cPanel is where you manage your hosting: files, email, databases, domains and backups. This covers signing in and the handful of tools most people need in the first week.
Signing in
Go to https://whmhost02.outsourceis.com:2083 and sign in with the username and password from your welcome email.
You can also reach it at https://yourdomain.com/cpanel once your domain points at us, which is easier to remember.
If your domain is not yet pointing at us, you can still reach cPanel using the server hostname in your welcome email. That lets you upload a site and set up email before you change your nameservers, so there is no gap in service.
Lost the password? Use Forgot Password on the sign-in page, or open a ticket from the client area. We cannot tell you your existing password — it is stored hashed — but we can reset it.
Uploading your website
Your site belongs in the public_html folder. Anything above that folder is not served to the web.
Two ways to get files there:
- File Manager in cPanel — best for a handful of files or a quick edit. It has an upload button and a built-in text editor.
- FTP or SFTP — better for a whole site. Create an account under FTP Accounts, then connect with FileZilla or similar. Prefer SFTP where offered; plain FTP sends your password unencrypted.
If you upload an index.html and still see a placeholder page, check the file is directly inside public_html and not in a subfolder created by the upload.
Email accounts
Under Email Accounts, choose Create, pick the address and set a password. The same screen shows the settings to enter in Outlook, Apple Mail or your phone — use the Connect Devices link rather than typing server names from memory.
Two things worth doing straight away:
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, or your mail is likely to land in junk folders. See our separate article on that.
- Set a mailbox quota. An unlimited mailbox that fills the account silently stops the website working too.
Databases
Use MySQL Database Wizard rather than the individual tools — it creates the database, creates a user, and assigns privileges in one pass, which is where people usually go wrong.
Note the database name and the username it produces — your application's configuration file needs both exactly as shown.
Database prefixing is turned off on our servers, so a database you name blog is simply blog. This is worth knowing because most cPanel guides you will find online assume prefixing is on and tell you to expect something like username_blog. If a tutorial's database name does not match what you see, that is why.
To browse or edit data directly, use phpMyAdmin.
Adding another domain
- Addon Domain — a separate website with its own folder, on the same account.
- Subdomain —
shop.yourdomain.com, with its own folder. - Alias (formerly Parked Domain) — a second domain showing the same site. This is what you want for a
.netthat should mirror your.com.
An alias is not a redirect. If you want one domain to redirect to another, use Redirects instead.
SSL certificates
Certificates are issued automatically. Once your domain points at our server, a free certificate is requested and installed for you, usually within a few hours, and renewed before it expires. There is nothing to buy and nothing to install.
If your site still shows “Not secure” after a day, see our article on free SSL certificates — it is normally either the domain not yet resolving to us, or mixed content on the page.
Backups
Take your own backups. Whatever we keep is a disaster-recovery measure for the server, not a substitute for your own copy of your site.
Under Backup, download a full account backup before any significant change — a CMS upgrade, a theme change, a plugin you have not used before. It takes a minute and it is the difference between a five-minute recovery and a bad afternoon.
Statistics and logs
Traffic figures are under Awstats or Webalizer. Raw access logs are under Raw Access, and Errors shows the most recent server errors — the first place to look when a page returns a 500.
Getting help
Open a ticket from the client area. Telling us the domain, the exact error text and what you did immediately before it gets you a useful answer on the first reply rather than the third.
