A web hosting control panel can make or break your web hosting experience. Of course, every web hosting has their own control panel preferences, and you may be subject to their preferences when you sign up with them. If you aren’t entirely sure what a control panel is, it is software that is installed to the web host’s server to help you control your web hosting features and the experience of your users. The control panel will give you access to the features you want and need such as FTP accounts, email accounts, sub-domains, databases that you can create or add, as well as the ability to manage files and such. The control panel is an important part of your dedicated server process and in creating the best website possible.

Knowing which control panel is best for you is all about what you expect, what is advertised, and what you want to achieve. There are different control panels depending on the platform that the host uses such as Windows, Unix, or Linux and each platform may or may not work for you, sometimes you have to experience all of them before you settle on the one that is best for you. You’ll find control panels such as Hostopia, Cpanel, Plesk, Sphera, Vdeck, and Ensim, which are all good brands. If you are new to dedicated servers and control panels you’ll want to choose one of the names that is more intuitive so that it is easier to use. If you are more experienced, you can choose one of the more functional control panels that work great on your platform but are not as easy for the novice to use. Vdeck is one of the most popular and easy to use, but many of the hosts cannot provide access. Ensim is easy to use but is most often used by those that have a bit more experience, but Plesk is an all around great control panel.

The best way to choose the best control panel for your dedicated server is to check out the control panel demos that are often offered through the hosts. Checking out several different platforms and their offered control panels is an experience, and through this research you’ll likely find the control panel that will work best for you and your needs. Remember that every software takes some getting used to, so everything may not come easily, but choose the one that offers some of the best features and the usability that matches best with your ability. Matching your needs, your abilities, and the features of a control panel is the best way to find the perfect control panel for you.

By Craig Rowe

By Ricardo d Argence

The most important task of any system administrator is backing up the systems they are responsible for. Not putting the system up, not keeping it running, backing it up and being able to restore is primary.

A system with no backup cannot be relied upon for any real purpose, because if anything goes wrong your data is gone.

Something always goes wrong eventually, and without good backups all of your work, and possible your entire business is just plain gone.

A good backup strategy is composed of backup, storage, verification, and restoration. The backup component covers selection of method and which data to backup (all of it by choice).

Storage covers both what media you back up onto as well as where you keep them (if your building burns down, tapes kept in the server room will be useless).

Verification is a crucial component of a backup strategy, you have to know you have usable data.

Lastly, you need to be able to get the data back to where it can be used.

There are two main strategies for backups: Disaster Recovery and Archival.

DR backups are designed to restore a system to a working state. To do this you backup the entire system so that you can restore it onto another machine to get a working system.

An archival strategy is concerned with retrieving historical data ('give me the customer database as it appeared at the end of last year') and not with restoring a working system.

Both strategies can, and probably should, be combined. An archival-only strategy requires the system administrators to reinstall and reconfigure the operating system prior to restoring the data; this takes longer and is more error prone.

Any backup strategy must be tested.

A DR backup is tested by restoring a system backup onto a fresh system to make sure you can recover from an emergency.

Archival strategies are tested by retrieving files and verifying that you can find the files you need and that they are readable once restored. An untested backup strategy is usually a complete waste of time and money.

For web hosting clients, you will usually do your backups with the cPanel administrative interface.

cPanel will let you backup your entire hosted site, your databases, or your home directory (which will contain your website but not the data behind it).

To perform a backup you simply access the Backup control panel and select a type of backup. The system performs the backup and downloads the file to your local system.

These backups can be restored through the same interface.

To test, you would create a new hosted site and restore your backups to it.

The downloaded backup files are important (possibly confidential) data and should be integrated into your local backup strategy.

At the least, burn them to disks if you can't arrange to include them in your main backups.

CPanel is an easy user-interface site that lets you control your host account environment. The main peculiarity of this operating system is that it so simple to use that your below average computer user can mess it up. It got great features embedded into its panel and some of the features are listed below.
There are such tools available for your use, which are Web Protect (.htaccess editor), Custom error pages, Redirects, Ability to edit MIME types, Ability to edit Apache handlers, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Search engine tool submitting and File Manager.

Email

The email program provides you with the possibility to add, remove, and change passwords while managing email accounts. CPanel is also provided by Webmail for the accounts, Auto responders, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Spam filtering and some more.

Backup

Backup allows you to create copies of account files and databases. The backup menu also allows you to download any automatic backups that were downloaded by your CPanel administrator.

Stats

Here are different tools to survey your site popularity and efficiency. Those are Webalizer web stats, Webalizer FTP stats, Analog stats, AWStats, View latest visitors, View bandwidth usage and View error log modules.

FTP

There is a module that controls FTP accounts (add, remove, change password for its access), Anonymous FTP controls; Ability to change FTP login message and Ability to kill FTP sessions.

Advanced Stuff

You have an ability to add or remove subdomains, Subdomain Redirects and its Stats.

Advanced Tools

You are provided with tools of SSH access tools, Manage GPG keys and Cron jobs.

There are also Pre-Installed CGI Scripts. Those are Interchange Cart, Agora Cart, Bulletin Board, Java Chat, HTML Chat, phpMyChat, CGI Wrapper (for non-suexec installs), Random HTML generator, Advanced Guestbook, Counter Generator, Java Clock Generator, Java Countdown Generator, Secure FormMail clone, CGIEmail, Entropy Search, Entropy Banner. Network Tools are DNS Lookup and Traceroute. Database Management tools includes Managing MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin access.

For beginners, CPanel has a lot of options that are easy to use. CPanel works with most of browsers, such as IE, Opera, Firefox and others.