Inc own the software and are also the distributors of it. The design of the control panel is for commercial purposes, and is used by web hosting services. Because of its commercial purpose it is not available as a personal use license at a reduced cost. But those who own organizations which are not for profit, such as charities and educational institutes can ask for the software at a reduced cost or for free. Companies who have dedicated servers can provide it at a reduced cost. This is because they have already installed control panel when they installed the operating systems for their computers.

cPanel Inc claims that it also supports Debian. But this version has been for several years in the beta state, and does not support it. The ports on which control panel is accessed commonly are 2083 for the SSL version, and 2082. The authentication is done either by web page login, or via HTTP. Control panel works on Linux distributions, which is based on RPM. These include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandriva, SUSE, FreeBSD, Fedora, and CentOS.

It was for Speed Hosting that control panel was initially designed. Speed Hosting was a web hosting company in which J. Nick Koston, the original author of control panel, had a stake.