What is a cPanel & How Do I Use it For My Website?

The website management system, “cPanel” will be mentioned a lot on this site so it’s important that you guys grasp the capabilities of what this awesome tool does. It’s basically a super visual interface (a bit like your phone apps) that is used to create, administrate and manage your websites on  🖥 – honestly, that’s it!

As it’s all visual and laid out in front of you, it’s easy to use and this is what mine looks like.

Cpanel Screenshot House Ninety Two

Most of it’s self-explanatory i.e adding sub-domains (subdomain.domain.com), extra email addresses and the file manager.

But it will also include more advanced tools like managing your databases using phpMyAdmin and MySQL and even setting up cron jobs on your server. Don’t worry about those you won’t probably ever use these functions unless….you’re interested. 👀

Is it suitable for me?

So, even though it has so many features it’s actually for Beginners to Intermediates. All your options are laid out in front all in plain site (tehehe 🤦🏻‍♀️) so there’s none of that click and digging through the settings 100 times just to update one thing. You will have full management of your website which is more than what all the popular generic web providers have.

I would suggest using something like this to begin with to get the hang of it and I’m pretty certain once you start getting into web development you’re going to be hooked and will be wanting to do a hella more stuff with your websites 😉 A good example of this is hosting multiple websites on your one server by “adding on” extra domain names to your account 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. A lot of the more well-known hosts limit this due to the basic plan they offer their beginner customers. Also, it’s usually not advisable to share servers just-in-case of an “attack” but I mean it’s great if you want to set up multiple websites as a hobby. Once you get comfy with their basic hosting plans you will begin to realise you’re limited in doing a lot of things like adding and uploading your own scripts to make your website do extra things.

Oh, and did I mention you can install WordPress with a click of a button?

One-Click-Install Web Stuff

My favourite thing about cPanel is the one-click-installer. This is a library filled with HUNDREDS of web applications to create your own blogs, eCommerce shops, galleries etc etc etc, all in just one click. That means when you want a web application i.e installing WordPress. You basically click a button and it creates databases for you, hooks you up to these and spits out a login and password to the visual part of the mayhem. You can easily create your own shopping cart system 🛒 in less than 5 minutes with no coding skills what-so-ever 😲

Introduction to cPanel – Takes less than 15 minutes

So, enough reading… I’ve found this really helpful video on youtube I want to share with you (and no that’s not me, unfortunately 🙅🏻)

If you want to get up close and personal and have a fiddle (that sounded dutty loool) then check out my post about Free web hosting – some of these provide cPanel for you to play around with 🙂

HAVE FUN!