HostGator cPanel
Hostgator Cpanel is one of most features loaded Cpanel till date. If you are familiar with Hostgator, which is Web hosting provider company, then you must have heard for there rich cpanel options to manage sites. In this current tutorial I will help you understand what each option in the control panel means and for what purpose it is used.
As soon as you login into hostgator cpanel, you will be able to see above Cpanel header, which is mainly focused to help you search for domain names. You can use above search box to register, transfer a domain name or even check who owns a certain domain name by using the Whois option.
- Home Button takes you to Cpanel dashboard, it is visible in all areas of Cpanel and helps you get back to Hosting Dashboard.
- Help Section in right top section, helps you contact hostgator support staff by creating a ticket.
- Logout button is used to sign out of the cPanel safely.
Special Offers
Just below the cPanel header section you will be able to see the Special offers section in Cpanel.
- Ipayment option is used if you wish to accept payments via credit cards on your site. Its useful if you are running a ecommerce site.
- Best wordpress themes option takes you to another site called templatesold.com, where you can chose free or paid themes for your wordpress sites.
- Sitelock is a premium service to protect sites from getting hacked. You can sign up for a Basic plan at sitelock if you feel your site requires more protection, but in most cases you will not need it.
- Amazing website templates option will take you to dreamtemplate.com site, where you can choose templates for your new site.
If you are thinking about getting your site built from a professional team, you can click on the last option of Free Web Design Quote and you can get a quote for free.
Hostgator Links
This section includes links of hostgator internal network.
- Like billing system option will take you to the client login page, where you can login and check what plans and packages you have bought and how you will be billed for them.
- Account Addons option tells you additionals services that comes up with this hosting account, like Free Adwords coupong and account transfer servcies.
- Support Portal button takes you support panel of hostgator.
- Website templates section shows you a library of website templates freely provided by hostgator to you. You can chose one, download and install on your site.
- Live Chat Support option opens a pop up windows for you, in which you can directly chat with the hostgator support, sales and billing team anytime.
- Ticket System option takes to hostgator tickets support panel, you can raise a ticket for help on anything and you keep track of conversation between you and hostgator staff with the help of proper ticket id.
Preferences
Preferences section is mainly focused to help you customize the cpanel looks according to you needs.
- Getting started wizard provides you documented meaning for options and icon in the control panel. You will find it really useful if you are really new to web hosting.
- Video tutorials options provides various videos on how to use various options professionally in cpanel.
- Change password option is used to change the login password for your cpanel account.
- Update contact info options gives you a form, in which you can update your contact details saved with hostgator.
- Change Style options gives you various themes to choose from, for your cpanel looks.
- Change Language option helps you change the default language of cpanel icons.
- Shortcuts options will tell you key shortcuts which you can use to access cpanel options faster.
Mail Option
Mail menu provides you various tools to manage how the emailing system will work for various domains in your hosting account.
- Email accounts option will show you how many email account you have for each domain and you can use it create more email accounts too.
- Webmail option helps you access emails online by using various online applications, like Horde or squirrel. My favorite is Horde
- Boxtrapper is an option mainly focused to tell you the mail addresses which has been marked as spam and you can control those email addresses.
- Spam Assassin is an automated software which helps to keep your email inboxe spamfree by identifying headers of the mails.
- Forwarders options gives you ability to set a email address on which all the emails will be forwarded for any email account you have on your cpanel.
- Auto Responders option helps you set an automated reply to the mails you receive on any email address you have on your hosting account.
- Default Address options gives you ability to set a default email id which will receive all the mails which are not delivered in any of the email accounts.
- Mailing Lists options helps you generate and import emails list that you have saved somewhere else.
- Account level filtering option is used to filter few email sender contacts according to your need as per domain name.
- User level filtering is same as Account level filtering but its done as per each cpanel User .
- Email delivery route option will show you how mails are reaching to your server, its an advanced option to see if mails are reaching correctly.
- Import Addresses/Forwarders Options helps you import contacts and forwarders settings list in one click.
- Email Authentication option tells how the email login system is protected and how you can change it as per your need.
- MX Entry option is an advanced level option, widely used mainly if you don’t wish to manage your email at your cpanel, you can use MX entries to forward all mails to other mailing server.
Files Option
Files menu is very important section and it helps you manage the files of various domain names you have on your cpanel account.
- Backups option helps you take a backup of your entire cpanel account.
- Backup wizard helps you guide in more graphic friendly way to take a entire backup, or partial backup or restoration of your hosting account.
- File Manager option is really powerful option which will show you and help you manage the whole hierarchy of the files of your domains.
- Legacy file manager is just another file manager tool but it provides better interface and different style of file management.
- Web disk options tells you briefly about how much hard disk space is left and how it is used till now in your hosting account.
- Disk Space Usage option tells you which of your sites or files are using how much space in a decreasing order.
- FTP Accounts option tell you how many File transfer Protocol accounts are there and you can delete or create on there. FTP is mainly a way in which you can transfer files directly to your domains by using ftp client software like filezilla.
- FTP Session control option tells you if currently any active file transfer is going on or not and you can control it.
- Anonymouse FTP is an option which helps you control the access to your site file by anonymous users. Means users whom are actually not having Cpanel access to your site but they can upload few files to your site. I recommend turning it off.
Logs Menu
Logs menu is focused on giving you more information about how your sites is accessed.
- Latest visitors options tell you from which IP address your which site is accessed recently.
- Bandwidth option shows you how and by which sites the bandwidth of your account is used.
- Weblizer is an advanced status showing option, which tells in details about each domains files. It tells how you how much visitors were there on your site and which sections of your sites were accessed highest.
- Raw Access Logs option gives you down-loadable files about the details of the way your sites were accessed.
- Error Log option gives you details of error returing sites and there addresses.
- Choose log Programs options helps you chose your preferred application to manage the monitoring. You can chose Awstats or Webalizer.
- Google Analytics Intergration Tool helps you integrate google analytics tracking code in your sites.
- Awstats is a log application just like Webalizer, but it shows better and detailed graphics of your account and site usages.
Security Menu
Security Meny section mainly provides you tools to help you better manage the security of your sites.
- Password protect directories option helps you lock few directories on your site
- IP Deny Manager helps to block certain ips to access your sites.
- Hotlink Protection Option helps you protect your bandwidth by preventing direct constant URL access of files on your site.
- GnuPG Keys Option helps you enable encryption massages you cpanel receives.
Domains Menu
Domains menu helps you manage how the domains that are added in your account will work.
- Subdomains option helps you create or delete sub domains of your main domain. Subdomain is like mail.yourdomain.com
- Add On Domains options helps you add more domains to be hosted in your same cpanel account.
- Parked Domains Option helps you park or point different domains to any of your main domain.
- Redirects options helps you manage redirection on your domains. You can use this options if you wish to send visitors to some other pages on your sites.
- Simple DNS Zone Editor is an DNS management section by which you can edit core domain registries. Its recommended not to change anything here if you are not aware of it completely.
- Advanced DNS zone editor provides more options in detail then Simple Zone editor but is more powerful then it.
Databases Menu
Databases Menu provides you options which can help you manage the way the databases work on your sites.
- MySQL databases option helps you create/Delete/Repair actively running databases on your cpanel account.
- MySQL Database Wizard help you do the database changes in more graphical friendly way.
- PhpMyAdmin Section shows you how many databases are listed in your system and it provides you deep control or editing each table in your database very easily.
- Remote MySQL option gives a remote server ability to connect to any database on your server.
Software / Services Menu
Software section is mainly filled with various auto installer scripts added to your cpanel account.
- Quickinstall option gives you list of mainly popular scripts to be installed quickly.
- Basekit Sitebuilder is an online sitebuilder tool to create sites without any technical knowledge.
- CGI center2 helps to install packages which are dependent on CGI applications.
- Perl Modules is a section to manage how perl packages will work on your domains.
- PHP Pear Packages options allows you add or remove any php package from your account.
- Php Configuration section tells you in detail about PHP configuration status of your server.
- RubyGems options helps you better manage any Ruby Application you are running.
- Ruby On Rails Option allows you to install Ruby language specific application on your domains.
- Optimize website option allows you to manage the way your site loads, you can chose and adjust this option to help your sites load up faster.
- Php.ini quick config – if you are php programmer then you can use this option to do big changes in php core quickly.
- Increase Website Traffic – Its a thrid party link which takes you to orangesoda.com site where you can checkout there traffic increasing plans.
- Fantastico – Its one of the best Script Autoinstaller option available in a cpanel account. You can use it install many scripts like wordpress, joomla, mambo in just few clicks.
Advanced Section Menu
Advanced section is mainly focused to help the advanced programmer and technicians to take better control over you cpanel.
- Apache Handlers – This option helps you manage the way Apache Module works on your cpanel sites.
- Image Manager – This option helps your image sites optimize and run images in the way you want.
- Index Manager – This option handles how your sites files will be shown and accessed online.
- Error Pages – This option shows you which pages on your sites are returning errors.
- Cron Jobs – This option is used by automated working application to run at a certain period of time.
- FrontPage Extensions – This option is used to enable the old Microsoft Frontpage extensions on your sites.
- Network Tools – This option helps you mange the way your sites are connected and working over the DNS networks.
- Cloudflare – Its a third party site which helps you load up your sites faster.
- MIME Types – This options he used to tell the browsers of your site users, how any specific extension will be used and displayed.
Free SEO Tools Menu
Free SEO Tools section is basically a list of third party service hostgator parters. These links keeps on changing by time to time and you can click on them to see there plans.
- Get In Google – This service helps your site get indexed.
- SEO Tools – This service SEO services at affordable price.
- Increase Website Traffic – Its a third party traffic generation service.
- Google Sitemap – This service is used to create google compatible sitemaps for your sites.
- Link building – Its a third party link building service for Off page seo of your sites.
- Facebook Traffic – Its a third party tool to help you increase traffic from Facebook.
- SEO Tips – Its a general list SEO tips for your sites.
Sidebar Top Menu
The sidebar menu find section helps you find cpanel options faster. Just below the find section, you can see latest announcements by hostgator. Website builder tool widget is a quick shortcut link to create your sites faster. Below this widget you can see the third party services icons to help you create custom built sites as per your need.
Make Money With Us Widget
Make money with us widget represents Hostgator’s affiliate program. You can make money by refereeing your friends and site visitors to sign up with hostgator web hosting plans. You can use the links provided to sign up the affiliate program.
Cpanel Statistics
The middle and lower sidebar indicates your hosting accounts limitation and usage levels. Like you can see how many add on domain, subdomain or allocated bandwidth your account is using and how much is left.
The Account information widget tells you details about your sites IP address, your accounts name server and plan. In the sidebar in statistics widget, you can see first the domain name your account hosted on then below that you can see how much more domains you can add as Add On Domains, same is for the limitations and status on subdomains and parked domains.
Below it you can see the IP address from where lost login to the cpanel was made.
Below last login you can see how many process are there runing in cpanel currently. Then you can your’s server’s memory usage status. How much CPU, RAM or harddisk space is currently consumeed and how much is left. Then status of email accounts, ftp accounts and databases is shown.
Finally you can SEE Inodes limits, which is number of files allowed on your account. Its not respective to the size of files, its respective only number of files allowed on your hosting account.
Under another widget named as Account information, you can first see your hosting package name, then the ip address of your server and then your server’s name.
Below it you can find the Name servers allocated to your server. Which you can use to connect and add more sites to your account. Below it you can see the main public directory location, where your sites files are located. Then you can see Operating system and server status below it.
In Website traffic widget you can see how many visitors where reached your site yesterday, in last month and current month. Backup status Widget tells you if you can run backups now or not.
If its says status failed then it means your account can’t be backed up as there is some error. You can followup with the support desk to help you with backup.
I hope you will find this tutorial useful and will make maximum use of hostgator cpanel accounts. If you don’t have hostgator cpanel account yet, its highly recommended that you sign up for one now by using this link.
What is HostGator?
