cPanel Tutorial

If you have a Web host that gives you cPanel as part of your Web hosting package (many hosts do -- go to yourdomain.com/cpanel and see if it loads something), you've got a great site control panel at your disposal. I use cPanel on all my servers, and while I'm fairly good at it, I know there are many folks out there who are a bit afraid of it. There's help out there....

I recently had the opportunity to have a look at a new book entitled cPanel User Guide and Tutorial (I was given a comp copy by the publisher). For cPanel newbies, it's actually a great resource, going far above and beyond the built-in help that comes with cPanel and the documentation on their site (it's far easier to read, that's for sure). There were a few things mentioned in the book that I didn't know existed (I had no need for them, so I wasn't really looking for them), and a few things that were mentioned in the book that were slightly dated (which is bound to happen with this type of book). Overall, it was a good book for users of cPanel.

However, for folks like me who actually want to use cPanel and it's accompanying WHM software to manage your server, it doesn't touch on that at all. cPanel comes with a great back-end Web interface to manage your server's DNS, Apache config, mail server configuration, accounts setup, quotas, system upgrades and patches, security, resellers, backups, etc... . It also comes with a bunch of handy command-line scripts for lazy folks like me that would rather type one line other than a hundred (easyapache is one example, and there are several for MySQL and email and DNS that I've used many times before). I would've liked to have seen more on that component of cPanel, as that'd be far handier to me (I usually rely on the cPanel forums for my info).

But it's a good book for folks out there who are looking for some help with cPanel's tools from a webmaster standpoint. Just dig into the WHM forums and docs if you're actually managing the system.

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