cPanel provides many advanced features that you can use to help improve your website from a technical aspect as well as from a functionality aspect if you choose to use certain features. Some of the advanced features can help you choose how the installed web server processes requests for files of a certain extension from your website; this means that you are able to choose specific programs that are installed on the shared hosting server on which you are hosted to process requests for certain file extensions which a user or website visitor might enter into their web browser under the domain name or website which you own - in basic this means that you can choose how the web server that is installed on your server, in most cases Apache, deals with some of the files that you have hosted within your web space. A Frontpage Extension manager is provided built-in to cPanel to allow you to manage the extensions which will affect how some of your files that you have created within Microsoft’s now defunct Frontpage web page creator are handled by the server; this feature can be quite important for some people since if they don’t have the Frontpage Extension options for their domain configured correctly then the web pages which they have spent time creating within Frontpage will not function within their shared cPanel website hosting space, which in turn might mean that they will have to move web hosts to ensure that they can find one at which their website will actually function correctly. Other features provided with cPanel allow you to manage custom error pages for your domain, in the case that you have this option enabled; this means that if an error does happen to occur on your website then you can still keep up the graphical identity of your website by carrying on your website’s design into the error pages, in turn meaning that your logo and design will still be displayed to your visitors even if your website does happen to go down due to an error with either your website and its code or on the actual server on which your website resides. Some people also use scheduled tasks to ensure that the important functions of their website are run automatically without the need for any manual intervention; this enables them to ensure that important tasks such as invoicing can be carried out automatically at any time of the day without the need for anyone to be there to run the task automatically - tasks which are run automatically are normally ones which are of the utmost importance and require for the tasks which they carry out to be done at a regular interval otherwise major problems could be caused. Another feature allows you to find out any information about a domain in terms of the technical side of things; this means that if you are trying to link some part of your site up to that of another website then you can use this feature to find out the technical information which you might need to ensure that you can carry out the task which you need to.

Within this article the ability to configure the web server on your hosting server to handle certain file extensions which might be individual to your website will be discussed; this means that you can tell the web server how you want certain parts of your website to be handled by the website by defining what program is used to handle requests for certain file extensions that are contained within your website. Image features unique to cPanel will also be discussed within this article; this means that you will be given the ability to change the size of images which are contained within your website as well as be able to generate thumbnails of images contained within your website which you can then place within your web pages as links to the larger images which can then decrease the loading time of your web pages if larger versions of th images concerned were being used beforehand, you will also be given the ability to change the format of a picture if needed with the use of cPanel - this means that you might be able to gain a higher quality picture of a lower size picture which can help decrease the use of the disk space within your account which you can then assign to more useful tasks. Other features allow you to set up custom error pages for your website and domain name that you have chosen to host under your shared cPanel website hosting account; this means that you can still present your visitors with web pages branded with your design, even if an error does happen to occur with either your website or with the website hosting server on which you are hosted. The ability to schedule scripts and tasks to execute when you want will also be discussed; this means that you will then be able to make the important tasks of your website run automatically without the need for you to be at a computer to execute the script or task concerned manually, it also means that you can almost ensure that the task will be run on time and when needed which is one thing that a human can’t guarantee because of time accuracy and the fact that someone might not be able to get to get a computer to execute the necessary task or script when it needs to be done. The ability to configure the necessary extensions to ensure that your dynamic web pages which have been created with the use of Microsoft Frontpage will also work and function correctly as needed within your shared hosting environment; this means that you can build near dynamic websites for use within a shared hosting environment without the need for any technical work such as the use of databases and file permissions. If you face a problem with either your hosting account or the server that you are hosted on, then there is a cPanel feature that will allow for you to contact your web host to report the problem if your web host does not provide an external help desk for customers who face problems with the services that they have chosen to purchase from the web host that they have chosen. If you need to find out certain information about a domain, then there is a feature built into cPanel that you can use to find out the necessary technical information; this means that if you need to know certain information about a domain which is live on the internet then you can do certain lookups to find out the necessary information if you are in the situation that you need to use it for a specific reason. The option to define certain mime types for file types which you might have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account is also discussed; this means that you can tell the web browser of a visitor how to handle a particular file which the visitor is trying to access - this is good for you if you have chosen to use files on your website that have their own unique file extension for some reason or another - you can also use this feature if you want serve web pages to mobile phones that are based on the WAP technology, this is because some web servers don’t have the necessary mime types set to allow WAP browsers view websites properly, which means that you have to configure the correct mime type in your web hosting account if your host doesn’t have them set to allow you to start serving pages to WAP devices almost immediately.

Apache Handlers

The Apache Handlers feature of cPanel allows you to control how Apache handles requests for files of a certain type or extension from search engines and visitors; this means that you can choose how Apache handles files that you have contained within your shared cPanel website hosting space, and how they are handled when search engines come crawling or when people come to visit your website through their web browser. This feature gives you the ability to be able to run files with custom extensions from within your shared cPanel website hosting space; this is because you are able to specify the program or action that you want Apache to use when a request for a file of the extension concerned is made - this can help you in terms of security since it means that if you specify a custom file extension when configuring the required Apache handlers, hackers will not be able to distinguish the server side language that your website has been created in, which means that without this information they can’t make an accurate attack on your website because their attacks can only be done if they know what language the pages have been written in, since they can only find script or page vulnerabilities with this information. You can also use this feature to help give it a unique identity in terms of the technical side of it; this is because your website will look more professional in the eyes of a specialist such as a programmer or website designer, since the use of a custom file extension throughout your website makes it look like that the person who has created it or maintains it is very knowledgable in terms of technology - when in fact a basic cPanel feature has been used to ensure that a certain program has been used to execute files which take the file extension concerned. As well as being able to create your own Apache handlers to allow Apache to handle files which have a custom file type by using a particular program, you can also use this feature to see Apache handlers which have been automatically set up by cPanel when it was installed as well as custom ones which your web host might have set up to be used by all the occupants who have their website hosted on the same server as yourself; this means that you might not have to create custom Apache handlers since there might be server wide rules already in place for the particular extension which you want to tell Apache how to handle. The good thing with this feature is that any rules which you create yourself will only affect the files and websites that you have hosted under your shared cPanel website hosting account; this means that those custom rules which have been created by people with accounts who are hosted on the same server as you are not going to affect your websites or files which you host within your web space, nor will the custom rules that you create affect your ‘neighbours’ who are hosted on the same website hosting server as you are - but system wide rules will affect all websites and accounts that are hosted on the server concerned.

Image Tools

The image tools feature of cPanel allows you to carry out many actions on any image which you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account; this means that you can carry out necessary image editing without having to be at a computer with which you have the necessary tools installed to edit the images that you have edited within your web hosting space, instead you can do the necessary editing on the fly from any internet connected computer from which you can access cPanel. Within this cPanel feature you are able to create thumbnails of images that you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account; this means that you can create smaller versions of larger images for displaying within standard web pages - this means that you are able to create fast loading web pages which still contain the images that you want - one thing to note is that thumbnails are usually used as a link to the full sized image so that visitors can still see the image that they have come to see on your website. Another feature within the image tools feature of cPanel allows you to change the size of images which you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account; this means that if an image which you have located within a web page is taking up too much space on the page, or is too big for its purpose then you can easily resize it to a smaller size on the fly through cPanel without the need for any specialist photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks - both of which can cost hundreds of pounds - you should consider resizing as many images that you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account as possible, this is because the bigger the dimensions of the image, the bigger its file size, which means that images could be taking up unnecessary disk space that you have assigned to your shared cPanel website hosting account. The third and final feature of the cPanel image tools feature is an image file format converter; this convenient feature allows you to change the file extension of images from one type (e.g. .jpg) to another (e.g. .bmp) - this feature can be handy in saving the amount of disk space which is used by some images that you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account, this is because images of one format can take more space than those of which possess a different file extension since the type of file extension used normally links back to the quality of the image concerned - one thing to note about this tool is the fact that by converting images to a file format such as Bitmap (.bmp) could result in a loss of quality from the image concerned. You should always be careful when using the image tools that cPanel provides you with to manage and edit images that you have contained within your shared cPanel website hosting account effectively; this is because the changes you make are in most cases irreversible, which means that if you are doing the managing or editing from a remote location when you don’t have an original copy of the image you are editing, and you end up making an incorrect edit then you won’t be able to replace the edited image with the original which could cause some inconvenience and annoyance for both you and your website’s visitors.

Index Manager

The index manager feature of cPanel allows you to customize the way in which a directory appears to a passing website visitor when there isn’t any default page within the directory to be shown to visitors; this means that if a visitor does happen to stumble across an open directory within your website with no default/index page, they will still be shown the index which has been styled to ensure that it looks the way you want it to look - this is a big plus for cPanel since many other control panels do not give you the ability to do this. When using the index manager, you are presented with several different options; you are able to specify whether you want indexing for certain directories that you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting allowed or not - if you have indexing disabled then visitors and search engine spiders will be presented with a 403 error page, which will say that they are forbidden from being able to access the directory concerned - files within the directory will still be directly accessible, it just means that the actual index page showing all the files which are hosted within the directory concerned is not displayed. If you have indexing for certain directories that are contained within your web space enabled, then visitors will be openly able to browse the directory concerned and will have the ability to see all the files that the directory concerned holds within itself, meaning that the security of certain files can be easily compromised; however, unlike directories which forbid external access, search engine spiders will be able to crawl open directories which means that any files that you have contained within the directories which you have left open for people to browse will be accessible directly from search engines if a user was to enter keywords that are linked to files that might be hosted within the directories concerned that are contained within your shared cPanel website hosting account. There are also two other options that you can choose from when using the index manager feature of cPanel; those two options are text-only indexing as well as graphical and text indexing. Text only indexing means that the index page which is shown is only text based; this means that the file list will still be displayed, but will only have basic formatting when displayed - this feature can be handy for you if you are to have open directories that are going to be accessed by many people, since this type of index page will not use up much bandwidth since it won’t contain any images. Graphic and text index pages will be slightly more bandwidth heavy than their text based counterparts; this is because images can use up slightly more bandwidth and just plain text based pages, graphics and text based index pages should only be used in the situation where you are going to have a small amount of people accessing the directory concerned, because of the reason of bandwidth usage in relation to the amount of graphics that the actual index page contains.

Error Pages

The error pages feature of cPanel allows you to configure Apache to display custom error pages that you have created for display when your website suffers some sort of error or problem; this means that if your website endures a problem, an informative error page will be shown to the visitor containing your website’s design, meaning that your website can still retain its corporate identity even during a problem whether it be with the website’s code or one with the server on which the website is hosted. Custom error pages mean that you can display a custom message to visitors when a problem occurs with your website or the server that it is hosted on; this means that you can display an informative message to your users which you have written yourself, and not an uninformative message which has been generated automatically by the server which you are hosted on - automatically generated error messages are normally very technical and are usually of no use to the visitor or the person who is viewing the message unless they either have a sufficient amount of technical knowledge to understand the server, or if you are the server administrator who can then take the necessary action to rectify the problem if it is within a script that is hosted within your web space, or contact your web host with information of the problem if it happens to be a server side one which you are unable to fix yourself since you are on shared hosting, therefore meaning that you have no root or administrator access to the hosting server. cPanel allows you to setup custom error pages for five of the most common website and server side errors which could occur with either your website and the code that has been used to create it, or with the main host node on which your shared cPanel website hosting account is hosted; the error codes which can have custom error pages are 400, 401, 403, 404 and 500 - a 400 error normally refers to a bad gateway which means that a connection can’t be established to the server on which your website is hosted, a 401 error is one which will ask somebody for login details in order for them to be able to access either a password protected directory or file which you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account, a 403 error will be displayed when someone has tried to gain access to either a protected directory or file to which they are not allowed access, a 404 error page will be shown when a visitor tries to reach a directory or file under your domain name that doesn’t exist and a 500 error page will be displayed when there is an internal problem with either the code in which a page has been produced with or with the server itself which means that the directory, page or file that is trying to be accessed can’t be processed and in turn displayed properly because of either a code or server problem.

Mime Types

The mime types feature of cPanel allows you to set up certain settings that will tell the browsers of visitors to your website how to handle specific file extensions which users might be trying to access. This means that if you are using custom file extensions within your website for whatever reason, you can use this feature to tell your visitor’s browsers how to handle the files with custom extensions, and with another feature you can configure the server to run a specific program for files of a certain custom extension that are hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account. The main idea of mime types if to help you as the account holder to make use of new web technologies as they become available, even if your web host doesn’t - one thing to note though is that some technologies might require some server side work in order for them to function, and not just the simple adding or modification of mime types within your web hosting account; for example when WAP technology started to enter the world of web development, many web hosts did not have their servers setup correctly to allow WAP browsers to visit and view pages which people have designed for WAP compatible devices and have chosen to host within their shared cPanel website hosting account. For the most common file extensions which you and other people who are hosted on the same server as you will most probably using, the mime types have already been setup and correctly installed for use by everyone who is hosted on the server; this means that if you are new to the concept of web hosting and want to get your website started up trouble free and are not planning on using any complicated technologies within your website, then shared cPanel based website hosting is the right type of hosting for you since with the mime types being already installed, you needn’t alter anything complicated within your shared website hosting account. As mentioned previously, if you have the necessary knowledge and want use your website a custom way in relation to the server, then you can use the mime types feature to set up custom mime types for the files which you might have hosted within your shared website hosting account; the good thing with this feature is that any custom mime types that you set up within your shared website hosting account will not affect any other websites or hosting accounts that are hosted on the same web hosting server as you, and any custom mime types which other people who are hosted on the same server as you will not have any effect on the files which you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account. Also, most of the main mime types have been set up by either cPanel or your web host which means that the most basic files can be run without the need for any custom mime types.

Cron Jobs

The cron jobs feature of CPanel allows you to setup certain scripts that you might have running under your website to be run automatically at a certain time to carry out certain tasks which they have been designed for. The most common use of cron jobs (sometimes referred to as ‘Cron Jobs’ in terms of Linux website hosting) is to carry out tasks which need to be carried out on a regular basis without manual intervention; an example of a cron job in use would be in a web host billing system, where invoices for customers need to be generated at the beginning of the day without any manual intervention. You might also find cron jobs running in the situation where notifications of some sort need to be sent out to website visitors on a regular basis to ensure that they are aware of the latest information or of a new update in their account which they need to be made aware of. When setting up a cron job within CPanel, you are given the option to enter the full command for the script to ensure that it is executed correctly so that you don’t have to come and run the script manually to make it carry out its assigned task correctly. You can also choose the exact time for the script to be run by CPanel automatically - right down to the last minute, you can also choose for scripts to be run every minute of the day but this isn’t recommended since it could easily use up many server resources, and if you are on shared website hosting, could lead to your CPanel shared website hosting account being suspended because of server resource hogging as it is known. You can also choose for CPanel to send you an email notification to tell you whether the cron job has been executed successfully by the server that you are hosted on. You can also select the priority of the task which means that if it is of a high priority, it will be executed before other tasks which might be of a lower priority but still being executed at the same time as yours. You can also specify extra arguments for the execution of the task which you have not specified in the text box labeled for the command. Cron jobs can be incredibly handy in the situation where you need to run a script or task on your website at a certain time or at a certain period and aren’t able to be at your computer to run these tasks or scripts yourself when you need to during the day; this is because the cPanel cron jobs feature gives you the ability to schedule tasks or scripts related to your website to run at any time of the day and at regular periods if it is really necessary for the running of your website.

Frontpage Extensions

Frontpage extensions are the extensions that web hosts install on their servers to allow people who have built their websites in Microsoft’s now defunct WYSIWYG editor, Frontpage, to run correctly if special Frontpage functions have been used during the development of the website. Frontpage provides website builders with many different functions that they can insert into their website to help make it more appealing to their visitors; addable functions include ones which can display the weather for a certain location on the same day that someone visits your website, as well as a visitor counter so that your visitors can see how many people have visited your website since you first put the counter on display. You can also add a guestbook to your website that visitors can then sign when they visit your website; you can allow them to comment on anything including the design and layout of your website - you can even use the guestbook as a source of feedback when you are looking to give your website a makeover or an upgrade of some sort in the future. The Frontpage extension manager that is built into CPanel allows you to configure certain preferences regarding the sending of email from web pages which have been designed and configured in Microsoft Frontpage; this means that Frontpage web pages have are able to have the same dynamics as their server side equivalents, but have no need for the use of databases or the setting of permissions to ensure that they are able to function correctly. Access to the Frontpage web admin is also provided so that you are able to manage and configure other features that may play a part in the running of your web pages that you have designed in Frontpage and then uploaded to your shared CPanel website hosting account space. You are also able to setup extra Frontpage management accounts with many configurable preferences including the amount of disk space that they are allowed to use. If you are new to the concept of website design and scripting then you should try and build your first web pages in Frontpage; this is because Frontpage provides you with many components and add-ins for your website which you can use to expand its interactivity since you could add a guestbook, for example, to allow your visitors to comment on your website as well as the content and design of it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, cPanel provides you with many advanced features that can help you advance your website in terms of the technology that you have used to build it and to allow it to function correctly; some of the advanced features that cPanel provides you with are unique to it as a control panel, meaning that some of the features would only be achievable in a dedicated environment such as that which is provided by both VPS and dedicated server hosting since no other website hosting control panel is able to provide you with the same features at such a high level. We have discussed the fact that you can use certain features from the advanced section of cPanel to help you use your own file extensions within your website, to help aid its technical identity which website designers and internet professionals might take a look at - the use of custom file extensions can also be used as a security measure to help deter hackers and other malicious attackers from attacking your website in any way; you can also tell a visitor’s internet browser how to handle a file of a certain extension which you might have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account. The use of custom error pages has also been discussed within the context of this article; this means that if an error was to occur with your website, you can use custom error pages which will ensure that the graphical/design identity of your website will still be displayed, even if there does happen to be a problem with it - you can also take advantage of this feature to assure your website’s visitors that you are working your hardest to try and fix the problem as quickly and as  efficiently as possible. Another advanced feature of cPanel can also be used to schedule tasks to automatically run, meaning that the most important tasks required for your website to run efficiently will still take place, but automatically meaning that you don’t have to be sitting at your computer to ensure that the task or script that you want to run at certain times of the day is run successfully and efficiently. Another advanced feature of cPanel allows you to configure and run the settings that are needed to ensure that you can run web pages which you have designed within Microsoft Frontpage, and then uploaded to your cPanel web space from your desktop so that they can be viewed by your website visitors; this means that you can easily design feature rich web pages from within Microsoft Frontpage and utilize the the advanced components that it supplied, safe in the knowledge that any web pages that you create using it will run and display with ease from within the context of your shared website hosting space. Another feature built into cPanel allows you to edit any pictures or images that you have contained within your website hosting account on the fly; this means that you can carry out complicated operations on images from any internet connected computer as long as you can access cPanel without the need for any expensive desktop image editing packages. You are also able to set how unprotected directories with no default/index page in them are displayed; you are given a range of options which means that you can choose whether to save on the amount of bandwidth used or not by unprotected directories that have no default web page contained within them.

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