What is cPanel: An Introduction

Course Content
cPanel & Webhosting Fundamentals
The starting point for anyone new to cPanel, or even the internet as a whole. You might have a basic idea of what your website and your cPanel interface represent, how much do you know about the environment that it runs on? Or the files that make up your site? Get a jump start into a better understanding of some basic concepts that are core to cPanel as a product, and even web hosting in general, by taking these short courses.
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What is cPanel: An Introduction
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Why Is cpanel needed?
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cPanel & Web Hosting Fundamentals
About Lesson

cPanel is a Linux-based web hosting control panel, designed to automate the processes involved with running a web server.

A few of the core web hosting processes that are automated via the cPanel software are:

cPanel & WHM allows hosting providers and users the ability to automate server management tasks while offering your customers the tools they need to manage their sites. One of our older, but still very relevant videos does a great job of explaining how cPanel & WHM benefit the web hosting industry.

cPanel is one of the most popular Linux-based control panels for web hosting. It lets you conveniently manage all services in a single place. 

Currently, cPanel is the industry standard, and most web developers are well-acquainted with it.

 

Intuitive and easy to use, cPanel empowers you to manage a web hosting account with maximum efficiency, whether that’s creating new FTP users and email addresses or monitoring resources, creating subdomains and installing the software.

So now we know what cPanel is – but what exactly does it mean to be a web hosting control panel? As the video in the last unit mentions, one of cPanel’s goals has always been to make web hosting accessible to everyone. 

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This works by making administration tasks simple and by allowing for self-sufficiency. Where in the past, users would constantly need to request assistance from the server administrator to make any adjustments to their accounts or environment, cPanel allows users to do it themselves.

This means that administrators can focus on making sure that the server is stable and working smoothly, while the users have the freedom and flexibility to establish a web hosting environment that’s best for them, additionally allowing for the administrator (and/or resellers) to define constraints and restrictions as needed.

A simple click of the button now performs the tasks that might have originally taken hours.

Here’s an example:

To add a new website, one of the things you would need to do on a server is to create something called a VirtualHost entry, by manually adding it into a configuration file on the server. 

This involved understanding the syntax of that configuration file, and constructing values to represent each option you needed to define. This needed to be done independently for SSL and non-SSL access.

With cPanel, this all takes place automatically.

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When a user creates a domain, the configurations are updated automatically, including backups (just in case). 

The server administrator doesn’t even need to be involved for this to happen. The end-user, or web hosting customer, then fills out a simple form within their own personal cPanel interface, after which point they can simply click a button.

 

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