Beginner’s Guide to cPanel

There’s no question that websites have revolutionized the way we work, socialize and communicate. Any website requires continuous maintenance and updating to participate in the battle for online presence.
The main factors for gauging a need for improvement are:

•      Revisions aimed at improving the site’s SEO performance
•      Replacing outdated content, or uploading news stories
•      Adding pages as a company expands or diversifies
•      Reducing loading times to prevent visitors abandoning the site
•      Backing up data to the cloud or onto a storage device to prevent content being lost.

All these factors – and many others – can be supervised using cPanel. This is a web-hosted interface that allows anyone with appropriate login credentials to manage all aspects of their website. A graphical interface ensures that even beginners can navigate this Linux-based control panel, which can function either as a dedicated server or VPS server.
Since its first release two decades ago, cPanel has been endlessly revised and refined. Its merits and potential are keenly discussed at annual conferences attended by web hosting experts and programmers. From a technical perspective, cPanel can handle FTP accounts and the management of privacy keys. More commonly, it’s used to manage product databases and email accounts, and spam filters like Apache’s SpamAssassin are highly recommended. Such impressive security is another factor behind cPanel’s enduring appeal, while it’s surprisingly hard to make mistakes using this straightforward icon-driven interface.
One of cPanel’s greatest attributes is its compatibility with WordPress – the world’s leading website hosting platform which powers over a quarter of all sites in existence today. Users can manage databases and domain names within their VPS server without needing to understand what a VPS server is or how it works. Users of WordPress will also appreciate the various apps that can be added, covering everything from ecommerce to comments sections. Remarkably, WordPress itself can be installed onto a server within minutes.
Accessing cPanel is generally done by suffixing a website’s homepage address with /cpanel. A three-tier access structure enables administrators, resellers and site owners to make their own changes. A clear graphical interface directs people to the specific aspect they wish to modify, such as redirecting traffic from one domain to another or adding a new email account. Indeed, cPanel is commonly used as a webmail interface, though email accounts can easily be run through packages like Outlook or Thunderbird instead.
At WestHost, we’re big fans of cPanel. We can guide you through the process of installing cPanel and the related Web Host Manager backend functionality. WHM has to be configured before cPanel can be accessed on a VPS server, and while that might sound like a daunting process, our step-by-step guide makes it easy even for beginners to install and navigate WHM and cPanel. The former can automatically back up data and monitor servers, while the latter tracks audience behavior and keeps on top of that all-important site maintenance.