This refers to a special kind of software installed for the convenience of webmasters to handle common tasks associated with web hosting accounts. With your user-friendly control panel you can expect to be able to easily change your password, create email accounts, create extra user accounts and passwords with varying accessibility, password protect directories, change file permissions, upload files (although typically control panels offer poor support for this), monitor your bandwidth and more. A full-blown control panel is a standard among commercial hosting accounts. If the web host you are looking at doesn't offer this then keep looking.