What is cPanel?

cPanel is a control panel that allows you to manage your website through the web. When you sign up for a hosting account with a hosting provider that uses cPanel, you will receive your cpanel address and a login and password to access it. Most of the time, you can access your cpanel account by typing in your domain name, then /cpanel. For example, www.domainname.com/cpanel. From that page, you will be prompted for your user ID and password.

Please keep in mind that this will not work until you have your domain name set up to point to your hosts nameservers. Your host will usually provide you with another web address for reaching your c panel while you are waiting for the domain name to propagate (basically a fancy way of saying point to the right host).

From within c panel you can do all sorts of things like set up your email accounts, backup your website files, FTP files to your hosting account and even view your web traffic statistics. If you are planning on installing scripts of any sort to your site, you will likely need to log into cPanel (or let a programmer access your cPanel account for you).

cPanel often comes with fantastico which will enable you to set up a content management system (and many other popular componenets) for free with just a few clicks. This is a huge timesaver as any script in fantastico can be installed without needing any advanced knowledge of setting up scripts.

So learn cPanel and your web building and hosting set-up will be much easier.