What is a Hosting Control Panel ?

A hosting control panel is a web-based interface that is provided to the end user which interacts with all the necessary hosting services on the server like Apache, IIS, FTP, DNS etc … and makes all the required changes as per the users requirements to make their Website, Database, Email or DNS up and running without the users having to make complex changes on the server.

In simple it is a system for Non-Technical people to make their websites and other services up and running in few clicks.

Popular Web Hosting Control Panels:

Since you already know what is a hosting control panel, its is important that you know what are the popular control panels available in the market so that you can choose the best among them. Hosting control panels are categorized as

Commercial or Paid Control Panels:

As the word says, you need to purchase a license to have one of these panels, most of panels can be rented either monthly or yearly and there is no lifetime license for the commercial web hosting control panels. Some of them are

a. cPanel: One of the most popular webhosting control panels so far, this linux based control panel comes with all the required application that anyone can require to host either a website or mail services, FTP services or can send bulk emails using Mail man subscriber lists.
Visit the Official Website.

b. Plesk: The second most popular control panel that supports both Linux and Windows operating systems. If you are looking for a control panel that has and supports Nginx, then the only available option is Plesk as even though cPanel has thirdparty Nginx plugins like NginxCP, as of now it does not support Nginx completely.

Free or Opensource Control Panels:

a. ZPanel: Builtin with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix and Dovecot ZPanel is one of the widely used opensource control panels. It comes with a user friendly web interface and is very easy to use.
Visit the Official Website.

b. VestaCP: Comes with Apache, Nginx (standalone and Reverse proxy mode), Exim mail server, highly customizable and getting more and more popular every day. Interface is very user friendly and very good at backup and restoring the accounts.

Visit the Official Website.