What Is Web Hosting Control Panel?

Once you subscribe to a web hosting service, you will be introduced to the control panel, which is your webhosting account's administration portion. What you can see here is the interface where all the aspects of your webhosting account can be found. This is where backend development happens as the control panel allows you to control all portions of your website.

Now that you have an idea what a control panel is, you may want to take a look at some of the control panel basics.

The control panel allows you to get a glimpse of the following:

a. Disk space usage b. Hosting package c. Bandwidth usage for the month d. IP Address e. Path to Sendmail f. Version Identification g. Quantity of: -MySQL databbases -FTP accounts -Add on domains -Email accounts -Mailing lists -Parked domains

The control panel also lets you manage your files or the actual content on your website. File management includes backing up your files. This is an important process especially when you decide to migrate to another web hosting service provider. This section also lets you create FTP accounts, which you can use for an FTP client. FTP accounts make it easier for you to upload and download documents to your website.

You can also create new folders or directories, create new files, change permissions, move, copy or delete files and folders.

The control panel gives you the option to administer email settings such as creating email addresses and setting quotas. You can also set up auto responders, mailing lists and forwarders. Some web host service providers may also provide additional features such as anti-spam tools that allow you to turn on or turn off a spam filter.

Since maintaining levels of security is also important in managing a website, the control panel gives you special permissions to protect directories so information is kept confidential. This section gives you the ability to create a username and a password so hackers and cyberattackers will not easily gain access  to sensitive information. You can even block a particular visitor if you deem their activity suspicious.

There are also other applications you can find in the control panel such as blogs, classified ad management, image galleries, polls, project management, site builders and many more. More advanced options are available and some of them may no longer be familiar to you such as network tools, frontpage extensions, domain management, PHP administration and other features.