Hosting Basics: Accessing Your Control Panel and Web Mail
New to hosting a website? There are two aspects to your Linux hosting account that you will need to access: Your control panel and your web mail.
How to Access Your Web Based Email
If you prefer not to route your site’s email into your pop3 account, such as Outlook Express or Outlook, it’s easy to access your web-based email on most Linux hosting accounts. Simply go to:
http://www.Your-Domain-Name.com/webmail
Type in your username and password that you received when you purchased your hosting service and you will be able to access the “catch all” email account. You usually have a choice in different web-based email clients. For the NotGuru.com domain, there are the following:
Your Web-Based Email Options
It doesn’t matter what email program you choose; you will still see your “in” mail and have the ability to send email or reply to email within any of the web-based programs. For specific email accounts, however, you need to first set them up. For example, you might want to set up an account called support@YourDomain.com, specials@YourDomain.com and so forth. To do this, you need to create your email accounts within the Control Panel.
Your Web Site’s Control Panel
This is the most important part of your hosting account. The control panel is sometimes called “cpanel.” To access it, go to your domain and the cpanel subfolder. Example:
http://www.YourDomain.com/cpanel
You will then be prompted for your username and password, which is the username and password that you received when you purchased your hosting account.
Within the control panel, you can set up your email accounts, install scripts and, if your webhost provides Fantastico in your control panel, you can easily install PHP scripts such as WordPress so that you can create a blog on the fly. There are many other features in the control panel, such as site statistics, the file manager, cron programs, database programs and error log access.
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If this is your very first time hosting a web site, you really need to spend a bit of time in the control panel so that you can understand its features. To make things easier, you can download a free video tutorial about the control panel.
This video series is part of a giveaway called “Hot Resale Rights Giveaway,” which will remain open until December 1, 2008.
The step-by-step videos (which you download from the Internet and watch on your computer) will show you all of the basic information you need to know about your Control Panel — what it does and what you can do within your cPanel to get your site up and running as soon as possible.
If you operate a mom and pop business and haven’t taken a look at your control panel, you’ll discover a wealth of information. For instance, in the “FTP/Web Stats” section, you should find a tracking program called Awstats. This is a great little program that will show you the keywords that people are using to find your site, the most visited pages, when the search engines have visited your pages and so on. You will also see referring websites; that is, sites that have a link to your page.
Many new website owners are not familiar with the automatic installations available to them in their control panels for Joomla, WordPress. forums boards and even search boxes.
I always warn folks who aren’t sure what they are doing to not mess with features within the Control Panel that they may not understand. Download your free video tutorials before December 1 and you will have a good idea what is in the Control Panel and what cPanel programs will help you out.
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