If you bought a web hosting, chances are great that you will be using cPanel to configure your hosting settings. To make the most of your web hosting, you need to learn the working of cPanel.

What can I do with cPanel? Unless you have shell access, cPanel will be your only way to configure your web hosting. It allows you to create directories, add ftp users, create databases, access phpmyAdmin, create mail accounts and most other day to day maintenances.

Using mail. If you have the domain example.com you would like to use say sales@example.com. To do this access the mail tab from the front page. There you get the options to create, modify or delete mail accounts. If you would like your mail to be forwarded to your existing mail account, here you can set it to be forwarded to any mail account. To read mails access the webmail tab from your frontpage.

Managing your domains. You may like more than one web addresses to point to your site. For example you may own both example.com and example.net. This can be achieved via parked domains. Now user can type any address to reach your website. If your hosting service allows having more than one site on one account, you can add extra sites via the addon domains. To use the add on domain you have to specify where in the files for other site reside. You can create subdomains via the subdomain tab.

FTP tasks. You can create extra ftp users, specify their access levels and other FTP related tasks via the FTP tab.

Database tasks. To set a new database or to modify an existing one access

the databases tab. Here you can do all allowed database tasks. For more advanced database needs you would have to access the phpmyadmin, which is also accessed via this tab.

Analyze your logs. If you are running a site you need to see what your visitors like, where they come from and all other data about them. While you have access to raw logs, via the raw logs, they are pretty hard to analyze. To see formatted data about your visitors, go to web/ftp stats. Here you have the option of using a variety of software to analyze your logs. You may use either Webaliser or Awstats.

Fantastico. Most cPanel installations come with fantastico which is an autoinstaller for many php based scripts. So whether you want to install Wordpress, phpBB, mambo or any other similar product, chances are that it can be installed using fantastico. This frees you from manually uploading and is a real time saver.

Cpanel is a very advanced program and learning all the tricks takes some time. Use what is given here and progress from there, as you get more experience with webhosting.

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