Hosting Control Panels
Posted by freewebspace1 on June 26, 2008
Plesk, Ensim, Cpanel, HSphere, or Webmin? Which to choose? Well…it depends!
Do you like your hosting control panel flavor to be pretty or functional? Do you do shared hosting, virtual private servers, or dedicated hosting?
These days it seems that the most popular for shared hosting is Cpanel. Hosting companies like BlueHost and HostMonster use this as their control panel. It’s pretty, it’s easy, and it has tons of features for beginners. Plus it’s not too hard to do server admin when running a shared hosting company. So everyone wins. Make sure you get it with Fantastico Enabled!
Plesk is being used less and less for major hosting companies, but we have used it many times on a dedicated server and it’s pretty easy to manage IP pools, setup accounts/domains, and manage your services. At this time I’m not aware of any major hosting company that uses this panel for shared hosting - only dedicated web hosting.
Ensim is a very easy to use and manage web control software. It’s just not as pretty as the others, but they do have some need plugins for things like a gallery, bulletin board, and blogs. OLM Web Hosting used to use this and I think they still might. We had an account on a virtual private server with them then we upgraded to a dedicated server through OLM and it worked great. The only problem was the services kept shutting down when we got a lot of spam. So the mail server setup on Ensim was wonky!
Hsphere and Webmin are usually used for dedicated servers. They are not as easy as some of these other panels. It’s best to use these if you know SSH commands and can work through the server that way. Webmin is easy once you get used to it, but make sure you’re with a company that can support you during the learning curve like Rackspace.
Some companies have created their own panel - these include companies like StartLogic and Ipower who both use vDeck - very similar to Cpanel. DreamHost uses their own as well and so does 1 & 1 Web Hosting. Godaddy Web Hosting is probably the least user friendly of the control panels created by hosting companies. These all have limited documentation because they are proprietary so you better make sure the company has great support!
