Where do I go to do _____?
Do I need to go to my Client Area or my cPanel??
Sometimes it is hard to figure out where you really need to go to do things. Most people get confused at one time or another, so here is a little refresher that may help you remember the right direction to take when you are trying to pay your hosting bill, or edit your web site, or read your email, or well, to do just about anything associated with your web site.
THE CLIENT AREA - The Client Area is for the most part INFORMATIONAL.
It requires a username (email address) and password to login.
This is where you update your contact information, credit card information, and any additional contact information.
Your Order(s) information is listed here, and you place new order(s) from here. You can order domain names, services, and products. You can View details of invoices past and present.
This is the area you come to View, Print and Pay invoices as well.
Your SHOULD send your support Tickets from here rather than from outside of the login so they will all be saved in your client area email account for you.
You can also see all emails that have been sent to you from your hosting company back for a period of time by the hosting company, along with all orders, invoices and receipts.
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THE cPanel - The Hosting cPanel is FUNCTIONAL. This area deals with everything that controls with your web site.
The address of your cPanel is "http://yourdomain.com/cpanel" with "yourdomain.com" being the actual domain name of your web site. The cPanel requires a username and password (a mixed string of letters and numbers - upper and lower case suggested).
This is where you set up your email accounts, read your webmail, turn on spam-assassin, and create a forward, auto responders, and mx records.
You can edit, backup, change and upload files. You can also edit pages and control FTP. You can create additional FTP accounts.
View your Web site Stats, visitor logs, error logs, and create custom error pages.
cPanel is the place to go to set your site security, such as password protected directories, HotLink Protection and the IP Deny Manger.
Here is where you will find the place to create parked domains, sub-domains and URL redirects.
Your cPanel is the place to set up databases.
This is the place to find the pre-installed software, Fantastico, etc. Find blogs, e-commerce, photo galleries, and much, much more.
This ends this tutorial. Hopefully, it will help you see a little more clearly the difference between the functions of the client area and the cPanel. The client area is INFORMATIONAL, and the cPanel gives your web site its FUNCTIONALITY