What to look for in a Control Panel
Web hosting packages these days needs to provide a control panel for users to manage their accounts instead of letting them rely on the old FTP, because there is just some things that a control panel can do you that an FTP client cannot.
Web control panels allow users to access features like back-up and data restoration, manage multiple email accounts, creating spam filters and setting up mailing lists and enter mail exchange entries into domain name systems. Some UNIX based control panels offer access to Webalizer stats.
The ability for a control panel to provide you with the latest visitors, bandwidth usage and site error logs is also essential. This will allow you to successfully manage your website marketing campaign in the correct direction. Managing multiple FTP accounts like adding, editing and deleting passwords, enabling anonymous access, and ability to enable or kill FTP sessions is also one of the features to look out for in a control panel.
Control panels should also allow us to password-protect sub-directories and the ability to enable/disable FrontPage extensions. And the ability for us to create custom error pages is always a very welcome addition.
More sophisticated panels permit the experienced user to edit MIME (multimedia) types that the server can deliver, along with editing Apache handlers, which determine how the Web server will react with a specific type of file is called. Control panels will also permit you to install and uninstall FrontPage extensions, which allow Microsoft's site building and maintenance program to directly interface with your Web site from your client computer.
Marketing functions are now increasingly being included in control panels. More recent panels will allow you to submit your Web site to search engines. Sophisticated control panels will also provide a file manager, so you can easily delete or move files within your Web site's directory structure.
One of the most useful functions that control panels provide are pre-installed CGI or ASP scripts. Novice users can deploy the scripts through the control panel rather than having to prep and configure the scripts to work themselves. Pre-installed scripts often include a bulletin board, a live online chat application, random HTML generator, an advanced guest book, a counter generator, a clock and countdown generator, secure online form applications, internal search engine, banner and e-commerce applications. Some panels offer features such as a Web-based HTML editor and Perl script checker.
Accessing the database from the control panel user interface is one of the most important features you cannot live without. This allows you to add or edit a database with ease without having to install a copy of the RDBMS software on your local computer.
Though control panels should not be difficult to use, a knowledge base and a complete documentation set is indispensable. You may never know when bad things will happen and you may need to refer to the “holy bible”. To go with the knowledge base and documentations, just in case your problem is still not solved, a trouble ticketing system is needed to have you redirect the question to a trained personnel.
If you look out for these features in a control panel and they do provide it, you will not go wrong in your choice.
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