Hostgator is a web hosting company that provides customers access to manage their websites through cPanel, a popular control panel interface. cPanel allows easy access and control over key components like email, databases, files, and applications. It strikes a balance of giving customers powerful tools while maintaining security. Overall, cPanel is praised for its usability and breadth of functionality to manage various aspects of hosting a website.

1. http://WhatIsHostgator.org
An accompanying video for this presentation:
http://WhatIsHostgator.org/hostgators-cpanel/

2. Web Hosting
 Hostgator.com is an excellent web-
hosting company
 Web Hosts “host” customer websites on
compute servers
 Web Host provides customer with
 24/7 uptime (ideally)
 Good internet connectivity
 Sufficiently fast computer hardware
 Good software, configurability and services
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3. Control Panels
 Web hosting companies have to strike a
delicate balance
 Provide customers with significant control
and configurability
 Maintain security
 “Control Panels” have evolved to provide
this functionality
 Secure yet easy-to-use interface that
provides good control and configurability
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4. Hostgator‟s cPanel
 Hostgator uses a control panel called
cPanel
 cPanel is provided by a third party
 cPanel is a great control panel
 It provides access and control to numerous
components on the computer server
 It‟s easy to use and secure
 cPanel has been around a long time and is
considered best control panel by many
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5. Accessing Hostgator‟s
cPanel
 Usually access cPanel by tacking on
„/cpanel‟ to the end of your domain
 Login with your Hostgator-provided
username and password
 Main cPanel page provides primary
interface to all control-panel functionality
 Various different panels and icons
provide access to the different cPanel
capabilities
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6. Top and Left Sidebar
 Top area
 Provides tools for researching and registering
additional domain names
 I prefer to register all of my domains at
Namecheap.com – so I don‟t use the top area
 Left Sidebar
 Announcements
 Offers (advertisements)
 Website status and information
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7. Special Offers & Links
 Special Offers
 A handful of offers from companies that are
partnering with Hostgator
 iPayment, Cloud Storage, etc.
 Hostgator Links
 Hostgator links related to your account
 Billing System
 Knowledge Database
 Chat & Ticket System
 …
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8. Preferences
 Change Password
 Update Contact Info
 Somewhat Out of Place
 Getting Started Wizard
 Video Tutorials
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9. Mail (Email)
 Create email accounts for your domains
 Access your email accounts from the web
 Reduce spam with Spam Assassin
 Forward one email address to another
 Forward all unknown email addresses at
your domain to a default email address
 Create “auto-responders” that automatically
reply to certain addresses
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10. SEO and Marketing Tools
 SEO = Search Engine Optimization
 Increasing likelihood of your website pages
ranking well in search engines (e.g. google)
 A separate “SEO Tools” account provides
services for improving SEO
 Easily create sitemaps
 Tell search engines what pages your site has
 Link Building, SEO Tips, etc.
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11. Files Section
 Perform Backups
 Access files on the Hostgator server via
“File Manager”
 Monitor disk-space usage
 Create a “Web Disk”
 Makes your top-level directory at Hostgator
look and act like a disk on your local
computer
 Create and manage FTP accounts for
your domains
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12. Logs Section
 Traffic and “error” logs from your web
server (apache)
 Graphs of the bandwidth used by your
websites
 Broken out by website & traffic type
 Two popular tools for analyzing log files
 webalizer
 Awstats
 Support for integrating Google Analytics
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13. Security & Domains
Sections
 Create password protected directories
on your website
 This can be done in other ways also…
 Create subdomains for your domain
 e.g. http://example.whatishostgator.org
 Add additional domains to your account
 Redirect one domain name to another
 Configure DNS handling
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14. Databases Section
 Databases are an important capability
provided by a web hosting company
 Provides fast and efficient storage and retrieval of
information
 Used by many web applications, e.g. WordPress
 Hostgator uses MySQL as primary database
 Panel provides various database functionality
 Create users
 Inspect and modify data
 etc.
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15. Software & Services Section
 Easily install numerous web applications
 QuickInstall
○ Custom-designed Hostgator installer
 Fantastico De Luxe
○ Popular third-party installer
 Customize PHP configuration
 Ruby on Rails & Ruby packages (gems)
 Perl modules
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16. Advanced Section
 Custom apache (web server) configuration
 Image manager and manipulator
 Custom “error pages”
 Probably want to use this or you may end up with
a standard Hostgator error page (advertisement)
 Cron Jobs
 Computer programs that are set up to run
periodically (e.g once a week, once a day, etc.)
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17. Conclusion
 Hostgator‟s cPanel is an excellent control
panel that provides great functionality
 Lots of parts – Don‟t be overwhelmed
 Much of it you won‟t use often
 Some of it you‟ll probably never use
 Thing to remember
○ It‟s there when you need it
○ It does its job very well
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18. http://WhatIsHostgator.org
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