Your HostGator Control Panel

It may take a short while before your domain and host is setup. In the meantime you should receive an email from HostGator with a temporary link to view your website and access your control panel. Shortly after your domain and host are setup, if you enter your URL from a browser you should be viewing a page that looks similar to Figure 1-9.

Figure 1-9 Your Host Gator Getting Started Page

Alternatively, if the domain and host setup has not yet been completed, you can access this screen from the temporary link sent to your email. In your email there will be a link where you can view your site. The link will look similar to the following format:  http://250.250.250.250/~username.

We are going to start by logging into the control panel. Click on the first button titled ‘cPanel Login’ as shown in Figure 1-9. You will be prompted for your login information show in Figure 1-10. This will be the information that you entered when you purchased the package and put in all your personal information. If you have misplaced your login, you can retrieve it from the ‘Your HostGator Account Information’ email.

Figure 1-10 The login prompt to enter you HostGator control panel.

After entering in the correct login information you should be in front of your control panel which will look as shown in Figure 1-11.

Figure 1-11 The HostGator control panel first time login

You will be prompted with a dialog asking ‘Do you need help getting started?’ You may want click on ‘Get Started Now’ and you will be shown screen by screen a tutorial of your control panel. Many of the topics shown in this tutorial will also be shown in the following pages. If you do not want to go through the tutorials HostGator has to offer you can click ‘No, I’m fine. Thanks!’

In the control panel you will see two columns the first column contains groups such as ‘Anouncements’ or ‘Google Adwords Offer’. In the second row you will find groups such as ‘Partners’, ‘HostGator Links’, ‘Preferences’, ‘Mail’, etc. The three groups that we will be discussing are located in the second column and are titled as the ‘Mail’, ‘Files’, and ‘Databases’ group as shown in Figure 1-12.

Figure 1-12 Images of groups in HostGator Control Panel

What we are going to show you in these groups are as follows:

• Creating your email account
• Your current files in ‘File Manager’
• Your Databases

Creating your email account

Click on the ‘Email Accounts’ button in the ‘Email Group’ in your control panel and you will be shown a screen containing the following, Figure 1-13.

Figure 1-13 creating a new email group

Fill out the textboxes as shown in Figure 1-13. I want my email address to be admin@yourarcade.org, so in the first text box I will enter admin. Next, enter your password. Finally the mailbox quota depends on how much space you want to allocate to your mail box. If you think you are going to get a small amount of emails to your email you can keep the 250 quota. If you believe you are going to be getting a high quantity of emails to your address you can increase the size to 1000 or 2000 or whatever you feel is desirable.

After you have entered information into all the required fields click the ‘Create’ button. You will probably be presented with a new page that displays the following shown in Figure 1-14.

Figure 1-14 email account creation confirmation

If you would like to configure your email account with a mail client such as Outlook or other email clients you can click ‘Yes’. We are going to assume that you clicked ‘No’ as we will show you how to access your web mail.

After clicking ‘No’ you should be back at the email creation screen as shown in Figure 1-13 of your control panel. Near the bottom of the screen you will see the current emails that you have currently setup as shown in Figure 1-15.

Figure 1-15 the current emails associated with your account

Congrats! You now have an email at your ‘com’, ‘net’, or ‘org’ name. If someone asks what your email address is you can proudly say it is yourname@yourdomain.com.

Now we will show you how to access your newly created email account. You can access your webmail two ways, you can go to the main control panel and click on the ‘Webmail’ button from the ‘Mail’ group as shown in Figure 1-12, or you can go to www.yourarcade.org/webmail.

You will now be presented with a screen that displays the following figure shown in Figure 1-16.

Figure 1-16 your webmail login options

This screen is asking you which mail software you would like to use. They are all pretty similar except that they all have different interfaces. They will all take you to your inbox. If you click on ‘Enable AutoLoad’ you will not be presented with this screen again. Instead when you login you will be redirected to your mail inbox with the mail software of your choice.

We are going to assume you are going to use the option called ‘Round Cube’. Once you click on this button you will be taken to your email inbox as shown in Figure 1-17.

Figure 1-17 your webmail account

From this screen you can compose emails, check emails, add contacts, and any other type of functionality you can normally perform with an email account. So congrats again, and feel proud that you now have your own specialized email instead of a commercial email such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or Google. Although the previously mentioned commercial email accounts are still good email accounts to have; you have now distinguished yourself from other email account holders because you now have your own arcade email account!

Your current files in ‘File Manager’

Now, we are going to show you your current files that are in your ‘File Manager’. Just as described above, the hosting company is basically hosting a computer for you to store your files on. The ‘File Manager’ directory will show you these files. The ‘File Manager’ will take you to your folder of files. So go ahead and click on the ‘File Manager’ button from the ‘Files’ group shown in Figure 1-12.

After you click on ‘File Manager’ you will be prompted with a dialog as shown in Figure 1-18.

Figure 1-18 File Manager Directory Selection Prompt

This prompt is asking you what directory or folder you would like to select. If you register other domains with HostGator you will see those domains shown in the dropdown list. Each new domain that you register will be like creating a new folder. So this prompt is basically asking you which folder you would like to select. We will not describe the other options as this will become apparent soon enough. Go ahead and click the ‘Go’ button and you should have a screen as shown below in Figure 1-19.

Figure 1-19 Your File Manager Directory

Right now the files listed should be a ‘default.html’ file and a ‘cgi-bin’ folder. These are the current files that are in the yourarcade.org directory. The ‘default.html’ is the file that loads when someone navigates to www.yourarcade.org. The default.html file may also be called ‘index.html’. If there is a file in this directory titled ‘index.html’ or ‘default.html’ the user will automatically be directed to these files when typing your arcade domain in their browser address bar. We will soon be replacing the ‘default.html’ file, so that when a user enters in your domain name they will be directed to your arcade homepage.

This is all that we want you to know at this time about your files stored on your host computer. We will get to more about this topic in Hour 3, when we will transfer the arcade files from your local/home computer to your hosting computer.

Your Databases

In this portion all we want to accomplish is to introduce you to the process of how your databases are created. If you are not familiar with databases the main thing you need to know is that a database is a container that stores information. A database is similar to a file that stores a lot of information, it can be looked at like an excel spreadsheet. A spreadsheet contains a lot of data. Our arcade will contain a lot of data such as users, games, comments, etc and it will all be stored in our database. If this sounds complicated, please be assured that the process will be extensively explained and that the concept of databases is actually very simple.

We are not going to create a database just yet; however we just wanted to make you aware of the ‘Databases’ group in our control panel. When we create our database we will be using the ‘MySQL Database Wizard’ selection as shown in Figure 1-12.

Okay… It seems that hour 1 has preceded us. It’s been a great hour and we have traveled a great deal through our adventure; however, the best is still yet to come. Let’s start with hour 2 where we will purchase and download the arcade script that we are going to use through this book. We will also show you other arcade scripts and sites that are run through these scripts, so the next hour was designed to be fairly short and fun… Oh and congratulations because you are now hosting your own ‘.com’, ‘.net’, or ‘.org’ domain name!