Free hosting is becoming quite an enticing idea especially since it involves using little or no money spent.Some web hosting companies offer the option of buying cheap domain and they host for you free of charge such as Truehost.In other cases you will get free domains and the option of buying hosting from them.

Most people willing to buy either the domain or hosting usually need a cpanel or which stands for Control Panel in full.Control panel is like the admin tool that assists you in managing your website once you get  hosting.At Truehost one can buy a cheap domain for as low as ksh 570 and get his/her website hosted for free.

Here is a summary of the cpanel features that come along with the free hosting package.

Just below see more features am going to highlight and what they actually do

FTP

FTP feature allows you to access your website files through a protocol called file transfer protocol.To achieve this you need a third party software and my most favorite is called File Zilla.

Directory Privacy

Another feature available in the cpanel is the directory protection.This feature allows you to protect your directories by making sure a name and password is used to access those files.

Email Forwarding

Email forwarding sends a copy of any incoming email from one address to another.This saves you the time to read your mails since you can receive them from one main account.In addition to forwarding individual mail accounts, you can forward all email from one domain to another.

Auto responders

autoresponders work by configuring an email account to send automated emails.This is very useful if you are on vacation or on leave.

Email disk usage

This cpanel feature allows you check the amount of disk space used up and allows you to recover disk space by deleting old messages from your mailbox.

Backups

The cpanel has several back up features like:file backups,cron job backups,database backups,email backups e.t.c All this will enable you to create backups of your files,database or emails and may be useful in case you accidentally lost your originals.

Mysql database wizard.

Mysql database wizard assists you in creating databases for your website.In addition to the mysql database wizard another closely related feature is phpmyadmin that offers an interface to edit your database or export and import databases.

Virus Scanner

This cpanel feature enables you to scan the entire mail,entire home directory or ftp space and detect any unusual virus that may have affected your mails or website files.

Index Manager

The Index Manager allows you to customize the way a directory will be viewed on the web. You can select between a default style, no indexes, or two types of indexing. If you do not wish for people to be able to see the files in your directory, choose No Indexing.

Track DNS

This offers network tools to find out information about any domain, or to trace the route from the server your site is on to the computer you are accessing Cpanel from. Under track dns we have :

1. Domain Lookup

this tool allows you to find out the IP address of any domain, as well as DNS information about that domain. This can be a very useful tool right after your site is set up or after DNS changes have been made to make sure your DNS is setup properly.

2.Trace Route

trace route allows you to trace the route from the computer you are accessing cPanel from to the server your site is on (i.e. the number of servers and what servers your data must pass through to get to your site

There are more features that come along with the free hosting package like mod security,IP blocks,website builder,lech protection,ssh access,cron jobs e.t.c

To conclude the free hosting package at True host will provide you these cpanel features to assist you in managing your website and on top of that provide 24/7 support.