A tour of your hosting control panel

Open a hosting control panel for the first time and it can look like a wall of icons for tools you have never heard of, most of which you will never touch. That is normal — a control panel is built to cover everything from a static one-page site to a store running a database of thousands of orders, and any one customer only ever needs a slice of it.

This is a map of that slice: what the recurring sections are for, in the rough order you are likely to need them, so the panel stops being an unlabelled grid and starts being a set of tools with jobs attached.

An overview or dashboard area

Most panels open on some kind of summary screen for the account: the domain it belongs to, how much disk space and bandwidth are in use, and shortcuts into the sections used most often. It is worth glancing at this occasionally even once you know your way around, because it is usually where you would first notice an account approaching a usage limit.

Files

This is where your website's actual files live and where you manage them without needing a separate FTP program. Expect to find the ability to upload, download, edit, rename, move, compress and set permissions on files and folders directly in a browser. Your site's files typically sit inside a root folder for the web-facing content, commonly named something like public_html or htdocs depending on the platform — everything inside that folder is what a visitor's browser can actually reach.

See how to use the file manager for the detail on uploading and editing files this way.

FTP and SFTP accounts

If you would rather work with a dedicated FTP client on your own computer instead of a browser, this section is where you create the login details for it — an account with its own username, password and starting folder, separate from your main login. Our guide to creating an FTP account covers setting one up.

Databases

Almost anything built on a CMS — WordPress included — stores its content in a MySQL (or MariaDB) database rather than in plain files. This section is where you create a database, create a database user, and grant that user access to it. Alongside it you will usually find phpMyAdmin, a browser-based tool for looking inside a database, running queries, and importing or exporting its contents. See creating a database and using phpMyAdmin.

Domains and subdomains

This covers adding a domain to the account, creating subdomains such as shop.yourdomain.com, and pointing any of them at a particular folder. It is separate from domain registration itself — this is about connecting a domain that already exists to a folder on your hosting, not buying or renewing it.

DNS

If your domain uses this hosting account's nameservers, its DNS records — the entries that control where email goes, which subdomains exist, and any external service that needs to prove ownership of the domain via a TXT record — are managed here. See managing DNS records.

Email

Creating mailboxes on your domain, setting up forwarding, and configuring an autoresponder all live in an email section, usually alongside a link into webmail for reading messages in a browser without any extra software.

SSL / security

This is where you check whether a domain has a valid SSL certificate, and where a certificate gets installed if one is not already active. A free certificate is included and is normally kept current automatically, but this section is the place to look if a domain is showing as not secure. See managing SSL certificates.

PHP settings

Sites built in PHP — which covers WordPress and most other CMS platforms — depend on a PHP version and a set of configuration values: memory_limit, upload_max_filesize, max_execution_time and similar. This section is where you switch PHP version and, within the limits of shared hosting, adjust some of those values. See changing your PHP version.

Backups

Look here for existing backups of your account and the option to restore either the whole site or a single file or database from an earlier point. Do not treat the presence of this section as a reason to skip keeping your own copy elsewhere — see how to back up your website for why a second copy still matters.

Statistics and logs

Basic visitor numbers, and — separately, and far more useful when something is actually broken — the raw error log for your website, which records the line and cause behind a PHP error rather than just the blank page a visitor saw. See reading your error logs.

Scheduled tasks (cron)

Cron is what runs a script automatically on a schedule — nightly maintenance, a periodic import, a report generator — without you triggering it by hand. See setting up a cron job.

An application installer

Most panels include a shortcut for installing common software — WordPress being the obvious example — without manually creating a database and uploading files yourself. See installing an application in one click.

The sections you will probably never open

A handful of areas — advanced redirect rules, hotlink protection, directory browsing settings, custom error pages — exist because some customer somewhere needs them, not because a typical site does. There is nothing wrong with never touching them. This knowledgebase covers each one individually for the day you do need it, and none of them are set up in a way that affects a site that ignores them entirely.

None of this needs memorising in one sitting. Come back to this page as a reference the next time you need a specific job done, and the panel will make more sense each time you use it.