I've recently used CPanel on the admin side for the first time and have to say I hate it. Everything from the layout to the functionality screams "hackish". It just lacks so many common sense features and way of working.
I was never 100% impressed with Plesk but the basics were definitely laid out and done in a sensible manner, even though it is made by a Russian company, they definitely thought about how to make a Control Panel.
I have no idea why people........
This is something that annoys a lot of people, fortunately the Redhat style OS's are the most simple in this respect. I disagree that Debian's way makes sense, it is more of a hackish approach in how they implement iptables.
Anyway, for those who are using Redhat/Centos style OS's it is very simple.
Set your rules from the shell/command prompt and to save the iptables firewall rules so they are remember/loaded on boot just run this command:
service iptables........