The advantages and disadvantages of cPanel

As a Senior System Administrator of Netshop-Isp.com.cy the technical and server-wise issues of the company concern me. I have made several crucial decisions up to now and one of them was about the control panel that we should be offering. One of the most important decisions in hosting is choosing how your users will use the service. There are many options for Linux hosting like Plesk, LXAdmin, and the most popular: cPanel.

What are the advantages of cPanel? Are there any disadvantages ? In the following article I will introduce cPanel and WHM to those who are not very familiar with and of course produce a list of advantages and disadvantages, based on my personal experience and my clients’ feedback.

cPanel is software that provide an interface to help website owners manage their sites (FTP, Email accounts, statistics), while WebHost Manager (WHM) automates server management tasks for server administrators. cPanel makes it very easy for the hosting company to give the client total control of their website without the requirement of providing full server access.

So, what are the advantages of cPanel ?

  1. cPanel is very easy to install. It only requires you to install Linux and run the installation script; it will configure most of your server automatically.
  2. cPanel provides a very easy visual user interface where you can manage your server and/or website.  There are several panels that are meant for administrators, clients, and even email users.
  3. Website owners and developers who are not familiar with server management in a Linux environment can manage almost everything via cPanel; from email accounts, to FTP, website statistics and cron jobs!
cPanel truly makes a lot of sense in managing your own website without any hassle. In addition to the advantages mentioned above, with cPanel hosting you can also take care of your entire website’s backup, manage cron jobs, protecting web directories, configuring http redirects and custom error pages and also configure spam filters.
cPanel on the other hand ( and as any other software) has its disadvantages:
  1. cPanel is meant for websites that are small to medium. cPanel itself is consuming quite a lot of server’s resources as it requires at least 256MB of RAM , and this amount probably won’t even run a website getting 400 hits a day without running out of memory or running into swap space on the server.    Most servers will have much more RAM than this, but a base install should not require more than 50 to 60MB of ram.
  2. cPanel is software which contains vulnerabilities just like any other software.  cPanel updates run nightly, however what happens if someone discovers a security risk and decides to attack your server before the updates are pushed to your server covering the vulnerability?
  3. cPanel costs money to license. This is rarely a factor to most big sites and companies because they have that kind of money to spend for something easy to use, however CPanel licenses are not cheap.  Nevertheless, at Netshop-Isp we do offer cPanel for free in our shared web hosting packages.

NetShop Internet Services offers cPanel/WHM on Shared Web Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS Hosting) and Dedicated Server Hosting.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

categories Dedicated Servers, UK Dedicated Servers, UK VPS Hosting, VPS Hosting, Web Hosting | Mike | datetime October 5, 2010 9:34 PM

2 Comments

Other Links to this Post

  1. dropjack.com — October 5, 2010 @ 9:38 PM

  2. Netshop Blog – Web Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Servers, SEO tips and Domain Name Tips » How To Install cPanel on Linux CentOS 5 — October 28, 2010 @ 10:30 AM

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

NetShop Internet Services - Leading Web Hosting & Web Development Company