Introduction to control panels
Your hosting account should have an easy to use, thorough control panel area. While this area will never be seen by your visitors, it is critical in helping you set up your web site, manage it, monitor it and take care of it, and may be just as important as the web site itself. While control panels vary among hosts, we walk you through the industry standard management system which is the most often used called CPanel.
What is a control panel?
A control panel is an area in your hosting account that helps you do a variety of tasks for your website. Many hosts use different types of control panel systems, but they basically let you do the same things; manage your hosting account, set up and work with email accounts, upload and manage files, and dozens of other tasks. This area also gives you information like your web sites IP Address, your storage and bandwidth usage, the server platform that is being used, and other technical information.
Some hosting companies, like GoDaddy, Yahoo and Bravenet, use control panel systems that are unique in their design and layout, and differ in look and usage from the system many web hosts use called CPanel. Because of these differences, and because CPanel is the most popular and most widely used system, our overview will cover CPanel, it's layout, and user areas; it would be difficult to create overviews from every hosting company that use their own unique control panel areas, but keep in mind that, for the most part, they will all do pretty much the same thing as Cpanel.
Following is a screenshot of a CPanel Screen, with a guide to each area and what it does. Depending on the version of CPanel that your host uses, your CPanel area may look slightly different.
The left hand panel shows you various statistics for your site, your storage and bandwidth usage, email information, domain and database information, and technical information for your hosting account.
The "Preferences" area offers videos to get familiar with CPanel, your choice of language to use, a change password option, and the ability to change the CPanel color scheme to match your preference.
The "Email" area is where you create new email accounts, view email through your browser, set SPAM filters, and set up autoresponders and forwarders, as well as other email related tasks.
The "Files" area lets you create FTP accounts, view/edit/create/delete files in your website, and create file backups so you never lose copies of your files. You can also download your backups.
The "Logs" area gives you primarily visitor information, showing you traffic statistics to measure your visitor activity. You can view logs via downloaded files, or via graphical pages within your browser.
The "Security" area helps you protect your site. Here you can create password protection for certain files and areas, like "Admin" pages, prevent other sites from linking to your images, and even keep certain IP Addresses from accessing your web site.
The "Domains" area lets you set up additional domain names, sub domains and parked domains for your website.
The "Databases" area is where you create databases for your sites data, if needed. PHPMyAdmin, an easy to use database interface, is usually included to help you manage your database information and users.
The "Software" area is where you find preinstalled scripts that, with a few mouse clicks, you can easily install premade scripts and components for your website.
The "Advanced" area is usually for more technical aspects of server management, and is often not needed by the average site owner. We recommend not using these areas without guidance or tutorials on their usage.