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The webmaster's control panel

cPanel

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Marcel GagnÈ

For companies that provide hosting and email packages to clients to administer a myriad of tasks, WHM and cPanel provide a web-based graphical control panel designed to help.

Setting up a Linux server to host a website is a relatively trivial matter. Of course, I assume that the reader has some experience with Linux and understands the concepts of basic server administration. After all, you still need to install Apache to serve up a simple site. More complex sites requiring a database might demand MySQL or PostgreSQL as well. Let's not forget the P in the LAMP stack, PHP to round out a basic server's needed software.

Adding a second site to this server requires that you understand something about virtual hosts, but it's still relatively easy if you know what you are doing. But even a competent systems administrator can start feeling overworked if he or she needs to host a hundred sites, each with its own domain, a corresponding number of databases, and another thousand email accounts. Sure, you can still do it, but eventually, the job can daunt even the most accomplished systems administrator. That's where cPanel comes into play (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: WHM and cPanel are, at least to the hosting provider, one and the same.

cPanel (yes, it stands for Control Panel) and WHM (the Web Host Manager) provide a web-based graphical control panel designed for companies that provide hosting and email packages to their clients. WHM is a top-level administration interface that makes it

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