How to Use Cpanel: Top 7 Ways to Use a Web Host Control Panel


How to Use Cpanel
If you’re hosting your website on a Linux server (most hosting companies) you’ll receive a web-based control panel called Cpanel. This allows you to manage your website using a graphical interface. It enables you to create e-mail accounts, FTP your files, install scripts, blogs and view your website statistics.

Top 7 Ways to Use a Web Host Control Panel

1. Site statistics

Cpanel provides AWstats. This software displays the number of visits and hits your site receives on a daily, weekly and yearly basis. AWstats shows you where your traffic is coming from e.g. countries, external links, browsers and search engines. It also tracks the keywords people are entering into the search engines to find your web pages. Monitoring your site statistics helps you to observe which traffic strategies attract the most visitors.

2. E-mail management

Your control panel enables you to create and manage e-mail accounts. Here are some of the features associated with e-mail management:

Spam assassin: install this software to filter out spam e-mails from your e-mail accounts
Webmail manager: enables you to access your e-mail accounts from a web-based control panel
Auto responders: allows you to send automatic messages back to the sender
E-mail forwarders: enables a copy of all the e-mail from one e-mail account to be sent to another
E-mail domain forwarders: allows forwarding of e-mail from one domain to another

3. File management

This allows you to create backups and transfer website files to the server using FTP.

File backups: use the backup Wizard to download your entire website (files, databases, e-mail accounts) to a zipped file on your computer. It will also enable you to restore your files with one click.

File manager: use this FTP (File Transfer Protocol)feature to transfer website files from your computer to the server. Make sure all your files are uploaded to the public.html folder on the server. This occurs live within your browser so your uploaded files will appear immediately on the web.

4. Install MySQL databases

Databases are needed for the installation of software such as WordPress, Joomla, scripts, etc.
phpMyAdmin is a great tool for managing your databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions and so on).

5. Software installation

Fantastico: enables easy installation of software that includes: blogs, forums, content management systems (CMS), e-commerce shopping carts, image galleries, mailing lists, polls, surveys, site builders and scripts. Your specific Web hosting plan may not have all these features enabled so check with your web host first before utilizing them.

6. Domain management

Parked domains: this is where you park one domain on top of another. For example if you register 2 domains for the same business you can direct both to the same web address by parking one on top of the other.

Subdomains: this allows you to create another website on top of your current one e.g. subdomain.yourdomain.com

Redirects: this is where you can redirect one web page to another. For example if you have a web page with a long URL you can redirect it to one that has a short and easy to remember URL.

7. Security

Password protection: if you wish to limit access to a particular folder on your website you can create a username and password for it. Only those people who have the login information will be able to access that folder.

The reason that Cpanel is widely used and very popular with web hosting companies is that it’s a quick and easy system for managing your website.

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.DrostDesigns.com.

Comments

  1. It is also easy to backup and transfer all your websites from one server to another server if you have cPanel installed.-“

  2. if you are going to get a VPS server make sure that it has cPanel coz it makes server maintennance easier.:*-

  3. both cPanel and DirectAdmin are great tools for managing hosting accounts and vps servers ::

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