One of the hottest new TLDs (top-level domains) out there is the .Me domains. Technically belonging to the country of Montenegro, it is now being marketed as a personal domain (as in “me”). But is it for you?

Many registrars offer the ability to purchase domains under this TLD, regardless of where you live. It is a rather expensive domain; prices average around 12.37 pounds. Some registrars, such as Namecheap, currently require two year purchases, but many, such as Dynadot, only require one year.

Essentially, this domain is twice the price of a .com or .net domain, but it could be useful for a personal website or blog. One disadvantage is that the standard for websites is largely .com and .org. These two domains are the best domains to grab, as they are what the majority of your visitors expect.

If you’re thinking of purchasing a .me domain, though, you may wish to snap up yours before someone else does.

One of the most important aspects of running a website is getting rid of troublemakers. With Cpanel, this is easy. If, for example, someone keeps accessing your site in a malicious way, you can block their IP address with the IP Deny Manager. This will allow you to block a specific IP address, or range of addresses. Anyone who accesses from these IP’s will see your 403 (Access Denied) page.

You can also set up Hotlink Protection. This is an extremely valuable feature, because many people feel entitled to link to images on your website, because it is you who pays the bandwidth bill, and not them. By using the Hotlink Protection feature, you can make it so that your website (or URLs which you specify) are the only ones that can directly link to certain types of files, such as images, videos, sounds, or PDF files. These sorts of files tend to be rather large, and all it takes is few hundred downloads before your bandwidth allowance may be negatively impacted. However, these worries can be quickly eliminated by availing yourself of the Hotlink Protection. By setting it up within Cpanel, it takes just moments to assure that only your site can link to your files.

Managing your domain with Cpanel is a snap. With Cpanel, you can set up subdomains (subdomain.yourdomain.com). Subdomains are stored in their own folder on your server, although to the user it’s visible as subdomain.yourdomain.com. You can also set up redirects, which would automatically send visitors to a pre-determined site. Add-on domains are also possible, which are simply additional domains with their own folder (and hence website) which are managed under your account, according to the package that you have.

You can also park domains that you may have, but are not using at the moment. Parking a domain will point visitors to your main website.

With Cpanel, you don’t have to be a domain or DNS expert. With just a few clicks, you can easily set up subdomains and additional domains.

One cool application that is included with most reseller accounts is Fantastico, which allows you to install numerous applications with just a few clicks.

With Fantastico, you do not need to do the installation yourself. You can install blogs, forums, help desk applications and more.

Some of the many applications that you can easily install include WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, and OS Commerce. This makes it easy for you to set up a business/e-commerce website with ease, and without a lot of technical know-how. You simply select the application that you want to install, and then select the directory/path that you want the application to be installed in. Depending upon the application, you may need to select an administrative username and password. Within seconds, your new application is installed.

Fantasico is just another one of the many features that makes Cpanel and WHM the perfect control panel for your website.

Although the focus will be on Cpanel throughout this month, there are quite a few control panels to choose from. Plesk and DirectAdmin both offer the same basic features, although Cpanel is easily the most recognized and the most widely used.

Plesk is advanced, and intended for experienced users, and DirectAdmin is intended for those who may not have as much experience, but still need to administer their websites.

No matter what control panel you choose, it is certainly a lot easier than making changes via SSH or telnet.