cPanel - Other Options.

Other cPanel options

Beside the "main" options presented in the previous articles, cPanel has a lot more settings that you can use to handle different aspects of your website. This article briefly explains some of the additional options available to the new webmaster.

Additional domains / sub-domains

If you have (or plan to have) more than one website, you don't need a hosting account for each one of them! Unless your hosting plan restricts you to one domain per account, you can host two or more domains using the same hosting account. So, what are you waiting for? Go and register your second domain name before someone else does it!

If the website for the new domain is not ready, you can "park" or redirect the additional domain name to your existing website. This way, the visitors will reach your website when entering the "parked" domain into their browsers. Go to [Parked Domains], enter the new domain name and click on the [Add Domain!] button.

If the new website is ready, than you need to create an add-on domain. Go to [Addon Domains] and enter the URL of the new domain and the name of the folder where the files for the new website will be stored (can be the same as the domain name). Select a password and click [Add domain!]. A new folder will be created into your /public_html folder. Copy the new website's files in this folder. Don't forget to go to your registrar website and also change the DNS servers values for the new domain.

Add-on domains are "stand-alone" domains but they are also sub-domains of the primary domain. If you only want more sub-domains you don't need to register the sub-domains as new domain names. Use the [Sub Domains] option to create more sub-domains of the main domain. You can also redirect the sub-domains to other web pages.

Hint: If you don't want the search engines' spiders to crawl the add-on domains as sub-domains of the main domain (sounds complicated, right?), just add a disallow line in your robots.txt file for the main domain. The add-on domains will still be crawled as stand-alone domain names.

Backing up your Data

It is very important to know how to and to actually back-up your data periodically. Do not expect or count on the web host's back-ups! You never know when "disaster strikes" and hardware failures can lead to irrecoverable data looses. The simplest "back-up" is the FTP file transfer where you make sure you have on your home computer an up-to-date copy of every file of your website. However, if your website is more complex and uses information stored into databases, you need to use the [Backups] option in cPanel.

The Backups page allows you to back-up (by creating an archive file) the home directory, the databases and the email domain forwarders and filters. The process is pretty straightforward; to backup a database for example, click on the database name and download the archive. To restore the database, browse for the archive on your home computer and upload it back to the web server.

Cron jobs

The Linux Crontab program allows you to run recurring actions. This is useful if, let's say, you have a weekly newsletter that you want to send to the people on your mail list. The newsletter email is sent by a script that needs to be run weekly at a specified day and hour. Use [Cron jobs] - Standard experience level to define the file and the time when the file will be executed.

Handling Errors

Everybody from time to time, surfing the web, will encounter the famous 404 error page saying that the web page or the document you were looking for was not found. The cause for the error could be a reorganization of the website (the file was removed, renamed or deleted); a user involuntarily mistyping the URL of the page or maybe the web page never existed. No matter the cause, any webmaster will want to avoid having these types of broken links on his website. Besides the 404, "File not found" error code, there are other standard HTML error codes. Here are a few examples:

• A 400 error code indicates that the link or the request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax;
• A 401 error code indicates that authorization is required to access the file;
• A 403 error code indicates that the visitor is forbidden to access the file (maybe it's in a password protected folder or maybe you activated the Hotlink Protection on your images);
• A 500 error code indicates that the web server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request (there are miss configured options on the web server).

Each error code has its own standard page and error message. In order to deliver a better user experience, you might want to customize the error pages with your own messages and directions for the visitor to follow. cPanel's [Error pages] option is the tool for the job. Here you can edit a custom message and use information such as Referring URL, Requested URL, Server Name and so on. The idea is that you still need to let the visitor know that something unexpected is going on, but provide him with options. A good practice is to include the website's sitemap here (so the visitor can choose a "real" page to go to) or, if you have a website search feature, include it here as well. Here's an example of a custom 404 page.

To see the last 300 errors for your website, go to the [Error log]. Check this log frequently to find out if you have broken links on your site, or, what files do not exist and they should. Use this information to fix the errors and to keep your site running smoothly.

Fantastico

It's not an option by itself but rather a gateway to the installation of additional programs. Here you will find "one-click installs" for software like blogs, content management, discussion boards and forums, polls and surveys, site builders, mailing lists and so on.

Analyzing traffic

Analyzing the traffic is crucial to any web marketing campaign. By understanding how the visitors are coming and what they are doing on your website you will able to optimize your web marketing efforts. There are a lot of different tools for traffic analysis but they have a common goal: to provide you with web analytics to track in-depth traffic sources, visitor behaviour, commerce, leads, click fraud and conversions.

cPanel has a few basic analysis functions (Webalizer, Latest visitors, Analog or AWStats) that use the "internal" data from the web server. You can also have "external" traffic analysis tools that analyze the traffic based on the data from the [Raw Access Logs]. Use the [Raw Log Manager] to automatically create daily archives of the access logs. Other traffic analysis tools (i.e Google Analytics) require you to insert a snippet of code into your web pages, so you no longer need to record your logs as the data is recorded in the tool's database and you see the statistics by logging into your account there. For a more detailed traffic analysis, read our Google Analytics - Traffic Analysis articles, but for now let's see what we can find from cPanel's Webalizer and latest Visitors options.