Effective web hosting control panel selection

One of the most important decisions you have to make when selecting your web host is your web hosting control panel selection. With a good control panel, you are saved of remembering the many technical details involved in hosting your web site, and have some more spare time for developing your unique website.

Which CP is the best? The choices become wider each day. So many choices you may almost feel lost. cPanel and Plesk, Helm, Ensim and DirectAdmin are only some of the names you would see. Certainly, a lot of research is needed before you decide.

My suggestion:

• When looking for a control panel, look at who uses it, and for what.
  
• Carefully define your requirements, and ask questions in forums, if you are not sure.

When I've selected my leatest web host, the control panel selection became a critical issue, since it is usually bundled with the deal.

During my process of control panel selection, two candidates remained:

• Pleask 7.5 Reloaded has it's an all-new GUI, designed by great usability experts, and is sure to catch some market share. But it still young and not all features are ready.
• cPanel is alot more mature and proven in the field, and hence has a larger amount of applications. For example: an integrated backup solution. Auomated application deployment with Fantastico, and a built-in backup solution which allows me to easily move my files to another cPanel-based web host when needed.
  

Recommended reading: This thread summerizes the most important points. Especially, read madsere's response:

Which CP you would choose I think depend on you and what you want to do with it.

If you are running your own sites only, or only expect to give users FTP access Plesk looks nice. It has a somewhat easier learning curve for administrators and users alike. This is also the solution that will give you best performance = most sites on a server for any given server load.

If you expect to give your users shell access there are no alternative to Ensim, using High Security mode for sites. It is not without a cost though and you should not expect to be able to host anywhere near the same number of sites in this environment as in Plesk (or Ensim Low Security).

Cpanel - has a large following mainly for historic reasons - they were among the first around and way older than Plesk or Ensim. It always reminds me of a big house that started out as a small house and had a large number of annexes bolted onto it.

Helm thankfully doesn't exist for Linux but I find it quite similar to Plesk in many ways.

Amnon