Although many of us might consider ourselves IT geeks, put us infront of a DOS prompt command box and we'll be about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Since the vast majority of the servers on which our websites are located use Linux, it's a good job that we have a simple to use Graphical User Interface called cPanel. This software basically enables us to interact with the Linux server in a point and click environment – much like Windows on your PC.

You shouldn't confuse cPanel as a hosting company, it's simply the name of the software which a vast majority of hosting companies use, this confusion can easily arise because many hosting companies advertise themselves as cpanel web hosting companies!

But how do you get started with cPanel? First thing you need to do is login, fortunately this is standardized across every cPanel hosting company, you just type example.com/cpanel in to your address bar (where 'example' is your actual website name) and it will pop up a box asking you to login. You simply need to put in your hosting login details which you would have received by email when you signed up to the hosting company.

Cpanel has a very standard layout which means even if you move to another cpanel web hosting company you will feel very comfortable in managing your site. On the left hand side of the control panel you have a number of details like space and bandwidth usage for the month, server status, quick access to areas you use frequently and some hosting companies even insert a few ads here.

The right column contains a large number of graphical icons and this is where the meat of the system lies. It contains all the functions required to manage your site from email, web statistics, databases and file management. All the features are very simple point and click and the cPanel software does all the complex work like 'talking' to the Linux server. To make things even simpler for the user, all related functions are grouped together in their own boxes, so you will find all the security functions in a box called “Security”.

One of the first things you might want to set up is your email address for your website. To do this locate the box called “Mail” and within this box you will find an icon called Email Accounts, this will take you to a page where you can create a new email address for your website. All you need to do is give the first part of the email, so if you wanted to create the address sales@example.com then you would just enter sales in the “Email” box. Then you will need to enter a password – obviously choose something difficult to guess, '123456' is not a secure password! Confirm your password and then click “Create Account”. Cpanel will talk to the server and your account will be created just like that.

You will now see the address listed in the table below the form. You have two options to read any email that is sent to this account. The first is the easiest, you can simply access the Webmail (you might be given a choice of Webmail accounts, just choose any) from the link provided, or you can configure it to work with your Outlook software and it gives you complete step by step details on how to set up your Outlook account to use this address.

Setting up your email is just the start, but most functions within cPanel work in a very similar fashion, so go ahead and start exploring. On a final note, although there are alternatives to cPanel, we always recommend you go with a cPanel web hosting company because it's so much easier to use than the other options.