Web Hosting Control Panel Soft Wares
Web hosting is the basic requirement
you need, after designing your web site, to make your presence on
the world wide web. A web host is the company providing you the
hosting service to host your website.
The hosting service, provides
everything you need to run your website, that includes data storage,
connectivity, email and auto responders. The web hosting providers
include individuals to corporate giants. They offer different
hosting plans to satisfy different website sizes and needs.
Every web hosting service provides a
control panel software to manage your website hosting. The control panel may
be compared to the brain of your body. It is through control panel
you can control all your activities of your web hosting, like email
creation, opening FTP accounts, tracking statistics and many more.
The control panel is an important aspect of
a web hosting site. The most used control panel in web hosting is cPanel. There are also some other panel options. The quality of a
web hosting service can't be judged by the control panel alone, but
it is an important aspect of a web hosting provider.
Considering the importance of control
panel it is useful to know some details of various control panels.
cPanel
cPanel is designed to allow you to
control everything from email accounts removal or addition to
administering MySQL databases. cPanel is based on Linux platform and
serves for over 10 different flavors of Linux. There are more
options and features and their interface is clean. cPanel is very
easy to use, has many features and moreover inexpensive. These
factors contribute to the number one place of cPanel. It costs just
$20/mo per server for a hosting company.
Plesk
Plesk has little advantage over cPanel
as it is available for both Linux and Windows. Web hosting sites who
want to provide web hosting plans for both windows and Linux, opt
for Plesk. Plesk has all the basic features of cPanel web hosting
plans and its interface appears as Windows XP. As it Plesk has both
Windows and Linux platforms, it is more expensive. Other
applications, like website builder tool, are integrate well with
Plesk.
Ensim
Ensim is another control panel that
has features to support both Windows and Linux. It is claimed to
have the interface to manage any type of web site, but it has to
cover some more grounds, when compared with other control panels.
H-Sphere
H-Sphere also supports both Windows
and Linux based machines. It is also widely used by the web hosting
companies. From key functionalities to complete automation it offers
many good features. But in overall judgement it lacks something,
when compared to Cpanel and Plesk. It is hoping to cope up with other
control panels in the next few versions.
Interworx
Interworx control panel has everything
to be ranked at the top of Linux only control panel. As more Linux
based web hosting companies are out there, Interworx has dedicated
to the Linux web hosting platform. This makes the Linux only web hosting
services to loose the potential windows hosting customers. Interworx
provides site usage snapshot. The interface is clean and you can see
your up streams and down streams.
DirectAdmin
DirectAdmin is also widely used due to
its inexpensive hosting costs, as it costs just $10/mo. DirectAdmin
boasts to have the features that the other control panels have, but
it only supports a few flavors of Linux and not Windows. DirectAdmin
claims to be the easiest web hosting control panel to use. A lot more
improvements have to be done as it lacks some of the extra features
provided by cPanel And Plesk.
Helm
Helm is the Windows only web hosting control
panel. The other control panels discussed above for Linux only or
for both Windows and Linux. It has good standard interface , easy to
operate and many customer friendly features. The striking feature is
the billing information inside the control panel. Apart from H-Sphere,
all most all the commonly used control panels do not provide billing
information inside the control panel.
Hosting Accelerator
Hosting Accelerator is yet another
Windows only server control panel. When comparing to other web
hosting control
panel, it lacks in extra features. The interface of the control panel
is busy showing more stuff on your face. It seems that the interface
is not planned properly. Showing too much won't make the best
impression. It is right for the seasoned players, but for the
beginners, this will be a little bit overwhelming and confusing.
The standard features and functions
that you have to look into a control panel, are listed below. The
list of features will help you to evaluate the web hosting plans.
Mail Manager
Domains Parked
Add On Domains
File Manager
Disk Usage
FTP Manager
Backup
Directories for password protection
Sub DomainsMySQL Database Manager
MS SQL Manager (Windows Only)
PostgreSQL Database Manager
Frontpage Extensions
REdirects
FTP/WEb Stats
Raw Log Manager
Raw Acess Logs
Error Log
CGI Center
Subdomain Stats
Network Tools
Hot Link Protection
MIME types
Fantastico (Linux Only)
IP DEny Manager
SSL Manager
Index Manager
Control Panel is to the web hosting as
the operating system is to the computer. Many factors come in to
focus while evaluating a web hosting service, but the control panel
plays an important part in judging the web hosting company.
For Windows hosting Helm is preferred
and for Linux cPanel is the most popular, user friendly control
panel.
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