cPanel control panel is designed for managing separate hosting accounts on the server. End users/clients are able to:
- upload and manage files for their websites
- edit DNS records for their domains
- add/remove addon domains and subdomains
- install CMS using Softaculous script installer
- create email accounts
- manage email settings and SPAM protection
- check website statistics
- manage databases and backups, etc.
Basically cPanel has two vertical sections with different features:
The left column provides a number of various features that are conveniently structured to specific groups based on the concrete aspect of the web-hosting service and the Right column includes different Stats information about the account. Additionally, you can see a header above both sections:
Header and Right Column:
Search User Stats
Server Information menu lists hosting account package and additional server-side details, like the IP address assigned to your cPanel account, software installed on the server and the status of the core services:
Statistics column collects cPanel services and quotas as well as the current account resource usage:
Files
File Manager: here you can manage the files stored in your account. These guides can be found helpful while working with this menu:
Images: this tool allows you to view and modify images in your account.
Directory Privacy: allows you to set a requirement for a username and password when users attempt to access your site from the web. It can be used when you need to limit access to a certain part of your site. You can get more details in this guide.
Disk Usage: in this menu, you will be able to check detailed information about the disk space usage of your account. It shows disk usage totals for your account’s directories and all of its databases, not for individual files or databases. More details about Disk Space usage optimization are provided in this article.
Web Disk: this feature is a cPanel implementation of the WebDav protocol, which allows you to manage, upload, and download your website’s files as though they were local to your personal computer.
FTP Accounts: this option allows you to create and manage your FTP accounts. In order to create an FTP account, feel free to check this article. For FTP connection instructions, refer to this set of guides:
FTP Connections: using this tool you can monitor the users who are currently logged into your site via FTP. Also, it’s possible to terminate an FTP connection from here.
Backup: this feature allows you to download a zipped copy of your entire account or specific parts of it, such as your home directory, databases, email forwarder configuration, or your email filters configuration. More details guidance about how to make backups in cPanel can be found here.
Backup Wizard: a user-friendly interface for creating a backup of your entire site, a partial backup, or allowing a site restoration from the last backup saved. Note, that the Restore option provided in this menu might be disabled by default on all our Shared servers.
Git Version Control: this feature allows you to easily host Git repositories on your cPanel account.
Inodes Usage: provides the statistics of your account inodes (files) usage. You will find more details about this tool here.
phpMyAdmin: it’s the database management tool, which allows you to make different changes to MySQL databases in your account. You can find more information about how to work with databases via phpMyAdmin this guide.
MySQL Databases: in this menu you can create and manage MySQL databases in cPanel account. You can refer to this guide for more details.
MySQL Databases Wizard: provides the same functionality as MySQL Databases menu, in a simplified way though.
Email Accounts: in this menu you can create and manage mailboxes associated with the domain names hosted in your account. In order to create an email account, feel free to check this guidance. More details about setting up a newly created email account with email clients can be found in the set of articles cPanel Email: Client Setup.
Forwarders: setting up Forwarders feature provides you with an opportunity to send a copy of all emails from one email address to another. For example, you have two different email accounts and you don’t want to check both of them every time, so you could forward emails from test@yourdomain.com to test2@yourdomain2.com. Note, that the original address will still receive the forwarded emails.
Email Routing: here you can set email routing for the domains hosted in your cPanel account, more details can be found in this guide.
Autoresponders: This feature allows you to automatically send messages in reply to incoming emails received on a specific email account. This is pretty useful when you are on holiday or unavailable, or if you have any generic messages to send. You will find more information in this guide.
Default Address: in this menu, you can manage an email address, which is used by cPanel to fetch any message sent to email accounts that do not exist at your domain (also known as ‘catch-all address’). More details can be found
Mailing Lists: with this option you can create a single address to send emails, newsletters and other updates to multiple email addresses simultaneously. Feel free to refer to this article to get more information.
Track Delivery: this menu allows you to monitor emails delivery for your account.
Global Email Filters: this feature allows you to configure filters of all the emails arriving to your hosted domains.
Email Filters: with this option you can create filters for each email account for your domain. You can find more details about filtering tools in this article.
Email Deliverability: this tool will help you to prevent spam. Setting up DKIM and SPF records for your account equip email messages with verifiable information so that your server can automatically detect the nature of incoming and outgoing messages. The detailed guidance about using this feature can be found here.
Address Importer: this menu allows you to use two types of files (.xls and .csv) for importing data in order to simultaneously create multiple email address or email forwarders for your account.
Spam Filters: it is a user-friendly email utility which examines incoming mail for different spam characteristics. It uses various network tests and spam filtering to get an overall score in order to decide whether the mail should be considered as spam or not. SpamAssassin tool is provided by default with all our shared and reseller hosting plans.
Encryption: this option allows you to set up GnuPG, which is a publicly-available encryption scheme that uses the public key approach. This system uses a public key to encrypt messages and you can decrypt them with the private key, which the intended recipient of the message retains.
BoxTrapper: this tool can protect your Inbox from spam by requiring all email senders not on your Whitelist to reply to a verification email before you can receive their mail.
Calendars and Contacts: this menu helps to configure your client to connect to CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts in order to access them on your personal devices. The detailed instructions can be found in this guidance.
Email Disk Usage: this utility allows you to recover disk space by deleting old messages from your mailbox.
Domains
Site Publisher: you can use this interface to quickly create a website from a set of available templates. This allows visitors to see some basic information while you continue to develop your website.
Domains: this interface allows creating and managing multiple domains from a single cPanel interface.
Addon Domains: with the help of this menu you can add more domains to the hosting account. Addon domains have the same functionality as the main domain assigned to your hosting account. More details about adding domains to cPanel are provided here.
Subdomains: in this menu, you can create subdomains and point them to different sections of your website or other IPs. Detailed instructions about this menu can be found in this article.
Aliases: this feature allows you to ‘park’ additional domain names to your existing hosting account. They display the same website as your primary domain and share web statistics as well. You can refer to this guide when setting up a new parked domain.
Redirects: here you can create a redirect for a specific domain/page to another domain/page and display the contents of the latter. More details can be found here.
Zone Editor: allows you to edit the DNS zone of the domain(s) in your cPanel account. The following records can be added: A, AAAA, CNAME, SRV, TXT, MX. Feel free to check this article to get more information about setting up DNS records in cPanel.
Metrics
Visitors: the access log of your account provided in a table view.
Errors: here you can check the error log for your account, showing the latest 300 lines of content related to the errors generated by any website hosted in your account.
Bandwidth: provides you with detailed information on the bandwidth used by your account.
Raw Access: the RAW access log for your account.
Awstats: this tool provides you with an opportunity to monitor the access indexes on your account – users, robots, accessed pages, and many, many more. You will find a more detailed explanation in this article.
Security
SSH Access: here you can generate an access key for your account in order to connect using SSH keys. More details about setting up SSH keys can be found in this article.
IP Blocker: with the help of this tool you can block a range of IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your site. Feel free to refer to this guide on the matter.
SSL/TLS: this tool will help you to install and manage your SSL Certificates. You will find a more detailed guide here.
Hotlink Protection: in this menu, you can enable hotlink protection for your website (that is to prevent someone from direct linking your images to another website and, as a result, consuming your hosting account bandwidth). Feel free to check this guide for additional information.
Leech Protection: allows you to control whether users can give out or publicly post their passwords for restricted areas of your site. It can be used to redirect compromised accounts to the URL of your choice, or suspend them.
SSL/TLS Status: use this interface to view the SSL status of your domains.
Optimize Website: this feature allows you to enable/disable and configure the compression of your website by tweaking the way Apache handles requests, which can increase the performance of your website.
Select PHP Version: here you can change PHP version applied to your cPanel account. You can find more information in this article.
Advanced
Cron Jobs: here you can set up scripts running on a scheduled basis. For more details about setting up CronJobs refer to this guidance.
Track DNS: using this tool you can check DNS information about any domain, or to trace the route from the server your site is on to the computer you are accessing cPanel from.
Indexes: in this menu you can customize the way in which visitors can view a directory on the web.
Error Pages: this feature allows you to edit the code for the default errors pages your website can display.
Apache Handlers: here you can configure different Apache handlers for dealing with certain file formats.
MIME Types: provides you with the information about the system predefined MIME types and the option to add a MIME Type on your own.
Virus Scanner: this tool will allow you to scan your account for viruses with ClamAV virus scanner. ClamAV is an open source (GPL) anti-virus engine used in a variety of situations including email scanning, web scanning, and end point security. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and an advanced tool for automatic database updates.
Preferences
Password and Security: this menu allows you to change your cPanel main password if know the original one. Otherwise, you can reset the password following the steps in this guide.
Change Language: this feature provides you with an opportunity to change your cPanel interface language.
Change style: here you can change the overall look and feel of the interface by selecting one of the several preinstalled styles.
Contact Information: in this menu you can specify an email address that will receive system email notifications.
User Manager: allows you to manage your Sub accounts. Sub accounts use the same login and password information for email, FTP, and Web Disk.
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