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Pau Lo

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cpanel access/functionality

I noticed most web site hosts offer a 'cpanel' to the website owners/customers, which seems to be different to the CMS for editing pages. As a novice in this area, what exactly does the cpanel allow the website owner to do? Or put another way, we want assurance only the correct people have access to the cpanel for our website, so to quantify the risk, what could a malicious or unqualified person do to our site if they had access to the cpanel.
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Shaun Vermaak
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Dr. Klahn

The "cpanel" for a web server is the rough equivalent of "root" for a linux system.

"Control panel" access should be given only to website administrators, and there should not be many such.  Once a web server is brought to a working configuration, very few people need "control panel" level access -- get the server working and it will keep working unless the configuration is significantly changed.

Day to day maintenance such as reading log files, updating block lists and adding or modifying web pages does not require "control panel" level access to a server.
As Dr. Klahn stated, CPanel is a GUI view of root access to a machine.

If you're new to Linux than CPanel will be a good choice.

And, for best performance + security, avoid CPanel + use root ssh (steep learning curve).