With hosting control panel you can perform many tasks with your hosting account. You can upload/download files (with File Managers), create databases with users permissions, setup FTP accounts (with quotas per user, and access restrictions), add new domains (addon, subdomains), server logs, view statistics/logs and other hosting related tasks. With control panel it is much easier to maintain website(s) because, it is very easy to use, simple yet have tons of features. Panels do not require any technical knowledge or skill like system or server administration. Popular control panels are cPanel, Hsphere, DirectAdmin, Plesk and all of them support linux hosting, while windows hosting is not supported by all. cPanel is the most popular panel and only supports Linux environment (preferably CentOS or RedHat). Most of the companies offer this panel to their clients. Fantastico is addon to cPanel which allows fast, easy installation of popular web applications like wordpress, joomla, drupal, shopping carts, galleries and lots of others popular web scripts. This makes it very easier for the average user to create a website.