What is a cPanel?

This is Part 3 in the How Do I Get a Blog? series.

Once you have acquired and purchased your domain name, and acquired and purchased your web hosting service, you can access your web hosting account and files from something called your cPanel. According to my handy dandy Glossary of Blogging Terms, a cPanel is:

a graphical interface designed for the management of a website. They are usually Linux-based. The cPanel allows you to easily manage your web host account, your websites’ database files, scripts, FTP, web statistics, server status, and more.

Not all web hosts offer the cPanel management center. I love the cPanel and won’t buy any web hosting that does not offer it. cPanels have different “skins,” which means they change colors and styles and appearances; but the basics of the cPanel don’t change. This tutorial will give you a quick overview of the basics of the cPanel.

Here’s the typical layout of the Hostgator cPanel (I recommend Hostgator for hosting, and I am an affilate for the company).

You can see that there are a lot of options. Perhaps the first one that you should look for is “Backup Wizard.” I strongly recommend that you make backups of your blog(s) after every major modification– AND before every WordPress upgrade. It’s painless to backup, and doing so could save you a lot of heartache later. Hostgator does automatic backups every week. I write posts daily, so it is very important that I make frequent backups. I’d sure hate to lose a week’s worth of posts, across a dozen blogs.

Here is the tutorial on how to make a backup of your blogs via your cPanel: How to Backup Your MySQL Database.

I’ll quickly cover the parts of the cPanel you’ll no doubt use frequently. Even though this cPanel is Hostgator’s, most cPanels offer something very similar to what’s here. The first thing you will probably look for is your account information: billing info, support chat, support ticket system, etc. The Live Chat Support is a fine feature- I use it often when I have technical problems, and I never use the phone to call. The ticket system is an email system: you type in your problems and the message is usually sent to a higher-level administrator.

Under Preferences, you’ll see the Getting Started Wizard, which briefly explains how your web hosting at Hostgator works. It’s very educational. The Video Tutorials by Hostgator are very well done, I think.

The next level addresses your email account associated with your domain name. I admit, I don’t make much use of this portion; I manage my email through my WordPress Dashboard. I get comments emailed to me so I know when someone has left one on one of my blogs. That’s all I do with email. That setting is done through WordPress itself, as well.

The next section is Files. You see the Backup Wizard there. File Manager is also another feature I use quite often. I use File Manager instead of using an FTP program (such as Filezilla). The File Manager helps you to manage all your blog files, such as images, themes, plugins, content, your .htaccess file, and much much more. Recent WordPress versions have made file management very easy, so the File Manager isn’t used as often as it once was. For example, let’s say you founf this amazing theme and want to use it for your blog. After downloading the theme package onto your computer, you must now upload it into your blog directory. In the past, we ha to use an FTP program (like Filezilla) or the File Manager to upload it, but not anymore. WordPress now allows you to upload directly to the proper directory in your File manager through the WordPress Dashboard. It’s the same with plugins and media like photos and videos.

Next is Logs. You can monitor your blog’s performance both in traffic and server consumption. If you have a barebones hosting plan and your blog experiences a large surge in traffic, you may want to keep an eye on your logs. Too much traffic (or other things, such as server problems or buggy plugins software) can cause your server to crash. This means your blog will experience downtime. And what’s worse is that other sites on the server you share experience downtime, too, making everyone unhappy. If this happens too often, you could be penalized or your account suspended. Be sure to monitor your blog and its performance.

Security is next. You can select the IP Deny manager to block certain IPs from accesing your site. This is useful if you are being bombarded by spammers from a particular IP. You can block them. HotLink Protection is a special command that protects your blog’s uploaded images from being “hotlinked.” Hotlinking is known as bandwidth theft. Whenever you see an image on the Internet, that image sits on some server, somewhere. YOUR images sit on your server. You have paid for that space and you pay for bandwidth (remember my Blog Glossary if these terms are unfamiliar to you). Someone else could come along and directly link YOUR image on THEIR site. So every time someone visits THEIR site and sees YOUR image, that’s your server resources that are being used. This HotLink Protection supposedly prevents that.

Next level is Domains. This is where you manage any other blogs you have (or want to install) on your server account. I have a handful of various blogs, and these are called Addon Domains. Should the time come when you want to install another blog, it will be an Addon Domain.

The next section is Databases. The phpMyAdmin helps you to manage all your php files; I find it very useful for debugging problems– I’ll have more on how to repair and optimize your database, in future posts.

Next is Software/Services. Our next tutorial in this series will be dealing issuing name servers, and a post about Fantastico, that nice little script-writing program that will install the WordPress software on your server.

Take some time and become familiar with the cPanel. There is a lot to learn and there’s no hurry to learn it all, so take your time with it.

<<< Return to Part 2: How Do I Get a Blog? Choosing a Web Hosting Provider.
Go on to Part 4: How to Issue Name Servers for Your Blog. >>>