When it comes to web design (all aspects of the business, from agreeing to work with a client, the technology/languages you choose to use, the actual design itself), how much influence does the control panel software (cPanel, Plesk, etc) the server is using influence you, your decisions, your job in general?

Or more specifically, if you are hired for a web design job, what do you use the control panel for?

Fast answers are better than slower ones. Thanks!

I've never done professional web development which uses hosting with a control panel. I always do things through editing actual config files via the shell. The minimum I want to work with for any kind of serious development these days is a VPS.

I like having cPanel around (WHM, to be specific) only from a web hosting perspective. As from the side of someone who is just designing the site, it's not all that helpful. I sure wouldn't use it for judging whether I take a job, unless I knew the control panel software to actually be a hindrance (like Plesk, ugh).

Really, as a web designer, you're going to be doing 99% work on PHP/asp.NET on some SQL over FTP/SFTP. A control panel isn't going to influence you much at all there.

We do everything either via command-line for Apache and Tomcat and the control panel for WebSphere Application Server, as trying to do everything in WAS through Jython would be :psylon:.

We do Java EE, primarily, and use Hudson on top of Maven to deploy our code to our development boxes (Jython scripts for WAS or Hudson's built-in deployment capabilities for Tomcat). In the few cases where we actually go directly to the database, we use Oracle's SQL Developer or the SQL*Plus CLI. There are some teams that use MySQL for development; I would probably still use SQL Developer for the sake consolidating clients in that case, unless there's a compelling reason not to. Any local development against a database is usually done against an in-memory or file-based database, such as HSQLDB or Derby, which is validated by Hudson builds that run against Oracle instances.

As far as production management of network infrastructure, that's left up to our system engineers.

tl,dr: we never use anything like CPanel to manage our web servers except for WAS.

Our dedicated server is running ispconfig/webmin. It's pretty much just a straight forward LAMP box for sites running on PHP. The only time I use ispconfig or webmin is for administrative functions like adding a new virtual server or simple configurations, otherwise I just use ssh. I would say a web designers job requires 5% or less of administrative functions on the server.