Main Differences between cPanel and Plesk

Every web hosting service comes with a control panel for the convenience of the user of the service of web hosting. What exactly is a control panel? What is web hosting? What are the two main and the most popular types of web hosting control panels and how do these differ? Here’s all the information, especially curated for your benefit.

Control Panel in Website Hosting

To comprehend the importance of control panel as an essential feature of every web hosting plan, it becomes important to understand the service of website hosting. Let us begin with that. Website Hosting is the service that needs to be availed for making sites accessible online. This service is made available through different types of website hosting plans. The service of web hosting is sought by the owners of websites from website hosting service providers.

This service is needed for hosting the files of websites. The hosted files contain the content of the sites and are stored on the web servers of the hosting company. These are retrieved from the web servers by the browsers of the site visitors and are displayed to them on their Internet connected devices. This is how sites are made accessible to online site visitors by the service of website hosting. Website hosting can be of many types. Some of these are Shared Web Hosting, Dedicated Web Hosting, VPS Hosting, Reseller Hosting, WordPress Hosting, etc. Apart from providing the service of web hosting, the common factor among all these web hosting services is the provision of control panel with all of these various types of hosting solutions. Let us delve into this.

A control panel with regard to the service of website hosting is a web-based interface, which is used for managing a hosting package. It is provided by the service provider of every hosting plan and functions as an effective tool, which enables the management of the servers and the hosted services by the users.

The modules that are usually included in web hosting control panels are web server (NGINX, Apache HTTP Server, Internet Information Services), File Transfer Protocol server, file manager, Domain Name System server, Mail server and spam filter, firewall, system monitor, phpMyAdmin, database, web log analysis software, etc.

A web hosting control panel ensures that the user can easily carry out many functions. It enables the management of the purchased domain names, installation of applications, uploading of a website’s files, creation and management of email accounts, etc. Such control panels are usually user-friendly and intuitive to use and are time-saving.

Some of the most well-known control panels are cPanel, Plesk, CloudPanel, Webmin, DirectAdmin, InterWorx, ISPConfig, aaPanel, My20i, Ajenti, ApisCP, etc.

Every professional website hosting company, such as HTS Hosting, which is renowned as the best Website Hosting Company and as the best Cloud Hosting Company, provides control panels with all its hosting plans. Here, we shall elaborate on two of the most popular website hosting control panels. These are, cPanel and Plesk. Their immense popularity as the most sought-after control panels, stems from the fact that both of these web hosting control panels are easy to use, intuitive and provide versatility as well as comprehensive control. Let us touch on these individually and learn more about these extensively used web hosting control panels.

cPanel

The renowned web hosting control panel, cPanel, is a software that has been developed by cPanel, L.L.C. This Linux-based control panel offers a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and automation tools for simplifying the process of website hosting and website management for the website owner who has availed the service of web hosting from a service provider. It becomes easy to manage one’s hosting account and domain, streamline web files, create email accounts, publish websites, etc., with the aid of the user-friendly cPanel dashboard. Its Graphical User Interface makes it easy to use as well as to navigate.

cPanel uses a standard web browser and a three-tier structure to enable administration. cPanel can manage a single hosting account, whereas cPanel & WHM enables the administration of the whole web server. Apart from the Graphical User Interface, cPanel has command line and API-based access. This makes the automation of standard system administration processes possible by web hosting companies, third-party software vendors as well as by developers.

cPanel is one of the most popular choices of control panels and is the default choice of a control panel for a large number of users of the service of web hosting. This can be attributed to the fact that cPanel is not only easy to use and intuitive but also has a very useful help section and a large and willing community that is always there to extend help.

Plesk

Plesk is another popular web hosting control panel that is widely used as a software for commercial web hosting and server data centre automation. It offers control panel for Linux and Windows-based hosting. It enables the convenient management of one’s hosting account and server through a web-based interface. It automates many activities, which include creating user accounts as well as email accounts, managing web files, creating and managing domains, etc.

It lets server administrators set up new reseller accounts, websites, email accounts as well as create and edit DNS entries via a web-based interface. Plesk ensures management and automation of domain names, web applications, email accounts, databases, programming languages and infrastructure tasks. It provides an environment which is ready for coding and delivers powerful security across all layers as well as OS (Operating Systems).

The design of Plesk can be regarded as minimalist and intuitive. Moreover, it offers account management and server management as standard. It also provides an informative help section for the convenience of Plesk users.

Main Differences Between cPanel and Plesk

As is evident, Plesk can be availed as a web hosting control panel for both, Linux and Windows; whereas cPanel’s use is restricted to Linux. Apart from this, there are a few key differences between these two immensely popular web hosting control panels. Let us touch on those, in brief.

In the context of the user interface, cPanel has a Graphical User Interface, whereas Plesk has a Graphical User Interface with Javascript. Server/s for the former is Apache and for the latter are Apache and NGINX. If we talk about the OS, Amazon Linux, CloudLinux, CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux and a few other Linux distros are meant for cPanel. The OS for Plesk are Ubuntu, Windows Server 08, Debian, CentOS, and a few other Linux distros.

With regard to security for cPanel, it is possible to encrypt all messages, deploy SSL certificates, create multi-factor authentication for all the clients as well as blacklist IP addresses. The security requirements of Plesk are taken care of by one-click SSL security, fixing bugs, installing security patches, monitoring all the updates for plugins from a central dashboard.

cPanel does not support mobile app natively but one can use third-party apps that are available. Plesk has mobile app for Android and iOS. Migration support for cPanel is provided through WHM and for Plesk through Native Plesk Migrator, which is available as standard.

These are some of the major differences between cPanel and Plesk, which are the most widely used web hosting control panels.

Conclusion:

Equipped with all this information, you can choose the most appropriate web hosting control panel for your web hosting service. It needs to be mentioned that HTS Hosting, provides both cPanel and Plesk, in its web hosting plans. HTS Hosting offers a wide range of budget-friendly web hosting solutions that are in high demand by global customers, owing to the top-tier services that are offered at the most affordable prices. User-friendly control panels, high uptime, SSD, fast speed, powerful performance, unrivalled security, data backup facility, 24*7 technical support and much more are part of all the web hosting services offered by HTS Hosting.

Source:https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/cpanel/306/main-differences-between-cpanel-and-plesk