In this article we'll go over what you'll find behind each icon the Domains section of your cPanel interface.
- Site Publisher - This is a very basic drag and drop editor that cPanel themselves includes as part of the hosting package. It can be used to quickly create a simple website for any of the domains hosted in your account.
- Domains - This will bring you to a list of all the domains currently configured in your hosting account. It includes links to each domain's document root, displays any active redirects for each domain, provides a link to manage certain aspects of the domain, and also a link to create email addresses for each domain.
- Addon Domains - This area is where you would go to create new Addon Domains. An Addon domain is any additional site you wish to host in the same package as your main account. Each Addon Domain is its own website and will have its own document root. This area also has a list of existing Addon Domains with links to their document root, redirection management, and the ability to remove any existing Addon Domain. Please note that removing any Addon Domain will delete all content within that specific domain's document root.
- Subdomains - This area is where you would create subdomains for an existing domain on your account. Subdomains differ from Addon Domains as they are a separate document root for a domain you have already created. You can install a completely separate content management system in a subdomain and manage it without affecting the main site. An example would be if you wanted to create a forum section for an existing site, you would create the 'forums' subdomain which would then be reached by going to forums.example.com in a browser.
- Aliases - This area allows you to make your website available from another domain name. For example, you can make example.net and example.info show content from example.com
- Redirects - This area allow you to easily add temporary or permanent redirects for any domain configured in your account. This would be used to forward traffic from one domain to another. A very common use for this function would be forcing all traffic from the unsecured http protocol to the secured https protocol so that all visitors to your site are redirected to your secured page.
- Zone Editor - This area is where you have the ability to edit, add, and manage all DNS entries for each domain configured in your hosting package. For example, if you wanted to use an external email service such as Google Workspace or Office 365, this is where you would enter the MX records so mail would properly be directed from your domain.
