What is a Hosting Control Panel?
The environment of web hosting is extremely competitive at the moment and these conditions have created an environment where firms are aggressively competing on price to offer numerous hosting plans at an attractive cost. If firms can’t compete on price they are forced to stand out in other ways. There are a number of different ways a firm can make a strong offering to consumers and these include building the site, providing a domain name at no extra charge and the overall fee. However, the major element for many consumers is the Control Panel. Therefore, the website that you have and what you want for it will play a huge role in determining which web host is best for you. The way that a web host maintains control to organize a customers site is through the software they provide and this comes in the shape of the Control Panel. Every single action and activity that is undertaken on a website is maintained through the Control Panel. These actions can include anything ranging from creating FTP accounts, operating the email server for the client or compiling statistical data. No matter what operating platform you use, be it Windows or Linux there will be a Control Panel for your specific platform or one that can cater for both.
Control panels for websites based on Windows Platform
Some of the web hosting control panels is only available for the Windows platform. Windows only control panels include Hosting Accelerator and Helm. They are both good but Helm is a very popular control panel for Windows only users only and a lot of this is due to the features it offers, which are very consumer friendly. A key component of Helms popularity is the way it handles billing information as it provides features that most control panels do not offer. One which does is H-Sphere but Helm is extremely easy to operate in addition to having a strong interface.
Key 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.
* Billing: They allow the hosting company to use either Helm’s own internal billing system or utilize any other 3rd party billing solution. It also enables to create the bill in any currency and provides the option of sending and viewing the invoices either in HTML format or in plain text format.
* Managing customers: An additional feature of the control panel provided via web hosting is that it allows hosting plans to be created for resellers. In addition to this, there is the ability to quantify how different resource limits are being filled with respect to transferring data, the use of domains, emails and the amount of disk-space that is on offer.
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.
Key benefits of using cPanel:
* Website statistics: The cPanel provides statistics facilities that enable a website owner to analyze the total amount of traffic. Most of the web hosting providers believe that the statistics programs consume a lot of resources on a shared environment and hence tend to eliminate this facility. Thereby it is always better to check whether the web hosting company is actually providing the web stats package.
* 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.
* Providing File Manager and FTP facilities: Having FTP access is useful to upload files and cPanel provides this service and this facility is incredibly important when trying to manage a website. There is also the provision for a website owner to use the cPanel to give other people access to newly created FTP accounts. There is still the opportunity for the website owner to dictate the access rights of other users, a power shared by them and the host firm. Using a FTP package may not be for everyone and for those uncomfortable with using this process can have access to a File Manager in cPanel to control their files. The beauty of the File Manager is that it offers users the opportunity to load up files, unzip files and manage the copying and deletion processes of the files.
Control panels for websites based on both Linux and Windows:
There are certain web hosting control panels, which work for both Linux and Window based websites. The Ensim, H-Sphere and Plesk are the most common examples of such control panels. The H-Sphere offers several features that range from key functionalities to complete automation. However, it is the Plesk which is the most popular control panel for Linux and Windows platforms. Most of the web hosting companies that serve both Linux and Windows hosting customers opt for Plesk. Its interface looks quite like the Windows XP and is an expensive option as it serves both the platforms.
Benefits of using Plesk:
* Shared Hosting: The Plesk offer a self administrating and identical multi-platform design that enables to perfectly manage the shared hosting environment. Even the non technical people can conveniently setup, create, and manage 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.
