When buying a shared hosting package, you can control it via a wide variety of web hosting control panels, but the most used ones today are cPanel and Plesk.
cPanel & WHM
cPanel was created and released in 1996. In terms of popularity, cPanel is the most widely used shared hosting control panel today.
The cPanel software can only be installed on servers that have a specific distribution of Linux (RedHat, CentOS, and CloudLinux), and the main advantage it has over the other control panels is the degree of control it provides to the users.
Because it has such a large and varied user base, it is pretty easy to find solutions and tips to any problem or issue you might encounter, on many specialized forums, tech support teams, tutorials and even from the cPanel staff itself.
Another selling point for which people prefer cPanel is its ease of use, as the graphical web interface or GUI is very easy to use without previous contact or training and much more intuitive than Plesk or any other control panel, and the cPanel user accommodation process is the shortest than with similar software.
With an active and professional staff, cPanel is continuously being developed and upgraded, being known as a very stable hosting platform with few vulnerabilities or bugs.
For a user that develops its’ first website, cPanel is a very intuitive administration panel that allows them to manage with ease a domain through a web interface. They can manage all aspects that involve web development on a unified interface: emails, databases, files, FTP, CGI scripts, and web statistics.
Providing hosting options for resellers has never been easier, thanks to cPanel / WHM. Thus, using the WHM (WebHost Manager) interface, cPanel offers resellers all the tools they need to provide customers with a quality hosting experience without involving the complexity of managing a dedicated VPS or server.
With cPanel, resellers can control disk space allowances, monitor the way a hosting account is used, suspend accounts, view site statistics, create custom hosting plans, and more. In addition, server administrators can configure their reseller accounts as they want. They can limit reseller accounts only to allow tasks such as adding and removing clients or choose from multiple sets of privileges, including a much more advanced set of privileges that gives reseller additional options such as account and quota modification.
Plesk
Originally designed and created in Novosibirsk, Russia, Plesk hosting automation software was launched by Plesk Inc. in 2001.
With the ability to be installed on both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, Plesk is a very versatile tool that can be used cross-platform, regardless of the hosting software environment.
With a monthly price of less than 50% of a similar cPanel package, Plesk is highly attractive for budget web developers or people that only need to manage a single website at the lowest cost possible.
With a growing user base, Plesk can be considered better when talking about matters such as task automation and multi-server administration.
Since October 2018, Plesk supports a wide variety of various software apps such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal but also web apps such as Git, Docker, and multi-server management tools such as Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby.
The current version of Plesk 17.8 can be installed on a wide variety of POSIX platforms, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Linux, and CloudLinux. Previous versions have also supported openSUSE, Fedora, and FreeBSD. Plesk for Windows can be installed on the operating systems Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012.