When you first decide to buy VPS hosting you will find a slightly wide choice of panel’s to choose from, this post will focus on webmin (usually free) and cpanel (usually around $8+ per month extra) and the pro’s and con’s thereof.

As you are probably aware of when using shared hosting, most tend to work with cpanel, this Is because cpanel vps and dedicated hosting allows those servers to create their own sub users with a limited set of permissions. However, with webmin you are not able to create separate user accounts and if you were to, then it would be a rather long and tedious task in order to install and set up and then manually add in the correct settings per user.  This is probably the biggest difference, the inability to setup your vps to sell shared hosting accounts. However, apart from that and the less friendly looking icons there is not much difference.

When you first load up your cpanel hosting with vps you may find that you are slightly overwhelmed by the literal hundreds of features you never knew you were locked out of. The majority of things you will need for a basic website, ecommerce site and wordpress site are ready (usually) installed on a cpanel hosting, whilst with webmin you will find that you will need to learn how to install everything (fairly simple with its installing process).

But What of Usability?

Well, from personal experience I would say that if you are new, want to get set off quickly and avoid issues then opt in for the cpanel, it may be more expensive, but it will save you time, stress and a fair bit of confusion in the long run.

If however, you are a person who likes a challenge and thinks that learning a few codes here and there and doing a few workarounds is worth saving you $96 a month then webmin may be for you. Note that some hosting providers give you cpanel hosting for free, this is due to them increasing the price slightly.