The web hosting service is one of the most competitive fields and this has encouraged the various web hosting companies to provide various hosting plans at affordable rate. This has further forced these companies to stand out other others performance. Though the extra features such as site builder, free domain name and the costing plays significant roles, it is the control panel that makes a major difference. Therefore, it is very important to select the proper service depending on the type of website. These control panels are actually a set of software offered by the web hosting company in order to manage and control the website. It is through the control panel, that a web hosting company supervises each and every activity of a website. These activities include opening of FTP accounts, creating email server, preparing and maintaining statistics report etc. In fact there are a variety of control panels. Some of these control panels work only for Windows platform, some only for Linux platform and some others work for both the platforms.

What control panels are suitable for Windows Platform

There are certain web hosting control panels that work only for Windows platform. Hosting Accelerator and Helm are the typical examples of Windows only web hosting control panel. However, Helm is one of the most popular Windows only web hosting control panel due to its several customer friendly features. One of the most outstanding features of Helm is the billing information as most all the normally used control panels do not posses billing information within the control panel. The only exception is the H-sphere. Moreover, Helm is also very convenient to operate as well as has a very good standard interface.

Benefits of using Helm:

* Managing your server: Helm can interact in many ways with your server and can operate with unlimited servers and domains. It is also possible for users to add or remove servers with the minimum of fuss. There are many servers that Helm has compatibility with and these include, MailEnable, SmarterMail, Merak and Imail. In addition to these servers, Helm also works with MDaemon, Mail Servers and hMailServer in addition to Serv-U FTP, Microsoft FTP, Gene6 FTP Server, MySQL Server, and Microsoft SQL Server etc. Helm is also capable of supporting ColdFusion, ASP, ASP,NET, PHP and Perl.

* The ability to manage billing: A hosting company will have the choice of using the internal billing system provided by Helm or any billing system offered by an external partner. the customer can have their bill created in the currency the like and they have the option to provide these invoices in plain text format and HTML format.

* Customer Management: This web hosting control panel also creates hosting plans for resellers as well as specifies the various resource limits including the amount of data transfer, domains, email accounts and disk-space.

What control panels are suitable for Linux Platform:

A client has a choice of a few web hosting control panels when it comes to the Linux platform and these include DirectAdmin, cPanel and Interworx. There is no doubt that the low cost of hosting and the convenience of its control panel are factors in people choosing DirectAdmin. Another choice for many consumers is Interworx as they provide many additional features including a simple to use interface. Yet cPanel is the most popular control panel for the Linux control panels and it has the ability to serve over ten different styles of Linux. This consumer preference is also shared by companies who provide a web hosting service and this is mainly down to the low cost of its service. There are also a number of other services provided by cPanel that are attractive to customers and these include deploy applications, customer account provisions, having the ability to transfer a number of accounts between servers and many other useful services including secure servers.

Key benefits of using cPanel:

* Website statistics: The cPanel provides statistics facilities that enable a website owner to analyze the total amount of traffic. Most of the web hosting providers believe that the statistics programs consume a lot of resources on a shared environment and hence tend to eliminate this facility. Thereby it is always better to check whether the web hosting company is actually providing the web stats package.

* Managing your emails: Having the ability to create and delete email accounts is something that many website owners crave and this is offered by cPanel. One of the major benefits is the Webmail facility that can be used by clients to access their emails online. There are a number of other programs that cPanel offers within its email range, with one of the most popular being the ability to create a forwarder that will pass emails in one account to another. There is also the facility to create a basic auto-responder that will send a pre-constructed reply to the sender if they submit an email about an enquiry.

* File Manager and FTP: FTP access is required to upload files and cPanel is capable of offering this facility and this is one of the most important features a website should be offering to its clients. Another thing that cPanel allows is for new FTP accounts to be registered so other people can have access the website. The power to restrict and specify access rights regarding certain files or folders will always remain with the website owner and the hosting company. Not everyone is happy with using an FTP package to load their files to a website and they can use the cPanel File Manager instead. This will grant the user to ability to unzip files, place files upon their server and be able to duplicate or erase any files.

Control panels for websites based on both Linux and Windows:

The web hosts discussed so far have only been for one platform but some hosts are able to cater for websites created on Linux and Windows. These dual application hosts include H-Sphere, Ensim and Plesk, which are probably the most common types of these control panels. They all have their own benefits and the H-Sphere is capable of offering many services that start at providing key functionalities and go all the way up to providing complete automation. There is no doubt though that Plesk is the most popular provider of both Linux and Windows control panel facilities. This is best shown by the fact that most companies that offer services for both Linux and Windows platforms choose Plesk. The interface of Plesk will be familiar to users of Windows XP but be aware that Plesk is expensive, which is due to its ability to serve both platforms.

Key benefits of using Plesk:

* Having shared hosting: Plesk is able to provide an identical various-platform design that allows any user to take control of their shared hosting landscape. This facility can also be undertaken on a self-administration basis. No matter the technical level of the website owner, they will find they are able to take full control of setting up, creating and fully managing their accounts.

* Dedicated Hosting: The RPM installation and modular design of the Plesk control panel enables the Dedicated Hosting providers to satisfy the various requirements of tech savvy clients. It offers a number of unique tools such as XML-API and other 3rd party applications.

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