WHM - Web Hosting Manager  

What is WHM?  WHM stands for Web Hosting Manager.  This is a web-based tool provided by hosting companies to people who buy reseller hosting accounts.  People who just get a regular hosting account get CPanel (Control Panel), but people with reseller accounts get access to WHM as well. WHM allows the reseller to add websites for each of his customers.  The WHM reseller can set up his own hosting plans (for example, bronze, silver, gold), each contains a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth. 

You can actually logon to WHM and see how it works here: WHM Demo (user=demo password=demo).

Most web entrepreneurs will have 10 to 100 (or more) of their own websites (for example, 10 minisites each with a sales letter, 5 blog sites, etc...).  So internet marketers often sign-up with a reseller hosting account, even though they don't plan to ever resell anything.  It's just a convenient way of getting up 10, 20, 30 or more of your own websites.

Only resellers and the hosting company itself uses WHM.  If you purchase hosting for a single domain, you will have access only to CPanel (see discussion below). 

Resellers can suspend or permit accounts (for example, if a customer doesn't pay, one button click suspends their web hosting).  Later when they pay, click a button, and the sites comes back online immediately. 

WHM Sample Screen:

CPANEL:

CPanel is the tool used to control and manage a single domain name.  Web Designers use it primarily for the following:

1) Set up Emails
2) Set up MySQL database and use PHP-MyAdmin to modify contents of a database
3) Perform backups
4) Occassionally used to view or FTP files
5) Set up FTP accounts
6) Change the account password

 CPanel Sample Screen: