cPanel has capabilities beyond what the owner of a website sees.  cPanel is not just for accounts on shared hosting or for end-users with a single site.

It provides browser-based tools for server administrators as well as for resellers where you control, automate and administer the server, including other people’s accounts, all via a web interface.  You can still administer the server using command line, logging in via SSH.

I mentioned dedicated hosting. There is also virtual private server (VPS) hosting.  VPS is between shared hosting and a dedicated server. A dedicated server gives you your own “box.”  You get full control over your settings, configuration and applications.  Scan down towards the bottom of this post for a brief discussion about why either might be a good option for you.

You might be surprised at how easy the move from shared hosting to VPS or dedicated server can be.  After using cPanel to work with a site at a shared hosting plan, you will have learned a lot about it and be comfortable.  When you move to a VPS or dedicated server, your knowledge of cPanel will simplify the step up in hosting.

Your current  hosting company may even offer dedicated hosting or VPS. They would be a good place to look first because they might even be able to help you move to the new plan.

Worth noting is Plesk is another leading control panel in addition to cPanel. I use cPanel and don’t cover Plesk here, but there is plenty of info to research it.

Reasons You May Have Outgrown Shared Hosting

• Your site gets a lot of traffic and needs more than basic processing power of a server that has 10,000 other sites running on it.
• You need specific settings or configuration to run your site or app that your hosting provider will not allow, or does not provide.
• You want to resell hosting to others to complement your core business. You might be a web developer, or graphic designer with clients and see an opportunity for more revenue.
• You want to get into the business of selling web hosting.
• Another customer on your current shared server got hacked and the hackers were able to bring down your site.

Before you upgrade anything, make sure you have backup copies …

This quote is from the WordPress readme.html file in the section “Upgrading Manually.”  Even if you use the automatic upgrader, back up your site and your database first. It’s always a good idea.

When you start to upgrade from within WordPress, you will see the highlighted message “Important: before upgrading, please backup your database and files.”  This link is to the official WordPress site that provides instructions about how to perform a backup. For cPanel users, the instructions say to use phpMyAdmin.  You can do this, but even easier is to use the cPanel “Backups” function.  Just look for the icon that I show in the top left of this post.

Whether your new web host will handle it all for you, it is wise to back up your site!

To do a full backup, log into cPanel and find the icon labeled “Backup Wizard”

Select the text button labeled “Backup –> ”  The next screen will give you the option of full or partial backup.

Select  ”Full Backup –> ” This will create a zipped copy of your entire site.  Note the text on the screen. This says that this will be a backup for moving to a new server.

On the next screen, you set up where to store the backup file that is created.  For “Backup Destination” keep the default “Home Directory” selection.

For the “Email Address” enter a valid email address and the server will email you when the backup is ready.

When the backup is complete, download the file by clicking on the link in the backup wizard where we left off (refresh your browser). Or you can log into your server via FTP and download it.

If you use FTP, go to your home directory. The file will be named in the form backup-1.27.2011_10-12-22_yoursite.tar.gz  where parts of the filename are separated by underscores. The first part of the filename is the date, the second part is a time stamp. The third is your site account name. “tar.gz” is file extension. (tar.gz means the file is a “tar ball” and  gzipped.)  Download this file to your desktop or laptop computer for a local copy of the file for safekeeping.

Contact your new hosting company for further instructions. Restoring a site from a full backup requires root access.  The important thing is that moving a site from a cPanel host to a cPanel host makes it easy for the hosting company which makes it easy for you.

Get your  job to include useful info in the email that it sends you.  You can notifiy yourself of success or failure, or post details about the nature or results of the cron job.

Let’s say your cron job automatically IMs your boss with a random question every hour (like Wally did in this Dilbert comic strip):

Here’s the code snippet (PHP) that is part of your script run by cron. It lets you know whether your job worked or not, and what you IM-ed:

// check for success or failure

if (empty($buffer)) {

echo “failure”;

else {

echo “success — the IM message was: ” . $im;

}

My example uses  PHP, but the concept is the same if you use PERL, bash shell or whatever you prefer.

When you are working on localhost, the output will display on screen.  You can check and debug there. When you are on your server, the output will be part of the email the server sends you. That way your will have an email history of what you automatically IM-ed your boss and what time it went out.

Take a look at The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time:

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable.

Here is a handy random password generator that I use often.

Awhile ago I moved into a house that had a password protected security system. The previous owners did not provide the password. I was able to guess the password and was able to walk right into an unlocked house. That password was among the top 10. Though friends and family were amazed at my abilities, I had simply used what I knew was a common password. (I never told them my little trick that made getting in easy.)  Don’t let your email, website, or any online login be as wide open as that house was.

In case you have never seen one, an “internal server error” page will usually be all text and say something like:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete your
request.Please contact the server administrator,
[email address] and inform them of the time the
error occurred, and anything you might have done
that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered
while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the
request.

What do you do? Check your error logs. cPanel makes it easy to do this.

Log into your cPanel. Scroll down to “Error logs.” This link will show you the most recent entries into the error log for your site. Look for the the date and time of the error you are trying to track down. The logs will provide some info about the error and the file that caused the error.

Remember to use the secure login when you are using a wireless internet connection that is not your own secured network.

cPanel

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/cpanel/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2082/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2083/

Webmail

• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com/webmail/
• Non-Secure http://yoursite.com:2095/
• Secure https://yoursite.com:2096/

This is because if your script is in, or under, your /public_html/ directory, then it can be executed via a browser by anyone anytime.

Sometimes, it does not restart. This happened to me recently for the first time after years of working with cPanel and Web Host Manager.

If you have shell access, restart cPanel with this command:

/etc/init.d/cpanel restart

cpsrvd failed @ Apr 05 07:08:11 2007. A restart was attempted automagicly.

Yikes! What the heck this this mean? For a long time, I was so spooked by the words “failed” and “restart” that I assumed “automagicaly” was a typo for automatically and missed the small joke.

cpsrvd is “cPanel Service Daemon,” which is gives you cPanel services. It crashes. Often. So often, cPanel handles the crash well by restarting and sending you the above email. So, it’s not a problem. Relax. Whew.