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cPanel hosting: what the panel gives you and what it costs hosts
cPanel is the most widely used shared hosting control panel in the world, and the numbers in this selection back that up: around 4,700 plans from more than 940 hosts. Prices start under half a dollar a month, and the median is roughly $7–8. Hosts in the US (around 1,240 plans), Germany (around 710) and the UK (around 650) offer the most. If you've ever used shared hosting, chances are it was cPanel.
What cPanel can do
The panel covers everything the owner of a typical website needs, no command line required:
- Domains and subdomains. Addon Domains, parked domains, redirects, and a DNS zone editor if your domain points to the host's name servers.
- Email. Mailboxes on your own domain, forwarders, autoresponders, spam filters, and the Roundcube webmail interface. You can see at a glance how much space each mailbox takes up.
- Databases. MySQL or MariaDB with a wizard for creating a database and user, plus phpMyAdmin for working with tables by hand.
- CMS installation. With Softaculous or WordPress Toolkit, WordPress, Joomla, OpenCart and dozens of other platforms install in a couple of minutes. Toolkit can also clone a site to a staging subdomain and update plugins in bulk.
- PHP. Per-site version selection (MultiPHP, or PHP Selector on CloudLinux) and an editor for settings such as memory_limit.
- SSL. Free AutoSSL or Let’s Encrypt certificates are issued and renewed automatically.
- Backups. A full account backup in a single archive, plus restoring individual files and databases. Many hosts add JetBackup with daily backups on top.
cPanel's main advantage isn't any single feature but predictability. The interface is the same at hundreds of hosts, online tutorials apply to any of them, and moving an account between cPanel hosts usually comes down to restoring a single archive.
Why cPanel got more expensive, and what happened next
In 2019 the developer switched licensing to per-account pricing, and prices have gone up several more times since. Hosts used to pay a flat fee per server and could fit hundreds of customers on it; now the cost grows with the number of accounts. On cheap plans the license has become a noticeable part of the price.
The market reacted in different ways. Some hosts raised prices or cut their cheapest plans, others moved to DirectAdmin, Plesk or free panels. Many kept cPanel on higher tiers as an option "for those who are used to it" and offer an alternative on entry-level plans. So a cPanel plan for well under a dollar a month deserves a close look: it's usually a very small disk, a single site and annual billing.
cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin
Many hosts let you choose between several panels. In this selection, besides cPanel, around 1,450 plans also list Plesk and around 1,000 list DirectAdmin. Here's how they differ in practice:
- cPanel — the largest feature set and plugin ecosystem, familiar to most web developers. Linux only. The most expensive license.
- Plesk — a more modern interface with well-integrated WordPress Toolkit, plus a Windows edition with ASP.NET support. Popular in Europe.
- DirectAdmin — a lightweight, fast panel with fewer features. The license is cheaper, so budget hosts often choose it. For one or two WordPress sites you'll hardly notice the difference.
There's one more option, mostly found at hosts in Russia and neighboring countries: ISPmanager hosting, a panel used by most Russian hosts.
What cPanel can't do on shared hosting
The panel manages only your account, not the server. You usually can't install a system package, change the MySQL version, enable a non-standard web server module or run a Node.js app as a persistent process: that's up to the host. Not every plan includes SSH access, and where it does, it's limited to a jailed shell. Also keep CloudLinux limits in mind: the panel shows how much CPU and memory your site uses, but you can only raise them by changing plans. If these restrictions are already getting in your way, cPanel won't solve the problem — you need a server with admin rights.
What to look for in a cPanel plan
- Version and add-ons. Check whether Softaculous, WordPress Toolkit, JetBackup and CloudLinux are included. Bare cPanel without them is noticeably more limited.
- Number of sites. Entry-level plans often allow a single domain; if you have several projects, look for plans for 10 or more websites.
- Traffic and disk. About half of the plans in this selection offer unmetered traffic, the median disk is 20 GB, and around a third have NVMe.
- Renewal price. Because of the license price hikes, hosts are happy to discount the first year, while renewal costs one and a half to two times as much.
If what your site needs isn't a panel but full control over the server, take a look at a VPS for WordPress: you can install any panel yourself or do without one entirely.