Monday, November 24, 2008

Using cPanel to Manage Your Host Files

CPanel is an easy user-interface site that lets you control your host account environment. The main peculiarity of this operating system is that it so simple to use that your below average computer user can�t mess it up. It�s got great features embedded into its panel and some of the features are listed below.

Site Tools

There are such tools available for your use, which are Web Protect (.htaccess editor), Custom error pages, Redirects, Ability to edit MIME types, Ability to edit Apache handlers, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Search engine tool submitting and File Manager.

Email

The email program provides you with the possibility to add, remove, and change passwords while managing email accounts. CPanel is also provided by Webmail for the accounts, Auto responders, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Spam filtering and some more.

Backup

Backup allows you to create copies of account files and databases. The backup menu also allows you to download any automatic backups that were downloaded by your CPanel administrator.

Stats

Here are different tools to survey your site popularity and efficiency. Those are Webalizer web stats, Webalizer FTP stats, Analog stats, AWStats, View latest visitors, View bandwidth usage and View error log modules.

FTP

There is a module that controls FTP accounts (add, remove, change password for its access), Anonymous FTP controls; Ability to change FTP login message and Ability to kill FTP sessions.

Advanced Stuff

You have an ability to add or remove subdomains, Subdomain Redirects and its Stats.

Advanced Tools

You are provided with tools of SSH access tools, Manage GPG keys and Cron jobs.

There are also Pre-Installed CGI Scripts. Those are Interchange Cart, Agora Cart, Bulletin Board, Java Chat, HTML Chat, phpMyChat, CGI Wrapper (for non-suexec installs), Random HTML generator, Advanced Guestbook, Counter Generator, Java Clock Generator, Java Countdown Generator, Secure FormMail clone, CGIEmail, Entropy Search, Entropy Banner. Network Tools are DNS Lookup and Traceroute. Database Management tools includes Managing MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin access.

For beginners, CPanel has a lot of options that are easy to use. CPanel works with most of browsers, such as IE, Opera, Firefox and others.


Ashok Arora is CEO of http://www.ewebguru.com/ leading reseller web hosting company of India and providing windows hosting services.

cPanel Primer For The New Webmaster

If you are about to purchase web hosting, it is very likely that you will be using cPanel to manage your hosting. To get the most from your web hosting, you need to learn the workings of cPanel.

What Can Be Done with cPanel?

If your web hosting doesn't offer shell access, cPanel will be the only way to manage your web hosting, cPanel is a web based server control software that allows you to do the following operations and a whole lot more. Common operations such as adding FTP users, creating databases, creating mail accounts and a multitude of other hosting operations can all be performed with cPanel.

Creating Mail Addresses

If you have the domain xyz.com and you would like to create a mail address called info@xyz.com, you can perform the following. Firstly click on the Mail tab from the front page. There you will see options to create, modify or delete mail accounts. If you to forward mail to an existing account here you can set an addres to forward to the account of your choosing. To read emails access the Webmail tab from the front page

Managing your domains

You may want more than a single address directed towards one web site, for example if you owned xyz.com and xyz.net, this can be achieved by using the Parked Domains tab, here you can type any address that you own to point to one of your web sites. If you hosting provider allows you to have more than one web site on your account, you can add domains via the Addon Domains tab. If you hosting provider supports the creation of sub domains you can create these via the Sub Domain tab.

FTP Options

You can create additional FTP users, set their access levels and other FTP related tasks using the FTP tab.

Database Tasks

To create a new database, or modify existing databases use the Database tab. Here you can perform all allowed database tasks, to perform more advanced database operations you will need to use phpMyAdmin, this can also be accessed from the Database tab.

Analyze The Logs

When running a web site you need to know what your visitors like, where they are coming from, which search engines are bringing the most visitors and all other data about them. Normally you will have access to the raw log files, but these are hard to analyze, to see data that is formatted about your visitors in an easy to read way go to Web/FTP Stats, here you will have the option to review your sites statistics using a variety of software such as Webalizer or AWStats.

Fantastico

Most if not all cPanel installations these days come with Fantastico which is an auto installer for many php based scripts. Fantastico can be used to install popular php scripts such as Wordpress, Mambo, phpbb and many other php products. Using Fantastico is the easiest way to setup these php based scripts and will save you having to manually upload the scripts, and more often than not Fantastico will do all the configuration of the script for you which is a real time saver.

Final Words

cPanel is a very advanced application for configuring your hosting and learning all the tricks can take some time, but hopefully with this guide you will have the basics down and you can progress from here as your experience with web hosting increases.

David J. Smith has recently written a Bluehost Review, Bluehost use cPanel for hosting management to allow new webmasters and veterans alike to easily configure their hosting.