cPanel hosting was first intended to be used as a control panel to assist with Speed Hosting, which is an old web hosting company which has now been abandoned. cPanel was started by a man named J. Nick Koston, who coincidentally happened to have shares in Speed Hosting. The company that took over Speed hosting was called Web King and this company started to use cPanel services very early. It released three versions of cPanel services for web hosting before the turn of the century, improving each one from the faults of the last to compete with other hosting services already on the market. The third version tended to be very unreliable because there were many different bugs in the system, which prevented the smooth running of it. However, once the original creator split with all other companies to focus entirely on cPanel then he managed to iron out all of the problems to create a smooth running service without any major problems that any recent customers have noticed or criticized.