What is MySQL?
So you have finally made the leap to setting up a new web site with a web hosting company – or at least you have paid for the site. Now what do you do? When you log into your web hosting account, you are given a link to a program called Cpanel; the Cpanel program has a large number of icons on its front page, but they all lead to different kinds of functions. What does Cpanel do and how can you use it to control the functions of your web site? Here are a few of the kinds of things that you can use Cpanel for.
Cpanel is great for controlling the email accounts on your web site – you can add and remove email accounts, edit the access options for your email accounts, and access your accounts through the Cpanel shell without having to use some kind of email program on the computer you are accessing the internet through. Even if you are connected to the internet through someone else’s computer or if you are on a system which does not have your normal email software you can still check your accounts through Cpanel and get all of your most recent messages.
Another great thing that you can do with Cpanel is manage your files – the File Manager software in Cpanel may not give you the same degree of speed and flexibility as a good independent FTP program, but it does give you all of the basic abilities that you need to upload and download files from your web server. By using Cpanel you can make basic additions and edits to the pages on your web site, and if you just need to carry out a few changes then Cpanel’s File Manager will be more than enough to get the job done.
FTP is usually the best way to transfer and organize files online, however, and with Cpanel you can control your FTP settings easily – just click on the FTP server icon and you will have access to FTP server names, account names and the levels of access that each of them have, as well as the details of the directory structure and the starting directories for your FTP servers and accounts.
There are other great things that you can take care of using Cpanel, such as crontab tasks (tasks which have to be performed on a regular time schedule, which is to say automatically whether you are there or not) and the management of PGP keys (a kind of key which is commonly used for encryption over the world wide web). With more recent versions of Cpanel you can easily manage information on users and transfer information on users and their account data between different systems. As long as both systems use a recent version of Cpanel you can transfer a user’s name, password and access rights from one computer to the next and not have to spend a lot of time setting things up. Cpanel makes this and a hundred other tasks much simpler!
