HISTORY
CPanel was originally designed as the control panel for Speed Hosting, a now-defunct web hosting company. The original author of cPanel, John Nick Koston, had a stake in Speed Hosting. Web King quickly began using cPanel after their merger with Speed Hosting. After Speed Hosting and Webking merged, the new company moved their servers to Virtual Development Inc. (VDI), a now-defunct hosting facility. Following an agreement between John Nick Koston and VDI, cPanel was only available to customers hosted directly at VDI. At the time there was little competition in the control panel market with the main choices being VDI and Alabanza. cPanel 3 was released in 1999; its main features over cPanel 2 were an automatic upgrade and the Web Host Manager.
cPanel 3 tended to be buggy and did not have a good user interface. The interface improved when Carlos Rego of WizardsHosting made what became the default theme of cPanel. Eventually due to internal problems between VDI and John Nick Koston, cPanel split into two separate programs called cPanel and WebPanel. WebPanel was the version run by VDI. Without the lead programmer, VDI was not able to continue any work on cPanel and eventually stopped supporting it completely. John Nick Koston kept working on cPanel while also working at BurstNET. Eventually Nick left BurstNET on good terms to focus fully on cPanel. cPanel has since been updated and improved over the years.
WHAT AND WHY ???
CPanel is a fully featured Unix based popular hosting account control panel that helps you to manage your domain through a web browser.It provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site. The idea is to allow more flexibility and control of managing the domain and website hosting related daily tasks over to the hosting account owner instead of request help from helpdesk support. Dotservant.com has been offering friendly and professional Cpanel Hosting since 2000. You are able to manage hosting related tasks suce as setting up email accounts, create new folders, delete unwanted files, create a backup copy o your entire hosting account, setup additional FTP accounts , CGI scripts, and check on daily website traffic statistics. Please go through a simple Cpanel guide on How do I use CPanel? for more information on how to make use of all of the CPanel control panel features.
CPanel hosting account control panel offers a complete range of functionality to manage your website hosting related daily tasks.It utilizes a 3 tier structure that provides functionality for administrators, resellers, and end-user website owners to control the various aspects of website and server administration through a standard web browser.
In addition to the GUI interface cPanel also has command line and API based access that allows third party software vendors, web hosting organizations, and developers to automate standard system administration processes.
Alternatives to CPanel…
Webmin
Webmin is the best free alternative to cPanel. Webmin is an open source server and hosting control panel. It provides lot of similar feature as cPanel. Some of the features include bandwidth usage, user account management, backups, SSH access, and email management. Webmin is built on modules, and more third party modules can be easily added. This further enhances the functioanality of Webmin. Latest versions of Webmin can be installed on Windows based servers as well.
Kloxo
Kloxo is another good free alternative to cPanel. Kloxo is another popular free and open source alternative to cPanel. Kloxo project has been suffering from discontinuities, but it seems to be back on track now. Kloxo is easy to use web hosting control panel. You can manage clients, resellers, domains, backups, mails, and all other aspects of servers with Kloxo.
SysCP
SysCP is a good replacement for cPanel. SysCP is an easy to use control panel for LAMP servers. It supports all popular web, email, and ftp daemons. It is available under GPL licence. It has custom control panels for admin, reseller, and customer. It provides integrated management for mail, ftp, and webspace. It also comes with 1-click application installer.
Source : Wikipedia.org , dotservant.com (Edited)
Just came across this article. InterWorx is also a great alternative to cPanel. Started using it a couple of years ago and have never looked back.
I would also add InterWorx and Plesk as alterntives to cPanel. They both have a much greater feature set than the free alternatives and our comparable with, if not better than cPanel when it comes to ease of use and functionality.