Web Hosting - The Importance of the Control Panel

When you're considering professional web hosting, it's very important to properly assess how you're going to interact with the hosting environment. It's a smart choice to choose a host that is automated or has the choice of such service. Web hosting automation services allow you to perform long and complex tasks in a matter of minutes if not seconds. It also allows for system administrators or application developers to focus on other tasks rather than having to manage complex web, mail, and DNS services.

No matter what type of hosting platform you choose - shared, virtual private server, or dedicated, for a long term investment it's critical that either you, or your IT staff automate. In this article, we take a quick look at three different leading control panels. All of them are quite famous, and one of them is specifically meant for Windows Servers.

cPanel

cPanel is one of the most well known control panels. Unfortunately, it runs only on Linux systems, but it does a great job.cPanel is extremely thorough and while this is its strength, it's also a weakness. Many have complained that it's a tad too difficult to use and figure out. Over the years, it has added several features that might be considered feature bloat - slowing it down and increasing it's complexity.Nevertheless, due to it's rock solid performance and flexibility with the inclusion of several add ons, it is one of the most popular choices for the Linux server.

Plesk

Plesk is the second contender on the list and is provided by Parallels Inc. Parallels also owns the Virtuozzo virtualization technology and therefore, it's products inter operate very efficiently. It's available for both Windows and Linux, and thus has an edge over cPanel in that regard.Like cPanel, Plesk also has a number of add ons that are used to improve functionality. With regard to security, it has continuously improved over the years after being compared unfavorably to cPanel. However, images die hard and many still feel that Plesk is less secure.Plesk is also praised for being somewhat easier to use. Though susceptible to feature bloat just like cPanel, many feel that it's GUI is more accessible and easier to use.

Helm

Helm is a full featured control panel, again from Parallels - dedicated to the Windows platform. As such, it shares many features with Plesk as well as cPanel, but it's Windows specific nature gives it an edge in that area.Based on initial reviews, Helm has received a very favorable response with regard to it's GUI and its functionality. For resellers especially, Helm is a boon as it integrates billing and payment, making it trivial to manage a large number of accounts.A strong point of Helm, is its scalability allowing the easy addition of DNS servers and mailservers as required. Another outstanding feature for responsible businesses is that it is Carbon Neutral! Meaning that any pollution caused by the making of Helm is offset by an equivalent amount of money going into green technologies or research. Quite a unique offering!