After reading above line the first thing that will come to cpanel lovers mind will be “Is this guy an idiot?”. cPanel is one of the most advanced, stable and reliable control panel with vast number of features that makes server management extremely easy. Also almost every hosting company providing linux shared hosting uses cPanel on their shared servers. So why would anyone ever want to stop using cPanel? I too agree that cPanel is the number one control panel available in market today. So why did I recommended using CWP? The reason is pricing. A dedicated server cPanel license today costs $45 per month. Which for most people is very high price. Especially when they have just 2 or 3 websites and they never even login to control panel once the site is uploaded and live. So there is no point in paying such high price per month when you only use less than 5% of the features available in cPanel and those features are already available in other free control panels. You can use that money on upgrading hardware instead e.g extra RAM, high power cpu etc.
Why did you specifically recommend CWP when there are lots of other open source and free control panel available?
Yes, there are lots of other popular opensource and free control panel available like Webmin + Virtualmin, VestaCP, ISPConfig etc. The reason for me recommending CWP is due to it’s cPanel migration feature. You can take regular cpanel backup and restore it directly on CWP Server. It will restore the emails, addon domains etc automaticaly. But in other control panels you have to do the migration manually. Also people who has used cPanel before can easily become accustomed to CWP. Second reason is that CWP team is releasing updates regularly. Which makes it a little more secure as compared to other free control panels.
Conclusion: CWP is recommended for people hosting private websites who doesn’t want to pay for control panel license. If you are going use the server for shared hosting or hosting large number of accounts then I will highly recommended you to use some advanced control panel like cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin etc. because managing shared hosting will be very difficult without the use of some advanced control panel.
It has free forum community support. But as I said it’s only good for very basic hosting needs/tasks like create account, upload site, create email etc. Which I think is pretty straight forward. And you should be able to do it easily if you have some experience in using other control panels.
But that’s not the point here. This post is just to let people know that there is a free control panel available to which they can migrate easily if they want to save money. And it’s only good for very basic hosting needs. There is no point in comparing it with other paid control panels.