The Web Hosting Guide
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Web Hosting - cPanel
cPanel
cPanel ("Control Panel") is a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is proprietary and distributed by cPanel Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services, so the company does not offer a reduced-cost personal use license; however, owners of non-profit organisations such as educational institutions and charities can request a license at a reduced cost. Reduced prices are frequently available from dedicated-server companies, who install it along with the operating system.
cPanel runs on a number of popular RPM-based Linux distributions, such as SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and cAos, as well as FreeBSD. Preliminary support for Debian is claimed, although this version has been in "beta" state for several years, and is not supported. cPanel is commonly accessed on ports 2082 and 2083 (for an SSL version). Authentication is either via HTTP or web page login.
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cPanel System Requirements
Processor: 266 MHZ or faster
RAM: 66MB+, 1GB+ when hosting many sites
HDD space: 9.95GB plus
cPanel also requires a fresh operating system installation if you do not want data to be formatted
Features
To the client, cPanel provides front-ends for a number of common operations, including the management of Pretty Good Privacy keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.
Several add-ons exist for an additional fee, the most notable being Fantastico, a bundle of scripts which automate the installation of web applications such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, Moodle and over 50 others.
Unlike some other web hosting control panels, cPanel manages some software packages separately from the underlying operating system, applying upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and related software packages automatically. This ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel, but has become a cause for consternation to some, as it becomes difficult to easily install newer versions of these packages.
WHM (Web Host Manager)
WebHost Manager (WHM) is a web-based tool used by server administrators and resellers to manage hosting accounts on a web server. WHM listens on ports 2086 and 2087 by default.
As well as being accessible by the root admin, WHM is also accessible to users with reseller privileges. Reseller users of cPanel have a smaller set of features than the root user, generally limited by the server administrator, to features which they determine will affect their customers' accounts rather than the server as a whole. From WHM, the server administrator can perform maintenance operations such as compile Apache and upgrade RPMs installed on the system