Hidden extras in cPanel
July 17th, 2008 Posted in Building my websitescPanel hidden extras
As well as being a comprehensive website and domain management tool, cPanel also offers lots of useful tools to assist you with some basic tasks involved in making and running websites.
This section brings together some miscellaneous ‘extras’ which I haven’t dealt with elsewhere.
Status bars
Your web hosting package will come with limits … on disk space, bandwidth, domain transfers, MySQL databases and so on.
Keep an eye on your disk space use and bandwidth.
A friend at work has recently been hit by a sting. He offers downloadable podcasts directly from his website (my pals and I advised letting a third party host his podcasts!) and somebody has been downloading them maliciously it would seem.
His hosting company - for some bizarre reason - don’t warn him when he’s about to exceed his bandwidth limit, so he’s been stung with a bill of a couple of hundred pounds.
With cPanel you get a warning at 80% of your bandwidth allowance.
I nearly exceeded mine last month, I forwarded the email to my friend, and he’s using it as leverage to demonstrate how his hosting company have been offering poor customer service.
Not warning about excessive bandwidth use is like a bank that never tells you you’re overdrawn … but charges you penalties anyway.
The point of this rant is to encourage you to monitor the little bars on the left hand side of your cPanel homepage.
If things are green you’re fine.
If they’re yellow, keep an eye on them.
If they’re red, you need to be looking at your hosting package and maybe upgrading.
The account above is one I’ve prescribed for myself on a reseller package … so if I exceed my set levels I can just increase them.
As you can see, I’ve used over 1/2 my current storage space.
I increased my bandwidth last month because I went into the red … I hope that’s because more people are using my websites now!
I’ve got unlimited email accounts (hence the /00) unlimited sql databases and unlimited ftp accounts.
You can also see how many domains I’ve got parked and added on.
So in short, check your use using these easy monitors and contact your hosting comapny if you need to increase your allowances … but expect to pay more with a more hefty hosting package.
Free website builder
cPanel comes with additional services built in.
I’m only going to deal with CGI Center and nativespace website wizard here, I’ll deal with Fantastico De Luxe in a dedicated post and the Perl and PHP I’m going to leave as advanced stuff for other people to tell you about.
CGI Center is the place where you go if you want to add and send forms from your websites.
I’ve covered that process in great detail in a previous post.
You can also do thing like making clocks, countdown timers, guestbooks and counters in this section.
A word of warning though … don’t clutter you site with useless and annoying stuff. If it has an integral purpose fine, if not, leave it off your site.
The most useful tool here for the amateur website maker is the nativespace website wizard which allows you to build a complex website easily and without great coding knowledge (note that your cPanel provider might not offer this service .. this is an ‘extra’ only provided by some cPanel hosting companies).
I’ll save myself lots of typing and suggest you take a look here to find out more about what’s included in this wizard. However, if you’re not a confident HTML user, this ‘extra’ is well worth having.
More useful info
cPanel offers a great range of built in informational services which are incredibly useful:
Latest visitors: Who’s looking at each website, what are they looking at, where did they come from … essential and crucial data for analysing the success of your website, a great tool.
Bandwidth: Which sites are responsible for that bandwidth use, presented in clear and easy to use graphs. Hopefully watch your bandwidth use go up as more people discover your websites.
Webalizer Webalizer FTP: Complex stats about who’s visiting your sites, how many visits they made, pages they looked at, unique users, referrers and so on. Data like this is like gold dust to a web producer.
Raw access logs: Data in a downloadable form rather than graphs.
Analog stats: A simple summary of the people who have visited your websites.
Error logs: The last 300 errors on your websites. Useful for spotting and sorting site problems.
Choose log programs: Ignore this
Awstats: Another analytical tool .. particularly useful are the search key phrases.
How many statistics can a man take? This data is amazing - read it, use it, make your websites perform better.
Password protecting areas of your websites
It can be really useful sometimes to lock down a particular section of your website to make sure only people with the correct permissions can access it.
It might be a ‘family and friends only’ area, a ‘members only’ section or even a private storage area for yourself.
By selecting ‘Password Protect Directories’ you can easily control folders on your website, but note, not individual pages.
If you have a specific page to lock, just put it in its own folder and lock the folder.
When someone tries to browse to this section of your website, they will be asked to provide the password.
No password, no access!
Error pages
The final useful tool for now in this miscellaneous collection.
If you remove a page, or someone searches for a stray URL for your domain, they’ll get sent to a standard error page depending on how their PC is set up and what browser they’re using.
To avoid this and make your customer experience better, you need to create custom error pages.
The key error pages you need to produce are:
400 (Bad request)
401 (Authorization required)
403 (Forbidden)
404 (Wrong page)
500 (Internal server error)
I’ve covered this subject in greater detail in a previous post but if you want a bit more help and guidance setting up these pages and putting them in the right place, use cPanel’s easy-to-use error page creator, it’s very good.
This is what my custom error pages look like for this website: http://laptopmanpaul.co.uk/error_pages/401.htm
For much more detailed guidance, siteground.com has an excellent step-by-step guide to everything related to cPanel.
See more cPanel posts on laptopmanpaul.co.uk
Managing your domain in cPanel
Back-ups, managing files and FTP accounts in cPanel
Managing email options in cPanel
