What is CPanel?
 by: Mer Amer


Cpanel is an easy to use interface for web maintenance. cPanel is the leading web hosting control panel available today. Even a user completely new to web hosting can easily manage his/her own website. With the Cpanel hosting interface, you'll have complete control over your website. When looking for a hosting package, CPanel is also a good indicator of the reliability of the hosting provider. The most well known and reliable web hosts would normally provide web hosting plans that are powered by cPanel control panel. cPanel hosting plans that are on the market predominantly support PHP and MySQL, FrontPage, Fantastico and RVSkins.

With CPanel, you will have access to lots of useful stats such as disk usage and space, bandwidth usage and sub domains through cpanel. The current version of CPanel is CPanel 11 or CPanel X, which gives you full control of every aspect of your account. Hosting packages that come with CPanel are a very cost effective solution as they allow you to host multiple web sites under the same account. Another very useful program-Fantastico can be directly managed from the cPanel control panel. Essentially, what Cpanel does is that it condenses the dozens of commands needed to complete one task to a single mouse click. CPanel takes care of tedious and complicated tasks, such as a simple change to the content of your web page, password protecting portions of your web site, or deleting a table in one of your databases. All these can easily be done just by some minor input from the end users. For webmasters that require assistance on web building, certain hosting companies would also provide cPanel control panel that comes with a range of powerful online building tools. Customers can use these tools to create, configure and launch their website.

Other available control panels normally restricts your ability to manage your website to just the basic functions like creating email addresses, managing files and adding sub domain names. Cpanel provides much more than these basic tasks, allowing access to the more advanced functions, such as MIME types, cron jobs, OpenPGP keys, Apache handlers, addon domains, password protected directories and a lot more. For the basic users, CPanel still provide the typical program such as to add or remove email accounts, view website statistics, install different PHP / mySql scripts, get access to your online Web Mail and more. Some other functions of CPanel are to create a POP or default email account, autoresponder, subdomain, custom error pages. Users can also create an MySQL database PHPMyAdmin to manage databases, install FrontPage extensions, redirect a URL, redirect mail change, create an add-on domain, create a FTP account and to password-protect a directory. All these vast array of programs would normally come with tutorials to assist users especially newbies to ensure that using CPanel would be an ease.

In summary, CPanel is an integrated program that combines the requirements of basic to advanced users in one user-friendly interface. It definitely will save you a lot of time and hassle of completing your tasks manually. The best fact is that it is directly linked to Fantastico, enabling users access to a multitude of programs that are extremely useful for managing websites.


About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.