Today I am going to discuss with you what CPanel is and its benefits to the user. CPanel is a control panel that is UNIX based, that gives you a graphical interface to work with. It has tools that aid you in creating your website. Most of the hosting providers use CPanel, and Hostgator is no exception. With CPanel it makes it easy for the user to see all the tools needed to create that first website.
The CPanel is broken down in to different categories.
- Special Offers: This category shows all the special offers Hostgator are providing. This includes items such as website templates, or quality designed shopping cart for your website.
- Links: These are links to various offers or information including live chat support, or billing.
- Preferences: This category includes video tutorials, information about your account, changing your password and so on.
- SEO tools: This category helps you with optimizing your website through different techniques. It includes a link building directory, SEO consultation, and a broken link report tool.
- Files: This is where all your website information is held in the file manager and this is where you will upload information such as a new theme for your website, or a new plug-in.
- Mail: You can have numerous email accounts with Hostgator and this is where you add, delete accounts. You can add your mailing lists here, send out mass emails, and use auto responders to send the mail for you.
- Logs: This category is a log analyzer, providing stats off your website, for example the amount of visitors you receive daily.
- Security: You can password protect certain directories here, and various other things for your website.
- Domains: This shows you what domain names you have, and you can also add sub domains of your domain names here. There is also a section for parking your domain names.
- Database: This is where the data bases off all your websites are stored, although you might think it's complicated to add a database, it's fairly straight forward, when you use another future of the CPanel further down called fantastico.
- Software: This is what the majority of people use with CPanel, they install Fantastico, which helps in the installation of WordPress on your site, and it also creates the database for you.
- Advanced: In here you can perform certain tasks on your site such as cron jobs (automated tasks), and other options such as network tools, or index manager.
So that basically is the structure of your CPanel, it might look daunting at first, but in reality it's straight forward after a few go's. Most people tend to use only a few categories anyway, they want there website up and running, so they will install fantastico, from the software category. Then they will probably use the file manager to upload various things to the site, themes, plugins, graphics etc.
I hope this helps you in deciding to build your first website, and I personally think that hostgator is perfect for the beginner, because of this CPanel. And there live chat support is second to none.
