CPanel is a web application that good web hosting companies use to help their customers manage their accounts easily.  CPanel is a central place where you can manage your web sites, domains, subdomains, email, traffic stats and even more. CPanel is organized into logical sections, the first section is site management. Site management is where you will be able to create, edit and delete domain names, subdomain names, your database files, FTP Manager and your File Manager. Your most important feature here is the File Manager because this is just like file explorer in Windows. You can see all of your files for all of your domain and subdomains, you can create edit and delete files from file manger and even upload files you have on your computer. So if you use some of my previous articles on creating a web page with Notepad you can upload those HTML files to your web site using file manager.

Your next section is Email Options, this is where you will configure your email addresses for your domain name or domain names. Email Manager is where you can create, edit, delete and access web mail for all of your email addresses. Depending on the type of hosting you have is how many email addresses you are allowed to create. The newer versions of CPanel will even give you your configuration to setup outlook, thunderbird or other email clients with your email address.

Live Stats gives you your server information, access errors, bandwidth stats and my favorite traffic stats. Traffic stats breaks down your web hosting by domain and subdomain and keeps track of your hits, visits, KBs downloaded and more. Your hits is the number of times your web site was accessed by a person. If someone was just pulling an image from your site then that would be one hit. An entire web page could possibly be 6 or more hits depending on the type of content on your page so don’t get to exceited to see you have alot of hits. What you want to look at is the visits column showing you how many people have accessed your web site. If you go a little further down, you will actually see how much of that traffic is from the same area or from the same IP address. This can tell you whether you have people from all over accessing your website or if your website is accessed by the same people over and over again.

CPanel is a very powerful tool that a lot of companies like www.cheapasdirthosting.net give you with your web hosting.