CPanel – Intro

n this video, we’re going to take a look at cPanel, and I hope this video will help you to get more familiar with your cPanel account, and also to use some of the critical important functions in a cPanel account. So this is how a typical cPanel account will look like. In this example, the version of cPanel is cPanel Accelerated. But you may also find other versions of cPanel, but overall, this is the generic look of a cPanel account. Now, you can only access your cPanel account if you have already got web hosting and your own domain name and you have set up the entire thi9ng; and then, you’ll be given a username and password to access your cPanel account, and after you have logged in, you’ll probably see a screen like this.

[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/cpanel-intro.swf[/evp]

So one of the very important functions in cPanel is that there’s also a built-in video tutorials section. You can just click on this, and you can see here that there’s tons of video tutorials that is built in to your cPanel account, and you can have a look at these video tutorials. They are very, very basic. They just tell you what to click to do what, but nevertheless, these video tutorials will probably be very important for you to help you to understand how a cPanel account works.

And secondly, you can also change how your cPanel account looks like by clicking on “Change Style.” And as you can see here, there are several skins or themes or templates that you can choose to change the layout of your cPanel account. Now, all these changes that you make here is purely cosmetic and it is not change of functions of your cPanel account. So in any normal case, you probably would not need to change the style of your cPanel account.

To create a new email address that is associated with your domain name, just click on “email accounts.” And here, you’ll be able to create your new email address, and you get a password as well, and you can select a mailbox quota. Then click on “Create.”

By default, you can access this newly created email address within your cPanel account by clicking on “Mailbox.” But you can also access this email through third-party clients like Microsoft Outlook, etc., and if you want to get information on how to do that, you can just click on this link here that prompts you: “Do you wish to configure your account to work with a mail client?” So click on “Yes,” and you’ll get some information here on how to configure this email address that you’ve just created with several of the more popular mail services or mail programs like Microsoft Outlook.

And at the bottom, you’ll also get some manual settings that lists your mail server, username, your incoming mail server, etc., outgoing mail server, and some of the supported protocols. So if you know how to set up your email address manually in Thunderbird or in Microsoft Outlook, then you can go ahead and just use these manual settings to do it. And now, I’m going to click on “Home” to get back to the main page.

And if you scroll to the bottom, you would see that you can also add new subdomains. You can have “Add-on Domains,” “Parked Domains,” and also “Redirects” in your cPanel account.

So let me give you an example of how to create a subdomain. A subdomain is simply an extension to your main domain. So in this example, my main domain is plrwpvideos.com. And if I want to create a subdomain for my support or helpdesk, I can always type in…and click on “Create.”

And you can see that my new subdomain has been created. And to access this subdomain, I need to type into my browser, for example, my Internet Explorer of Firefox, I need to type in “support.plrwpvideos.com”. If you want to redirect this subdomain, you can just click on “Manage redirect ****04:57.” And over here, you can have your subdomain, for example in this case, [email protected]. I can have it redirected to my blog if I want to.

And if you type in [email protected], it will automatically redirect to my blog at gobalakrishnan.com. So let’s go back to the main page; you will explore more important functions of cPanel. Just click on “Home.” Now, scroll down to the bottom, and you would see this smiley icon here – name for these icons is Fantastico De Luxe, and this is perhaps one of the more important services in your cPanel account. Just click on that.

So using your Fantastico account, you’ll be able to access and install a lot of free or open-source scripts such as WordPress and other blog platforms like b2evolution or Nucleus, and you’ll also be able to install several forums – for example, the SMF Forum or phpBB Forum. And if you plan to sell products online, there’s a couple of free E-commerce software available here; the ones that are good are Zen Cart and OS Commerce. And you can also just explore all the other available free software in your cPanel account, under the Fantastico icon.

And there are, of course, a lot more functions in your cPanel account that you can explore. You can also get a statistics program to see exactly how much web messages you’re getting; but for now, let me just show you how to customize your cPanel account. If you can see your little icon here, you can actually collapse or expand the functions that you either do not use at all or the ones that you use more regularly.

And if you want, you can also just click and drag certain components of it to rearrange the order of the functions in your cPanel account. So if you hardly use this section over here and you may want to move some of the boxes above here, and again, in the sidebar also, you can collapse things that you don’t use. Overall, this is cosmetic, but it also helps you to manage your cPanel account better by getting rid of any distractions by hiding the programs that you hardly use.

So I hope that you benefited from this Basic cPanel tutorial.