Is cPanel / WebHost Manager the best control panel for reseller hosting?

If you’ve read my previous articles, such as Should I choose reseller hosting to host multiple websites?, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of reseller hosting. Shared hosting is fine for a single web site, but once you have a few sites or domains, reseller hosting is light years ahead of shared hosting.

Reseller hosting has many advantages, but for me the biggest one is convenience. When I was running two or three separate web sites, I wanted something that would be more efficient to manage, to save me time and trouble. I thought that there had to be a better way. That’s when I discovered reseller hosting.

Reseller hosting saves me time and helps me manage my sites more effectively. Much of the advantage is due to cPanel, the hosting control panel that I use. There are many reseller control panels available, and your choice will have a large impact on your experience. I tried other control panels, some good and some not. Don’t choose a reseller host without evaluating the control panel that they will provide you.

When evaluating control panels, one of your considerations should be the size of its user base. While popularity doesn’t always equal quality, it’s helpful for a control panel.

Popularity is important when you do a web search for another explanation of some feature, or for assistance with something you’re trying to accomplish. Having installed some good but unpopular software tools on my PC, that last point is significant. It was frustrating trying to find on-line discussions about uses similar to mine. A high number of users also means that any issues with a new release are likely to be reported quickly so they can be remedied.

cPanel is the world’s most widely used web hosting control panel, with about 70% market share in the U.S. That results in a wide selection of web hosts, and a wealth of tutorials and forums on the Internet for peer-to-peer assistance.

cPanel has been in continuous development for many years, resulting in a product that is mature, stable, and offers a wealth of useful features. It’s simple enough for beginners to use, with included tutorials and help files, but has powerful features for the advanced users.

cPanel includes WebHost Manager (WHM), the control panel used by reseller accounts to create and administer the client accounts. WebHost Manager lets you operate as if you’re a large web hosting operation, creating accounts, creating hosting packages with the features you choose to assign, setting quotas for disk space, bandwidth transfer, number of e-mail accounts, and more.

I like the division of tasks between cPanel and WebHost Manager. Essentially, if I need to perform functions as an individual site or domain, I use cPanel, as one of my shared hosting clients would do. Even in this, cPanel’s reseller hosting simplifies my life, as I can access all my client sites’ cPanel accounts via one single reseller login.

When operating more as a reseller, say creating new accounts, altering quotas or setting domain redirection actions, I login to WebHost Manager. WebHost Manager shows me all my client accounts at a glance, listing the hosting package assigned to each, its quotas and the chosen cPanel theme. Between cPanel and WebHost Manager, everything I need to do is easily accessed and managed.

The visual appearance of cPanel and WebHost Manager can be altered using themes. You may easily choose from a variety of themes, affecting layout, colours and icons. Third-party themes are also available, and you may create your own theme or edit existing themes. As a reseller, you set which theme each hosting package or client account uses. Afterwards, clients can select a different theme for their own client accounts.

If you want the most popular control panel that’s powerful and easy to use, I recommend cPanel.