cPanel may seem intimidating at first, but it’s a lot easier to use than it looks. It’s not the only web hosting control panel you’ll come across, but it’s the most popular one used by more hosting companies. It lets you access important hosting features and configurations that would otherwise require technical knowledge.
There’s a lot you can do with cPanel, you should be well on your way to becoming a cPanel pro.
This interface allows you to update your cPanel, team owner, or team user password. A strong password helps you to secure your cPanel account.
To learn more about team owners and users, read cPanel’s Manage Team interface (cPanel » Home » Preferences » Manage Team) documentation
Use this interface to store contact information for your cPanel account and to set your contact preferences.
Change your contact information
To change your contact information, perform the following steps:
Enter the desired contact information in the available text boxes.
You can choose to view the cPanel interface in many different languages.
To change your cPanel interface’s language, perform the following steps:
Select the language that you wish to use from the Select a language menu.
Click Change. The interface will refresh in the newly-selected language.
The Audit Log interface allows team owners to track team user actions that use the cPanel UAPI. It is part of our Manage Team interface (cPanel » Home » Preferences » Manage Team).
This interface shows API function calls made by different team users.
Use this interface to change your account settings.
This setting applies to every page on which a notification appears.
The location of system notifications defaults to the top right of the screen.
The Centered selection will create an overlay for the screen. Click anywhere on the screen or press the ESC key to close the notification.
The Webalizer interface displays traffic statistics from the Webalizer statistics program.
For more information about Webalizer, visit the Webalizer website.
To view all of the possible configuration options for Webalizer, read Webalizer’s Configuration Files documentation.
This Visitors interface displays detailed information about recent visits to your website. This information helps you to learn about your audience and monitor frequent visitors so that you can adjust your website content to fit their needs. It also helps you locate and fix errors, such as missing pages or broken links.
Raw access logs are compressed text files that contain information about your website’s visitors. The logs also contain information about the content your visitors access. This feature allows you to download a .gz file that contains your access log. You can access logs for both Apache® and NGINX®.
To select which metrics to use, perform the following steps:
For each domain on your account, select the checkbox for each metrics program that you wish to use. You can select from the following programs:
Webalizer
Analog Stats
AWStats
The interface displays up to 300 of the most recent entries in your web server's error logs, in reverse chronological order.
The interface displays error log entries from the user’s domains. The interface also displays entries that include the username for the account from the /var/log/apache2/suexec_log file
Warning:
This feature uses live data from your server. API function calls may change or delete data on your server, which can cause your server to fail.
Read the documentation for a function thoroughly before you use it in the API Shell interface.
To see an example of the function’s output, read the function’s Response samples section in our cPanel Developer Documentation.
Apache handlers control how your site’s Apache web server software manages certain file types and file extensions. Apache can handle CGI scripts and server-parsed files. The file extensions for these files include .cgi, .pl, .plx, .ppl, .perl, and .shtml.
You can configure Apache to use an existing handler to handle a new file type. To do this, manually add the handler and extension in this interface.
Use the Web Disk interface to create a Web Disk account to manage, navigate, upload, and download the files on your web server. The Web Disk management system allows you to use the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol to manage files remotely.
WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol, allowing users to collaborate while editing and managing files remotely on web servers.
Thumbnailer — Use this tool to create thumbnails from images in a directory and store them in a thumbnails subdirectory.
Scaler — Use this tool to resize individual images.
Converter — Use this tool to convert one image file type to another file type and change the file type of all images in a directory. For example, you can change .jpg files to .png files.
The HTML Editor interface allows you to easily edit your HTML documents from the File Manager interface (cPanel » Home » Files » File Manager). This visual (WYSIWYG) HTML editor includes powerful editing functions of familiar desktop editors (for example, Microsoft® Word).
The Git™ Version Control feature allows you to easily host Git repositories on your cPanel account. You can use Git to maintain any set of files (for example, a website’s files and assets, a software development project, or simple text files). For more information, read our Guide to Git - How to Set Up Deployment documentation and Git’s Documentation.
Important:
To connect your local machine to your FTP server, read our How to Upload Files with FTP documentation or your third-party FTP client’s documentation.
Note:
This interface is only available if your hosting provider enables FTP services on the server.
This interface does not appear on servers running the CloudLinux™ operating system.
Note:
To determine which FTP server daemon that your server uses, contact your hosting provider. cPanel & WHM supports the ProFTPD and Pure-FTPd FTP server daemons. On servers that use Pure-FTPd, the system will only return the first 10,000 files in each folder. Your hosting provider can adjust this number..
Note:
Whenever you access a folder that contains a Git™ repository, we strongly recommend that you do not update any files or directories. Changes could cause serious problems with the repository, regardless of whether you created it in the Git Version Control interface (cPanel » Home » Files » Git™ Version Control).
Important:
This feature only appears if your hosting provider’s server profile enables it.
To use this feature, your system administrator or hosting provider must enable account backups and other configurations in WHM’s Backup Configuration interface (WHM » Home » Backup » Backup Configuration).
Hosting providers must install the following services for this interface to appear:
The ClamAV Scanner plugin in WHM’s Manage Plugins interface (WHM » Home » cPanel » Manage Plugins).
The Exim Mail Server service on the server in WHM’s Service Manager interface (WHM » Home » Service Configuration » Service Manager).
This interface contains tools to help you retrieve network information. For example, you can look up an IP address or trace the route from your computer to the computer that hosts your website.
The Terminal interface allows you to access an in-browser terminal application for direct command-line access within a cPanel & WHM session.
Commands that you enter in this interface can render your cPanel account inoperable. We strongly recommend that only users with command-line experience use this feature.
MIME types relay information to the browser about how to handle file extensions. MIME types can allow visitors’ browsers to handle new technologies as they become available.
To add new MIME types to your web server, define the name, directory, and file extension that correspond to the MIME type.
When a visitor accesses a directory rather than a page on your website, the browser typically displays the directory’s index page. If no index page exists, the browser displays a list of the files in that directory. Use the Indexes interface to define how the server displays a specific directory’s index to a visitor, or to disable the index display for a directory.
