In this article, I’m going to compare my two favourite control panels to manage your web hosting server, cPanel/WHM and Webmin/Virtualmin. First of all, it is important to note that Webmin is not equivalent to cPanel; Webmin is a Linux control panel which can manage all aspects of your server, but it does not simplify the daily tasks of managing multiple domains on a Linux VPS, it simply provides a more user friendly interface to the configuration files of a Linux system.

If you are looking for a free alternative to cPanel/WHM, it is actually Virtualmin (a Webmin extension) that you want to install. Secondly, this isn’t a technical article that compares the systems’ underbellies.

Rather I’m going to run through three main factors for you to consider while choosing the right Control Panel for your web hosting: how much you’re willing to spend; whether you plan to actually resell hosting on your server and; your preferred Linux distribution.

Price

Although there is a paid version of Virtualmin which offers support and some extra script installation features, I am focussing on the free and open source version in this article. In this case, there is a stark contrast between cPanel and Virtualmin, the former will cost you up to $20 per month, whereas Virtualmin will cost you nothing. So why would anyone pay for cPanel when Virtualmin has all the same features for free? Well, the answer is that cPanel is the industry leader and the industry standard. Furthermore, cPanel provides support which is second to none, their forums and ticket system are excellent when faced with a difficult issue. This of course leads right into the next point, your goals for hosting.

Your hosting goals

If you’re like me, you may have built up a collection of domains over time. In this case, your web hosting server may not be your primary business but just a side project or the next Google/Facebook waiting to happen. A web server like this is the perfect environment to run Virtualmin on; it will take less overall resources (particularly RAM) which will bring down your overall hosting costs and improve the performance of your sites. If on the other hand you are a web developer or web host whose business relies on providing a high quality hosting service to your clients, cPanel is definitely the control panel for you. Your clients will appreciate its intuitive user interface, and because of that, you’ll appreciate the fact that you can spend more time building your business and new sites with less time devoted to supporting your clients for trivial tasks.

Your Linux flavour

Last but not least for the techs, your favoured distribution of Linux is likely to have a profound influence on your control panel choice. If you learnt web hosting on a Redhat based platform such as CentOS, then your options are wide open for control panels. Redhat based distributions lead the web hosting market and therefore provide the base for cPanel/WHM systems. If however you can’t give up the elegance of APT and the Debian ecosystem, your options are limited. Whether it’s Debian or Ubuntu, you can forget about cPanel, but I’d imagine if Debian’s your thing, you’d probably prefer an open source panel anyway. Virtualmin is the ideal control panel for this system. The installation is easy and best of all, it doesn’t take over your system, leaving you free to carry out updates through apt-get and edit config files on the command line to your heart’s extent.

These are some of the primary factors to consider when choosing which Control Panel to install on your Linux VPS. Remember, once you’ve installed and configured your control panel with a number of sites, migrating to a new control panel can be a considerable task. So think long and hard about your decision and make sure you do your research before making that final choice!