The cpanel web-based administration interface allows you to manage most all aspects of your domain. From cpanel you can access website related e-mail, website statistics, your site log, and track your bandwidth among other options. Usually, from this control panel you can also upload and download files to and from your web hosting server via FTP. This is the reason that that the cpanel interface is probably the most user friendly administration interface currently available.

From the control panel you can control and count data, domain and subdomain redirects, and e-mail autoresponder forwarding as well as website directory permissions. From the cpanel hosting window there is not much that is out of your control. You can directly edit your webpages through an HTML editor or code editor, create new databases and attach them to different directories, or enable Apache server handling. From Cron jobs and automated tasks to moving files from one directory to another to search engine submission, cpanel is your personal control center.

With the relatively recent addition of Fantastico, cpanel now offers the ability to preinstall CGI scripts, shopping carts and forums all with the click of a button. It takes no genius to realize that this type of functionality can be crucial in saving you hours of valuable time and frustration in the beginning, when you need to install such add-ons as content management systems such as Joomla and Wordpress, or smaller applications. Make sure that cpanel hosting is offered with the web hosting package that you end up purchasing.