What is a Control Panel?
A control panel is an application that allows a web site owner to carry out administration and maintenance to their website. Web hosting providers include a control panel as part of their hosting packages, with the most common being CPanel. Other control panels include VDeck, Plesk and XPanel. The great thing about a control panel is that it allows an inexperienced web site owner to carry out basic tasks, without the need for any technical knowledge. It does this by utilizing a graphical interface.
A control panel will aid the user in several ways during the initial set-up of the site, including establishing e-mail accounts and giving the user the option of utilizing an auto-responder or forwarding tool for these accounts. A control panel will also help with setting up any required FTP accounts, and enable server-side scripting such as PHP and Perl.
In terms of on-going administration, a control panel can be extremely useful in a number of ways. Firstly, most control panels allow the user to find out how much bandwidth (monthly transfer) and disk space they are consuming. This means that the user can ensure they do not exceed agree monthly limits and incur unexpected charges. A website statistics page is another great feature, as it allows the user to discover how many visitors they are getting, which pages are being looked at the most, and other useful information which can all aid them in tweaking and modifying their content to achieve better results. A control panel will also log any site errors – such as broken links, which can then be repaired or removed.
Further options which a control panel can provide the user include the ability to create/manage sub-domains, set security levels for areas within the site and allow a site back-up to be performed. A site back-up should be done on a regular basis, otherwise the owner risks losing their content in the event of a server crash.
Any user which signs up to a shared hosting package will be required to use the hosting company’s control panel. If you are unhappy with the control panel of your hosting company, then your only real option is to change to a different provider. If you have a website that is run on a co-located or dedicated server you can choose your own control panel. In all cases, it is advised that anyone who is planning on starting up a website does their research into the features which different control panels offer, and make this a key factor when choosing a web hosting company.