This is what your cpanel will look like in Hostgators web hosting. It lists all the different categories off things you will need to maintain a website. most people never get round to using all the different options within the cpanel, but they are there just incase.
Ill give you a rundown off all the different categories, so that you can get a feel of its functionality.
Partners
This basically is partner programs that you can use in conjunction with hostgator. For example you could add a shopping cart to your blog, by using one of hostgator partners, or you could use one of there partner companies web page templates, but these programs cost more money, so people tend to stay away from these. There is many free website templates available, just do a search on Google and you will see.
Hostgator Links
This category is an important feature of hostgator, because this is where you get live help if you ever need it. there open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, really friendly, and very knowledgeable, so they will sort out any problems you may have. Believe me its worth the small monthly fee just for this service alone.
Other options in this category include your billing, hostgator add ons, for example you can get a $50 credit towards Google adwords in this category.
Preferences
This is a good place to learn how to use hostgator, with video tutorials, a getting started wizard, and options like changing your password, or contact info.
Mail
As a beginner you probably will not use this category much, maybe to set up an email account for your website, but this is geared mainly towards email marketeers, who create lists of thousands of people on a database, then send out offers to them.
Files
I think this is probably your most important category, because this is where you will upload your files to hostgator, for example if you are using wordpress, then you need to upload your files to hostgator, so that they can be managed. You can upload your theme for your website, all the plugins you require, and the images, for your site. You will need a ftp (file transfer protocol) client to help you in getting your files from your hard drive, up to hostgator.
Ive included a picture of the file manager as this is where you will manage everything related to uploading your files to hostgator. It might seem a bit daunting right now, but its really not to bad to understand, and dont forget, you have the live chat if you ever get stuck.
Logs
This is the place where you can check your website stats, for example how many visitors you get , how much bandwith you are using on your host, for example a site dedicated to say photography will use lots of images, so it will use more bandwith. and depending on your package which I mentioned in my first post, you will have certain amounts of bandwith per package, so its important to check first, which package suits your needs.
Security
Ive never used this as its more to do with having hostgator on a network, say for example on a college network, so the administrator can protect certain files.
domains
In my first post I mentioned about domain names, you could just use a blogger like I am right now, so you dont need a domain name. But a lot of people use a hosting package so that they can buy a domain name, and redirect it to there hosting account. Domain names add a lot more weight in Googles eyes, so its a good idea to buy one. Its quite easy to redirect to your host, and there is also the option of adding sub domains.
a subdomain is a addon of your main domain, for example, say you redirected, mydomain.com to your host account, you could make many different subdomains of that name. site.mydomain.com, buy.mydomain.com, and so on. The beauty of sub domains is that they are free, and you can add as many as 1000, in a typical account, so your only buying 1 main domain name.
