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Basic Understanding of cPanel
cPanel is a web hosting control panel that is used by most web hosting providers to allow
their customers to interact with their Web servers. cPanel allows those who don’t have
a computer science degree to use a graphic interface to perform almost everything you
need to do on a UNIX web server. In this video will take a short tour of the items that are
included on most cPanel setups and what you can do with cPanel.
When you signed up with your web host they gave you a link to access the cPanel on your
account. Using that login information, let’s go to your cPanel.
The 1st thing you’ll notice is that the opening page, or dashboard, has basic information
about your account on the left and icons of different actions you can perform on the right.
Along the top can be a series of tabs that allows you to access other areas of cPanel
and your web hosting account or it can all be included in the icons on the right. Every
web hosting provider is a little different about what is included in the data on the
left, the icons on the right, and sometimes the tabs on the top.
On the left you should see mostly data about your account–your domains, your e-mail accounts,
your monthly bandwidth, and lots more. On the right side, the icons are grouped together
in categories. You can move these category boxes up and down based on what order you
want to access them.
One thing you’ll want to look for in the box labeled “ software/services” is something
called either Simple Scripts or Fantastico. These are service companies that allow you
to have simplified set up of most of the popular content management systems. If neither of
these appear in your software services box, it does not mean that you can’t set up a
CMS like WordPress or Joomla on your server–it just means you will have to do it manually.
You will use many of the icons in your cPanel regularly, but it’s probably a good idea
to get started with the “getting started Wizard” if you have not worked with cPanel
before. It is usually located on the upper left corner of the “Preferences” category
box.
When you go to set up e-mail addresses for your domain, look in the mail category box.
You will either use the “e-mail accounts” or “forwarders” icons shown here. Our
video “Setting Up Your Own Business Email Address” provides details on how to perform
this process.
There is a category box for Logs, which is how you would track your number of visitors
and access data to your website. We have another video in our training about setting up analytics
called “Setting Up Website Analytics”, which we recommend to perform the same service
but if you want to use the log program offered by your web host, you can access it here.
There is another category box for security. The most common icon you would use here is
for “password protect directories”. This is for when you want to require a username
and password for an area of your website.
Most of the time when you set up an account at a web host you have what is called a primary
domain. If you want to have other domains and other websites on your web hosting account
you can create what is called “add-on domains” and you would use this icon in the domains
category box to access this area.
If you use a content management system, or CMS, to set up your website it requires a
database to maintain the information for the website. The most common database used by
CMSs is MySQL. In the databases category box you will find your “MySQL databases”,
a “MySQL database Wizard” to help you build new databases and “PHP my admin”
to help you access the databases that are already built.
There are many more things you can do with cPanel, but for most web administration work
you can get mostly by with the information I just covered. Make yourself comfortable
with it and don’t hesitate to contact your web hosting support if you need assistance
in working in cPanel.