cPanel: Control Panel of the Web!

cPanel is the easiest and most widely used web hosting control panel which is generally used for Linux operating system. It manages your website files, databases, and folders, creates email domains, manages subdomain, domains etc. The best thing is that it is useful for everyone, be it a corporation, freelance techie or anyone, it offers best hosting to customers. It provides great customer support. It offers dependability, free migration, and ease of use. A website builder is present in the cPanel’s interface known as WordPress. It gives you a large range of features that allow you to control every aspect of your websites virtually. It provides great security features also.

cPanel is a Linux based web hosting control panel. It provides the graphical interface. It also provides automation tools which simplify the process of web hosting. John Nick Koston was the developer for it. The current stable version is 11.56.0.3 which was released on 12 April 2016 and it supports CentOS, RHEL, and CloudLinuxOS. FreeBSD is supported majorly till 11.30 version of cPanel. cPanel is designed to function as either a dedicated server or a virtual private server. The tool is a multilingual one. It is written in Perl and uses a 3 tier structure. cPanel has GUI, command line, and API-based access. It provides application based and email based support. Application based support includes PHP, Apache, MySQL, Perl, DNS and PostgreSQL, while Email based support includes IMAP, POP3 and SMTP services.

It should be installed only on a recently installed OS (operating system) which has a minimal prior configuration. After installing, it is hard to remove. The best way for uninstalling is to reformat your server, but expert server administrators do not want that so there are many uninstall guides for them which are available online.

It manages some of the software packages separately. It applies upgrades to PHP, FTP, MySQL, Apache, Exim, etc. automatically. It is done to ensure the compatibility of these packages with cPanel, and also to ensure that they are up-to-date. By doing this, it is difficult to check that the packages have not tampered and also to install current versions of these packages which is the main disadvantage.

cPanel provides front-ends for some common operations like management of crontab tasks, FTP accounts, PGP keys, mailing lists, and mail. There are many add-ons available, some are free and some are for an additional fee. The most used one are Auto installers. They are actually a bundle of scripts that automate the update and installation of web applications like ZamFoo, Moodle, Geeklog, Drupal, phpBB, SMF, WordPress, etc. Some examples of Auto Installers are Fantastico, Installatron, Softaculous, and WHMSonic.

According to the official website of cPanel, a domain is created using cPanel server in every 6 seconds and an online cPanel hosting account is created in every 14.5 seconds.

Enkompass, a version of cPanel, is available for MS Windows. In February 2014, it was declared EOL with version 3 only available for download, but it does not have further support or development.

You can forward the old website to the new website by using a redirect. Follow these steps to set up a redirect:

1. Log in to the old website’s cPanel interface.
2. Go to Redirects interface. (Home>> Domains >> Redirects).
3. Set your old website’s index page to redirect to your new website’s index page.

If the new website is not set up yet and still you want that your old site and new site go to the same location, then use aliases.

You can do a complete backup of your website, and also customize your error pages.

Accessing cPanel using cPanel account

1. Go to one of the following URLs
2. https://Server-IP-Address:2083 (for accessing it over an encrypted connection with IP address)
3. https://exampledomain.com:2083 (for accessing it over an encrypted connection with domain name)
4. http://Server-IP-Address:2082 (for accessing it over an unencrypted connection with IP address)
5. http://exampledomain.com:2082 (for accessing it over an unencrypted connection with domain name)
6. Enter your cPanel username and password in Username and Password text boxes respectively.
7. Click on ‘Log in’.