to destructive. The ease of transferring all of your web hosting assets between cPanel hosts, combined with the sheer number of cPanel hosts, enables you to make a quick and hopefully painless getaway from a web host.

Transferring between cPanel hosts requires no intervention from your old host, and is started using a handy wizard.

cPanel full backup

Once you have moved the backup file to a new host, that host should be able to extract an often exact copy of your old setup (server nuances notwithstanding).

Learning curve

If setting up the server environment is enough work on its own, you might not want to have to learn a new control panel. Learn cPanel once and you're good to go – you'll know in general where everything is, what settings you can manage, and so on.

If you stick with cPanel hosting, the only new things you'll potentially have to learn on a different host are:

Different cPanel version (minor tweaks to processes)
Different cPanel skin (things are in different places)
Whether certain features have been enabled or disabled (for example, if your host has disabled shell access, then the corresponding item in cPanel would be missing or disabled)

The first two items are mostly painless and the last item would be the case no matter which control panel is being used.

The functions within cPanel are littered with standard programs as well, such as phpMyAdmin for viewing and editing the database, as well as SquirrelMail for email.

Continued development

With so many people using cPanel, the likelihood of its development stopping is much lower than that of a home-brewed (in-house) control panel, such as 1and1's Control Panel. Therefore, you have some peace of mind that cPanel will continue to evolve as web hosting evolves; history has shown that cPanel has consistently evolved.

Your web host can focus on being a web host

Some hosts really market the fact that their custom control panel is top-notch. However, unless you have very peculiar hosting needs, cPanel will do the trick more than adequately. (And if you're technically inclined and your host gives you shell / command line access then you've got it all covered.)

Many web hosts develop their own control panel in order to save on cPanel licensing costs. Cost-wise, you'll have to weigh the benefits of cPanel versus a different control panel. However, especially on shared server accounts, you might not be affected by the cPanel cost. Also, a cPanel host does not have to spend much time maintaining the control panel, and they spend no time developing the control panel. Therefore, in theory, they should be able to spend their time being experts in server settings and other hosting details.

Documentation, support on random forums

I have often searched on Google for help on how to perform tasks in cPanel and gotten relevant, helpful results. If many people are using cPanel, this means that many people are talking about using it. Chances are, someone else has had the same cPanel problem as you and has written publicly about it.

For people who like reading manuals, cPanel documentation is comprehensive, including a publicly available documentation on the cPanel site and video tutorials, which are both linked to from with the interface: