As a self-proclaimed “cPanel hater”, I have often stated in the past that I could not stand cPanel. There’s nothing like putting your foot in your mouth when chatting with a former cPanel developer.. sorry Matt!

Well ladies and gentlemen, I am about to eat my words.

cPanel is not a bad control panel at all!

I’ve discovered that it wasn’t cPanel that I hated all these years; it’s the simplistic, un-intuitive “x” theme. The default theme is far from being user friendly and is not appealing to the eye.

In the past, I have always been an advocate for hosts with custom control panels. From a host’s standpoint, there are definitely advantages and disadvantages when using a custom control panel. From a client’s standpoint, it’s merely personal preference.

Shameless Site5 plug - we use cPanel with a custom “shell” called SiteAdmin which allows us to add custom features and whatnot. Its interface is very easy to navigate and work with. I love SiteAdmin’s feel and power.

As an aside, here’s an interesting observation though. From my experience, custom control panels almost always indicate distributed services (http on one machine, mail on a different machine, and mysql on yet another machine) whereas cPanel almost always indicates that all services are on a single machine.

I’ve been maintaining websites for a long time now, and while the idea of distributed services is appealing and works wonderfully in theory, my experience is that consolidated services is far more reliable.