An Exploration of Hosting Control Panels (William MacMahon)

Mar 11, 2011

The web hosting service is one of the most competitive fields and this has encouraged the various web hosting companies to provide various hosting plans at affordable rate. This has further forced these companies to stand out other others performance. Though the extra features such as site builder, free domain name and the costing plays significant roles, it is the control panel that makes a major difference. Therefore, it is very important to select the proper service depending on the type of website. These control panels are actually a set of software offered by the web hosting company in order to manage and control the website. It is through the control panel, that a web hosting company supervises each and every activity of a website. These activities include opening of FTP accounts, creating email server, preparing and maintaining statistics report etc. In fact there are a variety of control panels. Some of these control panels work only for Windows platform, some only for Linux platform and some others work for both the platforms.

What control panels are suitable for Windows Platform

There are certain web hosting control panels that work only for Windows platform. Hosting Accelerator and Helm are the typical examples of Windows only web hosting control panel. However, Helm is one of the most popular Windows only web hosting control panel due to its several customer friendly features. One of the most outstanding features of Helm is the billing information as most all the normally used control panels do not posses billing information within the control panel. The only exception is the H-sphere. Moreover, Helm is also very convenient to operate as well as has a very good standard interface.

Benefits of using Helm:

* Managing your server needs: Helm has the ability to facilitate an unlimited amount of servers, users and domains whilst being able to swiftly increase or decrease the number of servers. Helm has a high level if integration and can be used alongside SmarterMail, MailEnable, Merak and Mdaemon. Amongst the other programs it can be used aside include Imail, Mail Servers, hMailServer, Serv-U FTP, Microsoft FT, MySQL Server, Gene6 FTP Server andMicrosoft SQL Server, amongst others. If that was not enough, Helm is able to support Perl,ASP.Net, ColdFusion and PHP ASP.

* Cost of the service: Helm offer a great deal of freedom with regards their billing process as customers can either use the Helm one or take advantage of the billing system from any other external party. This freedom is also extended to allowing the customer to operate in the currency of their choosing and how they want to distribute or view the invoices. Customers are able to choose between HTML and plain text format.

* Managing the customer: Utilizing Helm as a hosting control panel also gives users the chance to shape the relationship with their own customers. These can be used for resellers and as also as a tool to gauge certain relevant data. These can be really helpful for calculating user limits for areas such as domains, available disk space, emails and the ability to transfer data.

The Linux Platform and the Control Panels for it:

The DirectAdmin, Interworx and cPanel are a few examples web hosting control panels that works only for Linux platform. The DirectAdmin offers a low hosting cost and is the most convenient type of control panel. The Interworx offers an easy to use interface along with several other features. It is the cPanel, which is the most popular Linux based control panel and serves for over ten flavours of Linux. Most of the web hosting companies also have a preference for cPanel, due to its low hosting cost. This particular software package provides several other services such as deploy applications, provision customer accounts, transfer accounts from one server to another, servers secure and many other useful services.

Features and advantages of cPanel:

* Statistics of how the website is performing: With the amount of statistical tools and facilities offered by cPanel it is possible for any website owner to correctly analyze and calculate the traffic that is on their site. Not every hosting provider offers this service as many view it as a drain in their resources and would prefer not to offer the service to customers. If this an important aspect for a website owner, it is in their interest to ensure their choice of web host actually offers the service.

* Managing your emails: Having the ability to create and delete email accounts is something that many website owners crave and this is offered by cPanel. One of the major benefits is the Webmail facility that can be used by clients to access their emails online. There are a number of other programs that cPanel offers within its email range, with one of the most popular being the ability to create a forwarder that will pass emails in one account to another. There is also the facility to create a basic auto-responder that will send a pre-constructed reply to the sender if they submit an email about an enquiry.

* File Manager and FTP: FTP access is required to upload files and cPanel is capable of offering this facility and this is one of the most important features a website should be offering to its clients. Another thing that cPanel allows is for new FTP accounts to be registered so other people can have access the website. The power to restrict and specify access rights regarding certain files or folders will always remain with the website owner and the hosting company. Not everyone is happy with using an FTP package to load their files to a website and they can use the cPanel File Manager instead. This will grant the user to ability to unzip files, place files upon their server and be able to duplicate or erase any files.

What control panels are suitable for the Linux and Windows Platform

The web hosts discussed so far have only been for one platform but some hosts are able to cater for websites created on Linux and Windows. These dual application hosts include H-Sphere, Ensim and Plesk, which are probably the most common types of these control panels. They all have their own benefits and the H-Sphere is capable of offering many services that start at providing key functionalities and go all the way up to providing complete automation. There is no doubt though that Plesk is the most popular provider of both Linux and Windows control panel facilities. This is best shown by the fact that most companies that offer services for both Linux and Windows platforms choose Plesk. The interface of Plesk will be familiar to users of Windows XP but be aware that Plesk is expensive, which is due to its ability to serve both platforms.

Key benefits of using Plesk:

* Having shared hosting: Plesk is able to provide an identical various-platform design that allows any user to take control of their shared hosting landscape. This facility can also be undertaken on a self-administration basis. No matter the technical level of the website owner, they will find they are able to take full control of setting up, creating and fully managing their accounts.

* Having dedicated hosting: Of course, some clients want to do more for themselves and this is where the technologically smart clients can do their own work. The Plesk control panels offers the RPM installation which makes the Dedicated Hosting providers able to set a challenge for any skilled tech owners. This is done by the use of tools such as XML-API and 3rd party applications which are not available anywhere else.
About the AuthorAbout the author: William MacMahon is a professional writer in the web hosting industry. Visit WebHostingMadness.com to read his reviews on the top hosting companies each month..