cPanel is a web application user interface to allow you to control your web hosting account without using or having to learn the command line interface. Your web hosting account resides on a Linux computer along with the Apache web server application, the MySQL database application and PHP scripting application. This is sometimes called a LAMP server. Without cPanel you would have to learn the commands to type at the command prompts. cPanel provides a graphic user interface to manage your web hosting account. However not all commands are implimented in cPanel, sometimes you may have to use the command line interface.