Just curious as to why it's so important for a host to have a particular control panel? It seems there are a lot of posts saying, "I need a host with this or that CP".

What am I missing?

Some people are just familier with the control panel they are used to. I guess they might not want to learn a new setup or they might like the features that one CP offers over another.

People find it easier to manage their servers with Control Panel. It is mainly important for novice users who do not have much knowledge in managing their accounts/servers.

As a host the goal of any control panel is complete automation. Some control panels offer easier integration of billing and domains registration. The bottom line is the easier the control panel the less trouble tickets you have to answer.

Tim

Originally posted by SoundMessage
What am I missing?

Depends. What control panel do you use right now?

It gets down to several factors.

Saving time which saves cost. In the old days to setup an account involved several factors.
DNS, Mail, Web, Database and billing all of which had to be completed from the command line and sometimes across several machines. This was both time consuming and opened up possibility to errorrrrs (Did I mean errors).

With the advent of many of the popular GUI interfaces i.e.(Control Panels) you could reduce your costs and the number of highly trained employees needed to do respective tasks. It also allowed customers to receive instant access and more control over adding resources such as email, domain names and databases.

1) When choosing a control panel, you need to look at what resources and platforms you are planning on selling.

2) How much time can you devote to setting up accounts and doing billing or do you want to automate as much as possible.

3) Your technical skill sets.

4) Your budget.

Originally posted by SoundMessage
Just curious as to why it's so important for a host to have a particular control panel? It seems there are a lot of posts saying, "I need a host with this or that CP".

What am I missing?

Because consumers love it. An average webmaster after seeing and playing first time with Cpanel don't wont any thing else. From now on he will ask for it and it will one of main factors while choosing future a webhosting company.

And it works. It looks like designed by kid, its based on frames, it have horrible icons, its stupid like windows but it das provide the "5 kinds of statistics", mailman, ftp anonymous accounts, ect.