cPanel is the control panel for a hosting account: files, email, databases and DNS for one customer or one set of sites. WHM (Web Host Manager) is the control panel for the server those accounts live on. You get both from one license, and on most servers you’ll use both every week.
Here’s what each one does, and how they fit together.
What is cPanel?
Think of cPanel as the control panel for your website. It handles the day-to-day jobs for one account, and a single dedicated server can hold many accounts, each with its own cPanel login. From cPanel you can:
- Upload and manage the files for your website
- Edit individual files and pages
- Set up and manage email accounts for your domain
- Manage email settings and security features, such as spam protection
- Set up and manage databases
- Install a content management system with an installer like Softaculous
- Add and remove addon domains and subdomains
- Edit DNS records for your domains
- Check website statistics and analytics
- Manage your backups
That covers what most site owners need, without touching the command line.
What is WHM?
Web Host Manager is the back-end panel for the server itself and every cPanel account on it. WHM gives you the basic system administration of the server, access to its metrics and logs, and control over the services that host websites. Most importantly, it gives each cPanel account its own compartment on the server.
That compartment is what makes WHM work as a reseller panel. A reseller can create and manage accounts for their own customers, with fewer rights than the server’s root user.
WHM lets you:
- Create and manage individual cPanel accounts
- Build hosting packages around what each customer needs
- Choose which features each package gets
- Choose which PHP version each account or domain runs, with MultiPHP Manager
- Set up private nameservers and edit DNS zones for domains and subdomains
- Run maintenance on the server and its control panels
- Set disk and bandwidth quotas per account (hard CPU and memory limits per account need CloudLinux)
- Log in to resold accounts without their passwords
So what’s the difference?
cPanel is the front end for each account, and WHM is the back end for the whole server. On a server you run yourself, you’ll live in WHM when you’re setting things up and in cPanel when you’re working on a site.
They’re also one product. It’s sold as cPanel & WHM, and one license covers both.
cPanel and WHM on a GigeNET server
On our dedicated servers, cPanel is on the order form: cPanel Premier Metal is $49.50 a month and covers 100 accounts. Run the server yourself with root and WHM, or add management, which is $79 a month on a server with cPanel. Our cPanel dedicated servers page has the builds and the monthly totals, and what a cPanel license costs explains the tiers.
Already on cPanel somewhere else? The cPanel to cPanel migration guide walks through the move, and if you’re moving from another host, we migrate your cPanel accounts to the new server free.
