About cPanel And Plesk

cPanel and Plesk are the two popular control panels that are provided by most of the web hosting services to aid the users create and modify their websites easily. cPanel is available only with Linux operating system, whereas, Plesk is available with the Linux as well as with the Windows operating system. However, the latest version of cPanel that will be released in the year 2008 will be compatible with both the operating systems.

When buying a hosting account, you must make several decisions. One of the important decisions is to consider about which control panel to choose that will be the easiest and also will have better in-built web utilities. There are many web control panels available, but the most popular are the cPanel or Plesk. Below is the comparison of cPanel and Plesk which should help you decide which of the two will suit your web needs.

The cPanel and Plesk both offer similar basic features. Using either, you can easily create, or edit, or delete e-mail accounts, thereby manage all your email accounts, as well as also perform all domains or sub-domains maintenance from either of the control panels. You can also upload all your files and manage them from your cPanel or Plesk account. There are other add-ons available with both and for most of the webmasters, these capabilities are sufficient to produce and manage good websites.

cPanel

cPanel (Control Panel) is a very popular graphical web-hosting control panel used to simplify the administration of websites. The cPanel is provided by the cPanel Inc. It is a proprietary product. cPanel is chiefly used by the commercial hosting services and being a proprietary product, it requires monthly license fees.

cPanel is a very popular control panel and is used by most of the web designers and web masters now-a-days. It was mainly designed for Speed Hosting. cPanel is based on Perl scripts and requires no access to the database most of the time. It is an excellent graphical user interface (GUI) which helps in developing and designing the website attractively and giving it a professional look.

cPanel has many features like the FTP, e-mail management, domain and sub-domain control, back-up facility, database management, etc. cPanel even takes extremely less time than most other to load. Web developers can have their own applications and add-ons like ‘Fantastico’ and ‘RVSkins’ installed using cPanel.

cPanel even has a statistics sidebar, which gives you every detail of your website, for example, the domain name, e-mail accounts, disk space usage, SQL database, monthly bandwidth used, sub-domains, parked domains, and many more exciting applications are provided by the cPanel.

cPanel even provides Web Host Manager (WHM), which is specifically used for simplifying the reseller web hosting. By using this feature, you can easily set up a reselling account and resell web hosting service.

Migration of your website and the web hosting account to another web hosting service is easily possible through the site migration module as the cPanel. This makes it very easy to transfer your entire site or some important data from one site to another.

Plesk

Plesk is the most preferred website control panel now-a-days, as it is more reliable compared to any other website control panel. The fact that, it is compatible with the world-renowned Windows operating system makes it more special. Plesk has different versions for Windows and the Linux operating systems. You can even use the same control panel for different operating systems. Plesk is also very easy to learn. This makes it very easy for the users to learn this control panel and, in turn, saves a lot of time and money.

However, the main disadvantage of Plesk is that the web developers and the web designers cannot create their own applications and add-ons in Plesk. Also, there is some security problem noted with Plesk. Hackers can easily gain access into this control panel even if the user name and password are changed often.

So, if you want the control panel which is compatible with Widows as well as Linux operating systems, then you can choose Plesk. However, if you want the easiest control panel which allows you to install many attractive programs, then you need to choose the cPanel.

More notes on the cPanel and Plesk that will help you decide further:

The cPanel and Plesk both have a great graphical user interface (GUI) to begin your work from. It is said that the cPanel has the better GUI and is user-friendly as well. The Plesk graphical user interface (GUI) can appear a bit difficult to a first-time user. cPanel must have been designed specifically for the novice users than the Plesk design, hence the cPanel is preferred by the novice and also by the professionals.

cPanel is being provided by almost all the major web hosting services and includes the Fantastico Deluxe installer that again includes many wonderful web utilities and powerful scripts. Using the Fantastico, you can easily install forum blogs, content management systems (CMS), e-mail accounts, community boards or forums, even install the e-Commerce shopping cart solutions, and other web tools to make your website very professional easily. There is absolutely no need to know web programming, coding, or advanced database knowledge. You can install all these utilities and scripts and have them running within minutes.

Plesk also provides an application pack. Plesk also can use major third-party web utilities, but the cPanel and Fantastico seems to be in more demand.

To credit Plesk, by the way, it can support both the UNIX and Windows based web servers while cPanel can only be used on UNIX-based web servers. As the UNIX based servers are not expensive to utilize, most of the webmaster will prefer the cPanel as it costs less to host their websites.