I think you need to buy a license for CPanel, unless they have some single-user/private use type of free deal. Can you configure the PHP apps to not require email confirmation? If you were on Linux (where all this stuff ... PHP, Apache, MySQL ... was designed to run), you could try sending mail to username@localhost. If you really want to play with this stuff I suggest getting Linux. I'm not knocking Windows, but it isn't the best platform for open source web and internet development.