Control Panels

Control Panels

The vast majority of web hosting companies today utilize software packages known as “control panels” to provide a level of service automation for their clients. Many different control panels are available, but the two most commonly used are cPanel and Plesk. Knowing how to use your web host’s control panel is very important, but first it is critical to understand what one is and how it works.

What Is A Control Panel

A web hosting control panel, simply put, is a web-accessible front-end interface that greatly simplifies the process of administration for a web hosting server. Using a control panel, a web host can define different customer packages, set resource levels, and allow the customer to perform many actions that would normally be off-limits to all but the system administrator.

What Would You Like To Do?

For example, using a control panel, a customer could create new email accounts, allocate available disk space resources to different domains on their account, change file and folder permissions, set which version of PHP is being used on a domain, create FTP sub-accounts, and much more. Additionally, depending on which control panel is in use, the customer could order new domain names or web hosting packages, upgrade their existing services, and view their past and current billing records. As you can see, having the ability to present this kind of information without any action from the web hosting company greatly simplifies the process of running such a business.

Your Control Panel Works For You

Always take time to familiarize yourself with your control panel, assuming one is available to you. Generally, all of the available options are divided into sections with large, graphical buttons for ease of navigation. For example, if you wanted to change a password on one of your email accounts, you would simply look under the ‘Email’ section of your control panel, find the button that lists your existing accounts, and click on the option to set a new password. As you can see, this would be much easier than emailing your provider with a request to do it for you, so always familiarize yourself with what tasks are available to you in order to accomplish things more quickly. Photo by Happyarm