What Is The Difference Between cPanel and WHM?
In the web hosting industry, cPanel and WHM are two of the most popular control panel pairs. Even though cPanel and WHM are often packaged and sold together, they perform different functions and cater to different users. If you are an individual website owner managing a single blog or a hosting reseller managing an entire server, it is important that you understand the cPanel and WHM relationship.
To provide a very simplified explanation, cPanel is the tenant’s control panel, and WHM is the property manager’s control panel. In this article, we will describe the primary functions of cPanel and WHM, and how they work together to serve millions of websites.
The Operations in WHM entail:
- Creating separate user accounts
- Creating personalized hosting plans
- Appending new domains to the server
- Handling the functionalities of the hosting plans
- Resetting passwords or changing the email addresses of cPanel accounts
- Administering the resource consumption for each cPanel account
- Altering the zone records of the DNS for each domain and subdomain
- Establishing the server’s private name servers
- Accessing sub-accounts without entering login details
- Performing routine system and control panel maintenance
cPanel is designed for the management of distinct and separate hosting accounts on the server. The functionalities that end users or clients can perform via cPanel include:
CMS installation via Softaculous
- File upload and management for personal websites
- Domain and subdomain management
- Creation and management of email accounts, including SPAM control and email account settings
- Domain DNS records modification
- Website stats tracking
- Database and backup management, and more.
Keep in mind that, as a reseller or root user in WHM, when you access a user’s cPanel, you will be able to control almost all the features under that user’s cPanel. However, the other menus, such as Google Apps, can only be administered when you are logged in as that specific cPanel user.
The following are the levels of WHM/cPanel users, and the accompanying functionality they are allowed.
Server Administrator Panel
At the top of the hierarchy, we have the root user. This user is the server administrator and has unrestricted access to the server. As a server admin, you have override control to all the WHM features and can make alterations to the global server configurations, as well as personal changes to the settings for low tier users. A root has visibility to all levels of the WHM including reseller WHM and end cPanel user. For each server, there is exactly 1 root.
Reseller Panel (WHM)
The reseller user has the second most authority after the server administrator. There are certain features that a reseller user has that a root user does not. The server admin does not give access to the whole server, only to the features that pertain to the reseller’s customer accounts.
Reseller access is given together with Reseller Panel (WHM) which allows the reseller to control all the accounts he has resold. A reseller is also given access to all accounts that have been created (resold). The server administrator is responsible for allocating reseller privileges and there can be multiple resellers in a single server.
Main Reseller cPanel
The cPanel control panel is used for administering the hosting account that is tied to the the primary domain. When you purchase a reseller hosting account, one of the steps is choosing the main domain name that can be used to access the main cPanel account. The credentials for cPanel are the same as the ones for the WHM account. If you want to change the WHM password, you will have to change the password for the main cPanel account and the passwords will be synced.
cPanel Account (Resold)
All the cPanel Resold Accounts (client accounts created by the reseller) can be found under the Reseller Panel (WHM). It is possible to use Reseller Panel (WHM) to create, manage and sustain the resold accounts with ease.
Wrap Up
cPanel and WHM are not rivals, rather they are two parts of a tiered, collaborative system designed to achieve optimum efficiency in the management of servers and websites all at the same time. WHM is the top tier of the administrative system and gives server owners and resellers the ability to control an entire server and spawn client accounts. Then, at the bottom tier, cPanel is the easy, customer-oriented system that gives a distinct website owner the ability to manage all the daily functions of their site in isolation, without a need to know server administration.
You are on the right track to more effective digital hosting or website ownership, if you can distinguish cPanel for site management functionality and WHM for server management functionality. This should also be a key deciding factor for you if you want to simply run a single website or even if you want to set up your own hosting business.
