What is cPanel?
cPanel is sometimes used generically to refer to a hosting control panel. It is in fact a registered trademark of a particular brand of control panel of which there are many.
cPanel control panel is a graphical web-based management tool, designed to make administration of web sites as easy as possible. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in an easy-to-use interface.
It is designed for commercial use by web hosting services. It does not have any personal use license and is not sold to the retail consumer. At the current time it is only available for UNIX based systems and runs on a variety of Linux installations.
The hosting client enjoys front end graphical support for a number of common operations like the management of PGP keys, cron jobs, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists. A file browser similar to Windows Explorer is also included. It does for web hosting management what windows did for DOS.
One of the more popular add-ons for cPanel is the third party Fantastico script installer which provides automated installation of open source web applications such as WordPress and about 40 others.
WHM, or Web Host Manager is the part of cPanel that is used to administer accounts. A sample demo of both WHM and cPanel can be found here.
WHM is usually included with your hosting account only when you have a reseller account.
This article was updated 11-17-2008