If you’ve been building or administering websites for awhile, cPanel’s backend is probably a familiar sight. However, now that you’re making the step up to administering your websites through a cloud server at Host Virtual, or even opening your own hosting service – one of your best choices for a web hosting control panel very well might very well be… WHM and cPanel.
That’s right — meet the new control panel, same as the old control panel.
That’s not taking anything away from cPanel. This powerful control-panel software has been used by thousands, if not millions, of users around the world for over a decade. It’s also robust enough that many hosting companies offer it by default because how complete a solution it is with regards to hosting and website administration. This means moving between web hosting companies when using WHM and cPanel will be a breeze.
But even if you’re new to hosting and administering websites, cPanel is one of our recommended solutions for your needs. Like we’ve mentioned, it’s been used by many webmasters, which makes seeking advice or help from other users very easy at the cPanel.net Forums, an active community of cPanel users and administrators. You can also view our growing knowledge base of cPanel and WHM tutorials at https://www.hostvirtual.com/kb.
cPanel features the ease of use of a GUI, but it also appeals to power users who want or need, a command line interface. It also supports Linux distributions such as CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CloudLinux. In addition, cPanel includes the popular LAMP software stack out of the box, CentOS Linux 6, Apache, MySQL & PHP 5. cPanel also now includes the ability to enable dual-stack and IPv6 on your websites, which is crucial due to the IPv4 shortage.
If you’re looking to become a web host, cPanel allows the automation of account creation, server services and allows white label reseller options. You can set up options and configurations for disks, storage, mail clients, MySQL, SMTP/IMAP/POP3, as well as domain and sub-domain management, among numerous other features for your customers. As of cPanel 11.44 you will be able to customize the background and elements of the Paper Lantern theme, and even design custom templates using Template Toolkit.
Website administrators will be able to upload to their servers using their choice of web- or client-based FTP managers, as well as being able to interact with those files as if they were on a local disk. You’ll also be able to backup websites and restore from those archives. Parking domains, redirects, managing sub-domains a simple DNS zone editor and the ability to add a domain to the same account are all standard.
Webmail interfaces for SquirrelMail, RoundCube and Horde are also available. cPanel and WHM also offers mail access through POP3, IMAP and SMTP and controls Spam with SpamAssassin and Box Trapper, or optional RBL (relay block lists) in real time through Exim.
You don’t have to use cPanel, but with a myriad of intuitive options, it’s highly recommended. At Host Virtual, we offer you the opportunity to install other control panels — and if you don’t see your usual flavor, simply contact us and we’ll work with you to get an image or O/S of your choice setup for installation on our virtual server platform.