What is CPanel?

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Use cPanel Hosting to Easily Manage Your Web Sites

cPanel is the most popular way for both web server staff and webmasters to accomplish technical chores regarding websites.
That’s because it’s easy for nontechnical website owners to understand and use.
It’s a software program that displays a screen of icons that you can double click on to accomplish different things.

This is a big improvement on the old-fashioned alternative — prompt line commands such as Microsft DOS and UNIX use. These days, most computer users including webmasters have no experience or even knowledge of this.

cPanel is combined with another proprietary software program called WebHost ManagerTM (WHM), and they must be used together. WHM displays a control panel for server administrators and resellers. To keep things simple, I’ll refer just to cPanel.

FOR WEBSITE OWNERS

Let’s say you have a website which is being hosted by a company which uses cPanel. You want to create a subdomain. You use cPanel. Or you want to enable Microsoft FrontPage extensions. You use cPanel. Or you want to read your email online. You use cPanel.

cPanel displays the Domain Owner Control Panel. This is the main screen which website owners who have their websites (domains) hosted by commercial website host companies. This screen displays the things it does as small icons, so it’s easy to use and understand, once you know what the icons mean.

They also have access to the Webmail Access Panel which is where you can use one of three different email programs (Neomail, Squirrel Mail, and Horde) to read your email. No downloading. Just read your email from any computer accessing the Internet.

You get cPanel by signing up to with a website hosting company that provides this program as a service to its customers. Most such companies will make that clear on their websites, because it is a sales benefit to potential customers. If you’re interested in a web hosting company that doesn’t say whether or not they provide cPanel, ask them.

One of the most useful features of cPanel is that it allows you to easily access your website’s statistics. You can track how many people visit your site and see your raw log file to see what words they put into a search engine to find. That’s important information that allows you to further optimize your site for search engines.

These features are: Webalizer Web Stats, Analog Stats, Latest Visitors, Bandwidth, Error Log, Raw Log File, and Raw Log Manager.

You can also use cPanel to easily:

1. Create subdomains and see statistics on those subdomains.

A good way to organize your site. If you want to devote a separate section of your pet site to dogs, it’s simpler to create a http://dogs.pets.com subdomain instead of: http://www.pets.com/dogs/ .

Having statistics on each domain will tell you whether or not dogs.pets.com is getting more visitors than cats.pets.com.

2. Enable Microsoft FrontPage extensions

You must do this if you’re using Microsoft FrontPage and plan to use that program to upload your websites.

3. Set up or change password protection.

Make sure that nobody else can send files to your site, or to control other people you let have access to the site.

4. Set up password protected directories on your site.

Maybe you’re selling an ebook or software program you don’t want people to download for free. Or you’re selling monthly memberships to access important information your site.

This benefit allows you to make certain areas of your site inaccessible to anybody who hasn’t paid for the password.

5. Create custom error pages

Instead of the boring and insulting standard 404 error pages — give people who are trying to access a page on your site a welcome message and a link to the home page or another page you’d like them to visit.

6. Deny website access to browsers from certain IP addresses.

Plagued by hackers and spammers or flamers you want to ban from your discussion board? This service allows you to block site access to anyone from their IP addresses.

7. Create page redirects.

Send people from one page directly to another.

8. Manage parked domains

This allows you to have visitors to one domain sent to another one. Say your website is domain1.com. You might own domain1.net and domain1.org and have people who type in those urls sent to domain1.com.

9. See how much space you have used.

Most web hosting accounts allow you only a set amount of disk space.

10. Set up cron tasks — these are generally routine website maintenance tasks that you should do every once in a while. You can use cPanel to schedule these to be done automatically.

Such jobs could include deleting temporary files to save disk space and to back up your site or your database.

11. Back up your website. Obviously a good idea!

12. Monitor your usage of bandwidth - see how much bandwidth your account has remaining for the rest of the month.

13. Set up autoresponders

This automatically sends an email to anybody who emails you. Say you’re going to be out of town for a week. You can send a short email telling them not to expect an answer to their question for another week.

14. Set email forwarding.

You set up a separate email account for each of your website domains to take care of business for that particular site because it looks more professional and reassuring to visitors and customers. However, it’s inconvenient to go in and out of many different email accounts just to check on your mail. With this service, you can have all your emails sent to one central account.

15. Set up a default email account.

Some people might send you email but misspell the first part of the address. You can have all email sent to your domains put into one separate account.

16. Set up email filters.

Filter out spam. cPanel comes with Spam Assassin to let in only the email you want to receive.

17. Set up an email list.

This enables you to maintain a record of everyone who’s agreed to receive email from you, and to email them all at once. Say when you’re running a sale or making an important announcement.

Warning: Internet marketing professionals use professional services because many web hosts will shut you down if they get even one spam complaint — so all it takes to go out of business is for one person to file a complaint because they forget that they voluntarily subscribed to your email list.

However, this is good for people who email only a small circle of friends and family.

18. File manager

This allows you to control the setup and organization of your website. You can create folders and direct specific pages into those folders. This helps you keep your site organized. Also, organizing websites into subject themes is vital to modern search engine optimization.

It works much like ordinary tree displays of folders and files on your hard drive, such as Windows Explorer.

19. Set up, use and manage databases.

Maybe you want to use a database on your site. cPanel provides an interface with MySQL, a popular open source database program. You can use it to create databases and administer access to your data.

cPanel and MySQL include a database management tool called phpMyAdmin.

20. Search engine submit.

Submit your new site to the major search engines at once. NOTE: many search engine experts will tell you not to do this. Most of them believe that you get better rankings by letting the engines find you. Especially Google.

21. Set up a chat room on your site.

Allows you to answer questions from your visitors — or to talk about whatever you like.

22. Set up CGI scripts.

These help make your website more interactive and useful for visitors. This service makes it easy for you to select a script and install it.

23. Set up the Agora Shopping Cart software.

Selling multiple items on your site? This open source software allows you to take orders on many different products.

24. Prevent “hot linking” or “leeching.”

Say you have a great picture on your site. Another site wants to display the same picture, but won’t copy it because you own the rights to that great picture. They can instead simply link to it. That is, it will be displayed on their site — to their visitors — even though it is hosted on your website.

This uses up your bandwidth and therefore can cost you money or can tie up your website’s server.

The system cPanel uses requres mod_rewrite, so you must check with your web hosting company to see if they support this.

The way to find out whether someone is hotlinking to your website is to search through your server statistics. If one site is accessing your image files, they’ve hotlinked to you.

Website hosting companies that supply you with cPanel usually also include a collection of scripts called Fantastico. These scripts allow you to a variety of other things, including setting up discussion forums on your site with a program phpBB, content management systems such as Drupal and installing Wordpress blogs.

FOR WEB SERVER ADMINISTRATORS

With WebHost Manager, web server administrators can manage domain accounts, monitor restart services (apache, bind, SQL, etc), check on hosting and reseller accounts, install server and system software and modules, configure manual or automatic system backups, transfer accounts between servers, edit DNS, and more.

cPanel comes with free installation and supports an unlimited number of domains per server. You can perform routine maintenance such as compile Apache.

By default, cPanel and WHM use ports 2086 and 2087.

Also, there’s a separate interface window for your resellers. The number of features they have access to is of course more limited than that of root administrators, and you determine which features they need to manager the accounts of their customers.

Four versions of cPanel are always available:

1. Edge — as in cutting or bleeding edge. Has all the latest features but they haven’t been well tested. This is not the version to found your business on.

2. Current — has been more extensively tested in real-life situations.

3. Release — the default. It’s stable, making it the preferred version for businesses.

4. Stable — doesn’t contain the latest features. This is the “old-fashioned” version. Only for fuddy-duddies.

cPanel also comes with cPGS, a free gameserver which supports 12 popular games.

You can only get DNS Only which allowed you to run a DNS server which will automatically be updated by any other servers you link to and which also run cPanel.

In the “bad” old days, if you had a website you uploaded your files and that was all the control you had. For every other service you had to get on the phone or email the a very busy webserver administrator who was usually some hardcore techie who felt that customer service took time away from the important technical jobs.

Thanks to cPanel, webmasters can now use the ease of graphical icons to take control of their own websites.