As bloggers evolve into technically savvy webmasters, they begin to outgrow their free or subsidized hosting service. They begin to crave the freedom, flexibility and status of naming their own URL and converting what was seemingly theirs into something that is truly theirs. One of the stages of this metamorphosis, is the need to transition to a web hosting service that will host the blog.
There are troves of web hosts out there and all are just a few taps and clicks away. Today’s challenge is not finding a server to host your site, it’s choosing one that can do it well and the one that gives you the things you wanted when you began the exodus to independent hosting.
There are a few things one comes across as new jargon when concepts are revealed. One of them in particular, central to the well being of the blog, is what is called a cPanel – pronounced ‘cee panel.’ The cPanel is simply short for Control Panel. It is a graphical interface for users to monitor and control all facets of their site. This, however, must be distinguished from the dashboard operations of the platform, which control the operations of the blog itself.
cPanel Basics
The bottom line of the cPanel is that it reduces all the necessary coded language needed to control the various operations of a server into a form that is graphically presented to a layman. A little creativity and imagination, with a healthy dose of trial and error will set one’s experience up nicely.
cPanel is not a physical server, it is just the front end interface that a webmaster uses to control the various functions that a server runs to make the website that is on it run correctly and efficiently. Within cPanel, webmasters can create email accounts, manage PGP keys, create FTP accounts and even set up mailing lists.
cPanel Features
Every function that is run on a website or that is related to it like email, FTP, installations, database, memory allocation and cron jobs are all accessible and individually manageable. There are even a host of add-ons that help with installing scripts, like Fantastico which easily and with no charge install blog engines like WordPress at the end of simple commands.
When choosing a hosting service, if there is no cPanel access it is going to make every server administrative task all the more difficult because it will require a pause to request customer service to do it. And unless customer service is super efficient, it will take a few minutes at the very least and maybe even up to a day! For something as simple as creating a new email account for a blog, that is just too long to wait, and highly inefficient.
About the author: Johnathan Henery thanks you for reading this and hopes you found it informative. Johnathan is a researcher & a writer for a hosting reseller. If you want to see an example of our reviews, here it is for you.