If you’re new to managing a website, sooner or later, you’ll hear the word “cPanel”. Like the name indicates,cPanel web hosting is a control panel – for your website. Before cPanel web hosting, webmasters had to learn how to manage their websites through shell access, FTP and other arcane monikers. Then came cPanel web hosting. cPanel web hosting provides a graphic user interface that allows webmasters to manage various aspects of their website and server – without having to learn shell commands or really do anything complicated.
Many web hosts offer cPanel for free as a part of their web hosting packages, mainly, because it reduces the number of support requests they need to manage. With cPanel web hosting, you can manage almost every aspect of your domain. You can manage email accounts, setup email forwards and account quotas. cPanel web hosting has many domain management features, including DNS management, creation of sub-domains, add-on domains and even redirect your domains to other URLs. cPanel also includes PHPMyAdmin, a very useful GUI tool for MySQL database management. This list of features just scratches the surface though, you can also:
- Install CGI scripts
- Password protect directories
- Check your visitor statistics
- Setup Email and FTP accounts
- Create new databases
- Setup cron jobs for your scripts
- Install dozens of scripts with one click (through the Fantastico plug-in)
- Check your bandwidth and disk space usage
- Use a variety of webmail clients
cPanel web hosting is packaged with Web Host Manager, also known as WHM. WHM allows you to manage all of the domains on a web server or hosting account. As an analogy – consider cPanel as a way to manage an apartment unit, whereas WHM is a way to manage the entire building. With WHM, you can manage the bandwidth, disk space and features available for each domain. WHM is an ideal tool for small web hosting companies that wish to resell web hosting and is generally available only on dedicated servers, VPS accounts and reseller hosting accounts.
