My past webmastering experience has been in the MS 2000/IIS world. On an upcoming site I need to use the UNIX/Apache platform. This is a new adventure for me...

I see most guys talking about using the CPanel admin panel. The host I planned to use (due to their great service in the past) uses Sphera’s VDS Control Panel. Is this necessarily a bad thing?...

The host is vianetworks.net. They offer phone tech support 24/7 and have been a great host in the past for me, but I am open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Alot of the UBB.Threads users here like www.vertexhost.com

Jeremy (a moderator here) is the founder.
He's got Linux servers with Cpanel.

I've demo'd the Sphera panel, but have not used it in production. It was so long ago that I can't remember enough about it to tell you how well it worked or didn't.