A control panel is the interface where you can perform the administration part pf your web hosting account. You can typically control all portions of your site within the control panel.
Get to know the Popular Control Panels
The type of control panel hosting companies use is one of the features that these companies compete on. The most popular ones are cPanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin.
Control Panel Basics
The Control Panel is like a dashboard or an overview panel where you can manage your web hosting account. You may see details such as bandwidth and disk space usage f0r the month, IP Address, quantity of MySQL databases, FTP accounts, domain names and email accounts you have. This is also the main page where you can edit your preferences.
Dissecting the Control Panel
Here are some of the important functions of a control panel.
The control panel is where you can administer your email settings. This function allows you to create email addresses, set quotas, set up mailing lists and auto responders.
File Management
The file management area plays an important function. This is where you can manage the content of your website. It provides the document map of your site so you can view all files, directories and sub directories. This is also the part where you can create FTP accounts for ease of uploading and downloading files to and from your website.
Security
The security feature helps you in customising the security controls of your site. You can apply special permissions to some parts of your site that need special security. (eg. “https” pages that require login.) You can also set up special permissions to certain websites, such as blocking certain IP addresses from accessing your site.
Statistics
This one is a very powerful, and useful tool, especially if your site is a business or internet marketing site that requires regular analysis of statistics such as traffic sources and the number of visitors to your site. While this information can be obtained by signing up with free tools such as Google Analytics, the statistical analysis tools offered by your hosting plan often offers a more comprehensive analysis. The tool provides data such as number of visitors, sources from which these visitors come to your site, how long the visitors stayed on your site etc.
The information you can garner from this data is priceless because it will help you to understand if your website is performing as expected. From the analysis, you can find means to improve the pages that have less visits, or a shorter time frame of viewing.
Applications
Many web hosts allow you to install third party software applications to enhance your website. These include site builders, blogs, E-Commerce stores, surveys, project management, image galleries, etc. One increasingly popular one click, easy installation of bundled software is Fantastico. Even if the web host doesn’t offer Fantastico, many web hosting companies nowadays offer an assorted array of such applications. Look for one that offers add-on applications that will add value to the nature of your website.
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