Importance of Control Panels ( Cpanel and plesk) in web hosting management..

Every web hosting user is aware of  'control panels', by name may be?

Do you know what it does? neither did I. 

I dug deep into sources and here it is what I got, as promised sharing the insights with you now.

First of all, #control #panels what are these?

Managing multiple websites is very difficult as a website owner, to solve this hassle control panels are used. These panels give us complete control over the system, without the need to run codes every time. It is an Admin user interface. Where not just the admin but the hosting client also has the power to manage small thing their way.

Control Panel is a completely web-based interface which has the capability to manage your web services from a single location. These web based control panels can manage everything such as email accounts, FTP accounts, file management functions, the creation of sub-domains, disk space monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, create backups and much more.

The web hosting control panels provides an elegant solution to Linux newbies to host multiple websites on VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and Dedicated Servers. This kind of hosting panel offers easy to use management software’s to simplify the process of handling servers without the need of expert knowledge of sever administration.

The most famous and powerful control panels are cPanel and Plesk. These two popular panels are paid software’s and hosting provider will charge a monthly fee for installing it on the server. Fortunately, there are few more alternate open source control panels available to download at no cost with similar features.

Now, let’s move further to explore the 2 most trusted control panels one-by-one. 

1. cPanel

cPanel is a Unix based hosting control panel. The Graphical interface helps you to manage your Website and web hosting accounts very easily and quickly. The automation tools are designed to simplify the process of a website.

cPanel give you a complete control over the various aspects of website and administration through a standard web browser and also streamlines the process such as Creating database, setting up an email account and auto responder and managing website files.

Cpanel client view

2. Plesk

Plesk is a hosting control panel similar to cPanel which allows you to manage your hosting account through a web-based interface. 

This panel can be used with VPS, Shared and Dedicated Server. Plesk also enables you to control thousands of virtual host under a single machine. The control panel allows you to automate many tasks which in turn reduce the time, cost and resources. It also increases the profitability, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Control panels make your hosting plan most reliable

Features: 

1. Create FTP account for users.
2. Manage and create an email account and databases like MySQL and PsotgreSQL.
3. Add domains and subdomains.
4. Restore and take backup of files.
5. Manage DNS and other resources.

This is the client view for the plesk panel:

Plesk client view

This is it for now, If you want some more details, I can surely get it to you just ask your doubts in the comment box below.

keep reading..!!

-P.S    

VPS and its importance/ VPS how to choose the best plan/ VPS the small business manager.

A VPS ( virtual private server) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service.

It is essential this way to bridge the gap between the shared hosting and dedicated servers.

It's beneficial to the business that is big enough to outgrow the shared hosting package limits but still small to afford the high prices of the dedicated servers.

In shared hosting, a single server is segregated according to the customers need and price comfortability. It is a very cost effective way to the business or startup companies having not too many needs. A satisfying small group of customers and clients interacting at daily basis.

As soon as the startups grow its necessary the hosting plan to grow with them too. It means that the limited bandwidth and restricted web hosting space becomes less for them to operate from. They need bandwidth and large hosting space many domain names and also their control panel stuff.

The VPS means Partitioning a single server to appear as multiple servers. And giving control to each server to boot itself separately. Its a best way to run any business by using VPS hosting

but there are loopholes in choosing the good hosting provider.

How to decide which hosting provider will be good for us? We are going to help you with that only.

Virtual Private Servers

These are tips for you to choose wisely and cross check what features you need are available in a package. Every company gives a good show about their good features, to know more we need to dig deep.

First of all never fall for cheap things at an instant. There may be hundreds of companies saying that the product is cheap and reliable. But the point is, are we actually looking for just the price or comparing the whole package. Just because a company advertises cheap virtual private server hosting doesn’t mean they will actually save you money.

Things that we need a good VPS plan. Are mostly the bandwidth and the unmerited traffic, these two things give us the fast load time for our website and an extremely high deal of convenience when dealing with a lot of existing customers who have good interaction with you on daily basis.

• Sufficient RAM: not having enough RAM will slow your website's page load time. This also results in decrease of the number of software's that you can use. The slow responsive websites are frustrating and also discourage the customers from visiting again. Because customer perception comes from your own website's performance at first.

• High bandwidth: we were talking about this bandwidth for quite long, what is it actually. Bandwidth means the amount of information that your site is allowed to transit every month, it is included in the package. And a limit is already set, If you go overboard then the service provider will suspend your site till the rest for the month, but it rarely happens. Because set limit is at least twice more than you actually use it.

• Disk Space: Disk space is the memory space provided by the company to store the pictures, videos, texts that are required to run your website. In short your website's on page information.

• Customer support: VPS hosting is not easy to track single handedly, Always prefer a provider that gives you full or at least maintenance support from their side. We hostindia.net give you the best support and 24*7 assistance on any problem. 

• Up to date top notch servers: the younger the technology faster is the work performance, if you opt for a cheap service and save money, then you will definitely pay for it later. The slow page load time and frequent down time is a sign of old servers.
  We hostindia.net give you full control over your working environment and the best technology. No downtime and fastest page load.

When we are looking at hosting package that is custom made for users, it has specifications say the disk space, the ram, the bandwidth limit and also many hosting companies have the addons as cpanel or plesk panels to give additional power and control through their service.

Benefits of the VPS servers:

The first benefit is the price difference that it gives between dedicated and the shared hosting package.

It has all the advantages of a dedicated server with limited features but reduced price,

For example it gives us the stability to automatically reboot our system, but VPS packages do not give you the complete authority over the bandwidth. We get a reduced bandwidth but this is acceptable because of the benefit that it provides.

Hoping that your doubts would get clear with this post. For more details keep reading.

In my next post I will explain the the usability and importance of control panels (plesk and cpanel)

I will always be happy to hear from you, you can ask any questions by commenting below.

 Please like or comment if its useful for you. You can even request for posts, I try to put them as early as possible.

-P.S

Wondering why do we need SSL certificate for our website, here's the answer..!

       

   SSL(Secure Socket Layer) certificate is nothing but the 128- bit encryption, the method of securing your website for your valuable customers.  A large percentage of internet users leave websites when asked to provide any information about themselves, simply because the website was not a secure website.

Security and SSL certificate

There is no better way of building users' trust than by enabling SSL and getting it installed for your website.

If you are transmitting sensitive information on a website, such as credit card numbers or personal information, you need to secure it with SSL Encryption. 

It is possible for others ( I call them, hackers) to see every piece of data unless it is secured by an SSL certificate.
Thinking from a customer's perspective, I will always choose to browse a site or purchase from it only if it keeps my account information safe.
Now returning back to answering your question, To find out if you need an SSL certificate for your site or not.

Now let's focus on these points:

• Is my site an e-commerce site that collects credit card information from its customers?

Frankly speaking, if your answer is yes, then HURRY..! you might be loosing a valuable customer right this second! More and more customers are becoming online shoppers and won’t buy from you if you don’t have an SSL certificate installed.

Your customers are providing you with very important and personal information that allows access to their hard earned money. If an identity thief gets access to your customer’s credit card information because you didn’t take the necessary precautions, it can be devastating to you and to your customers.

• Do I use a 3rd party payment processor?

This is very easy if you forward your customers to a third party payment processor (eg. PayPal) then it's not mandatory to get the SSL certificate installation. Still, security has its prime value and there is no loss in a little extra precaution.

Here you have to know it for certain that you or your site has no payment authentication, you just redirect your customers to the third party. The address bar should not display your domain registration name on the payment gateway page.

But on the other hand, if you accept the credit card information on your site itself, you definitely need an SSL certificate. There is no negotiation on this point.

• Do I have a login form?

Login form where you ask your customers to enter their username and password to log-in to a specific page, and when you are not using an SSL certificate, any attacker can hack their password. It is well known that users have same passwords for different accounts, thus an attacker can potentially compromise many other accounts.

If you let people store a password with you, you must take responsibility for protecting it, even if the security of your own site isn't critical.

• Where do I purchase an SSL certificate?

Great! So you’re now sure that you need SSL for your e-commerce or another type of site. How do you know what type of certificate to purchase?

All the SSL certificates provide you with the security of the confidential information, by providing you with 128-bit encryption and 256 bit SSL encryption strength.  It secures your domain name from any potential threat. over the years the use of SSL certificate has dramatically increased. Some companies simply need SSL for confidentiality i.e encryption. And some others need it to grow their customers trust them.

You can check SSL certificate feature and pricing for more details.

Purchasing of SSL depends on your business requirement.

1. Extended Validation certificate:

Validation has simple meaning that your SSL provider does a background check on your company, it validates the following things:

• Verifying the legal, physical and operational existence of the entity.
• Verifying that the identity of the entity matches official records.
• Verifying that the entity has exclusive right to use the domain specified in the EV SSL   Certificate (Extended validation)
• Verifying that the entity has properly authorized the issuance of the EV SSL Certificate.

                    If you have business sites with number of domains, or You are an E-commerce site and while your users enter a username and password to access your site, and you accept card payments, in this scenario you need the highest security level SSL, it's called the extended SSL certificate it gives a green bar to you web address. Yeah, customers notice that green bar, trust me!

2. Organizational SSL Certificate:

•  Where the certificate authority checks right of the applicant to use a specific domain name also it conducts some examination of the organization.

• Many business sites have the requirement of single SSL certificate to all of their subdomains (eg. info., systems.), for this, they can use wildcard SSL or say shared SSL service, it's provided in the organizational SSL certificate category.

• Shared SSL can be used to avoid the need for purchasing an SSL certificate. The shared certificate does not use your domain name. The server host name is used in addition to the cPanel username to allow a secure connection to happen.

3. The AplhaSSL and DomainSSL: 

•  Are the basic and powerful SSL certificates. Where the CA(certificate authority) checks the right of the applicant to use a specific domain name.

•  No company identity information is vetted and no information is displayed other than encryption information within the Secure Site Seal. It can be used as per your business requirement.

•   It's on you to decide to have an SSL certificate or not, but after knowing that the internet is continuously battling with security threats it's wiser to go with a security protection option rather running without any. Because it's our service that matters in the business most. 

               If you are satisfied with the above answer do not forget to leave a reply,  in the case of any doubts or queries feel free to ask.

 -P.S