What do web hosting Panels do?
Below a screenshot of the CPanel. If you use a Hosting provider this will be known for you.



Panels like cPanel and CPanel WebMin are web hosting control panels.
A web hosting control panel is a web-based interface provided by a bweb hosting service that allows users to manage their servers and hosted services.
Web hosting control panels usually include the following modules:
- Web server (e.g. Apache, Nginx, IIS)
- DNS Server
- Mail server and spam filter
- FTP server
- Database
- File manager
- System monitor
- Web log analysis software
- Firewall
Where cPanel is commercial Software, WebMin is free and Open Source. Both use the same modules (The list shown above).



Both systems are programmed in Perl and do more or less the same. The first time I used WebMin was on a Debian Linux machine. Later on I installed it on my Mac. I didn’t know all the UNIX possibilities of Mac UNIX yet but thanks to WebMin I got pleasantly surprised, since everything was there; Apache, Sendmail, Postfix, MySQL, BIND (The DNS server, PHP, Fetchmail, Monitoring and much more. It did me realize that the Mac OS was much more than just the Finder. In fact it is a full featured UNIX machine.
Later on I discovered much more about my Mac. For example that I could install Other software too, including Graphical Window managers like Gnome and KDA, and with the X-Terminal I could open graphical sessions using SSH on remote Servers.