cpanel

I want to make a backup in my cpanel web hosting without doing one in softaculous. I want to make a backup of the files for my blog and the database and keep them on my own computer instead of in my hosting. Does anyone know if it is hard and how to do it if it is not too hard?

I am looking around for some web hosting and wanted to know if I should only get web hosting that uses cPanel or if it really doesn't matter that much. I see most do but not all. What do you guys think?

I think I might move to a new hosting service and I see that some of the hosting companies will move your cpanel account for free. Does anyone know how long this can take? I asked some live chat and they say it depends on how busy but they will not give any kind of answer.

Does anyone know if you can move/migrate a shared Cpanel hosting account to a VPS Cpanel hosting account? I was searching in google but there is conflicting information so I would prefer to have it verified by a person somewhere like here versus hoping some guy with a blog is right.

I have always used (paid for) cPanel for all of my hosting accounts and now I looking for a free control panel alternative to cPanel. It's for a VPS that will be used to test out some things and some websites so I really don't want to pay the extra for cPanel unless I have to. Anyone know of...