Shared & VPS Panel
The control panel your customers log into, and the panel your team provisions VPS from. Both sit above the hypervisor: swapping either is a customer-visible change, swapping the hypervisor underneath is not.
Products in this layer
Market Share →
Switching cost. Panel choice drives end-user UX, support load, and per-account licensing cost.
What a panel is
The control panel is what your shared and VPS customers actually log into. It’s where they provision DNS, manage email, change caching, or spin up a new WordPress install — the day-to-day controls that would otherwise require a server administrator. cPanel and Plesk have held the largest share of this market for two decades, with DirectAdmin a long-standing third.
Focused vs everything-capable
cPanel and Plesk are built to support not just WordPress but a wide range of platforms and use cases. That breadth is useful — and it’s also weight. On a host that runs only WordPress, much of that surface area is functionality you license, patch, and support but never use.
Newer panels — Webuzo and Virtualizor — and WordPress-native control planes take the opposite stance: cover the WordPress workflow well and leave the rest out. For the right operator that means a lighter system, a cleaner customer experience, and lower per-account licensing cost.
How the move usually works
Panel migrations come in two shapes, covered in detail in the migration guide:
- A converter runs in place on the existing server, swapping the panel while keeping sites, databases, email, and SSL intact (no IP changes, but it needs a full backup to roll back).
- An importer stands up a new server and transfers accounts across, letting you run both side by side before cutover (IPs change).
Either way, the panel decision drives end-user UX, support load, and recurring per-account cost more than almost any other layer above the cloud.