Three years back, I was rather skeptical at first. I had absolutely no experience with Linux or Apache, was even unaware of the fact that unlike in Windows I had to be here more specific with small or capital letters in file names but I liked the C-Panel.
I made the choice (shared hosting). I never regretted it. C-Panel is fun. Hostgator folks are helpful and the servers have been maintained all these years without I or my website experiencing any problems. Issues with my mail server were resolved within a few hours. Even some of my sluggish visually overdosed pages load quickly. Using third party monitoring tools during the first two years I found most of metrics for my pages showing an above average performance.