abbeyhosting.co.uk
UK Web hosting by Abbey Hosting
The term cpanel can be looked at as a general term applying to the general need for software that manages a web or computer server implementation. In its generic use a cpanel established the technology linkage between an administrator for a website (webmaster) and the actual servers that run the operating system for the website.
Many companies offer webhosting services to clients. When you acquire a domain name to give a name to your website, a provisioning process must be done by whoever you decide to host your website with. The domain name service provider who you acquire the name through may also be a webhosting company. If they are then you will likely choose a hosting plan that allocates a certain amount of capacity to your website. That "capacity" has to be allocated to your account and after it’s allocated it is turned over to yu to manage.
The way that you manage the capacity and services allocated to your account is through a service delivered by your access to the cpanel. You are normally given a userid and password to sign into your “instance” of the cpanel. That cpanel and all the features it controls are then managed by interactions you have with the features of the cpanel.
Depending on what features you have purchased in your web hosting plan or that are automatically included in the plan, those configuration and setup processes required to make use of those features are usually made available through a web browser interface. This allows easy access to the features of the cpanel from any location that the webmaster works out of.
Normally a webhosting service will provision your website on a shared server configuration, unless you acquire a dedicated server, and the management of your services have to be kept separate from the other users who share your server with you. Your resources must be secure and not accessible by anyone else except the employees of the hosting company.
The services you will manage through your access to a cpanel may include the file system on which your website will be stored, an instance of a database server if your website needs a database to use for any services it will provide and an email server if your hosting plan includes email addresses associated with your domain name. Most businesses will get a set of email inboxes associated with their account. These individual email inboxes have to be setup and allocated to individuals you employ or functions of the business. The cpanel allows you to do that on your own behalf. The webmaster must also be able to upload various files from your computers to the websites file system and a rudimentary FTP (file transfer protocol) server may also be part of your hosting plan.
The cpanel provides a user friendly and secure set of tools to manage all of your services provided by the website. If there are other applications or website creation tools that are made available to build your website they will often be made available through the cpanel in a very basic set of tools. More advanced website creation tools may be used and the files for the website may be uploaded to the file system of your server space using other utilities like an FTP client. That capability would not be available unless the basic cpanel was used to configure access to your server that way.
There is also a company who has a product named cpanel that provides these services to a set of its own clients for resale by some other web hosting providers.