Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

January 17, 2011

A Guide to Utilizing Control Panels

Anyone using a hosting account will need to learn how to use their control panel to make adjustments. Almost all hosting packages will come with some form of control panel, but some of these have unique differences. Control panels can be used to change various settings which affect your hosting account.

Types of Control Panel

There are several common types of control panels which are normally used by web hosting providers. These include cPanel, plesk, and various others. cPanel is one of the most common control panels available because this is very easy to use, however, If you are hosting with a large company, they may utilize their own proprietary software.

Anyone using a hosting account will need to learn how to use their control panel to make adjustments. Almost all hosting packages will come with some form of control panel, but some of these have unique differences.

Reasons to use Control Panel

There are a number of different tasks that you will need to use the control panel to accomplish. These common funcations are as follows:

• Setting up sub domains – Sub domains can be created to make it easy for visitors to find certain parts of your website.
• Setting up email accounts – New email addresses can be created for different users on your site.
• Backing the site up – This is very important as it will secure your website no matter what happens to the server
• Managing Databases – New SQL databases can be created and managed using PHPmyAdmin
• Controlling scheduled events – Scheduled events such as server backups can be controlled and set up using the control panel.
• Installing new software – Some pieces of web based software can be installed through the control panel.
• Setting up advanced features
• Checking bandwidth and storage usage – The control panel also has a large number of statistics and pieces of information. This makes it possible to check whether or not you have exceeded your allowance.
• Creating new users – It’s simple to use the control panel to create new users. This makes it possible to allow other people access to the control panel and FTP server.

Using a Control Panel

Most web hosting control panels are very easy to use.  Cpanel also includes tutorials which show you how to do basic things and set up the control panel.  If you do have any problems with the control panel then you should contact your host.

Tags: control panel,  Control Panels,  cPanel,  Plesk,  hosting packages,  sub domains,  phpmyadmin