Many people tend to shy away from accessing their cPanel for fear of doing something by mistake that crashes their website.  Don't let that fear stop you or even slow you down.  The cPanel looks a lot like your Windows Desktop.  There are Icons for accessing the various sections and each section has a reasonable amount of help.  But if you see something that looks interesting but aren't quite sure what it is, you can always click the Icon to Submit a Support Request and ask about it.  You will get a reply right away 24/7.

Statistics
You will also see a lot of general statistics down the left column of your cPanel Home page.  Things like how many MySQL databases you are allowed and how many you currently have.  How much disk space  you are allowed and how much your website is currently using up.  There are 32 bits of information down that left column.  Even information that your Web Designer may need, like the Path to Sendmail.

Another good thing that you can't possibly be concerned about using are your Website Traffic Stats.  Your cPanel has a web log processor called Awstats which converts all the hard to read and understand log entries into nice charts and graphs.  All of the statistical reports are updated every 24 hours. All of the bandwidth information is updated every 6 hours.

Backups
While the data center does have your website on multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration and they do periodical backups of the drives, it's still not a bad idea to do a quick backup of  your website prior to doing any major changes.  Just a couple of clicks and you can have a backup file saved in your FTP home folder or download it to your hard drive.  An excellent thing to do just before that large site update.