5 Tips For A More Reliable cPanel VPS

cPanel is an addon product that makes Linux hosting easier to control. You can create hosting accounts, plans and even reseller hosting plans with cPanel. What makes it great is the intuitive interface.

Even with all the easy control it requires some work to keep it out of hackers hands and working right. There’s a few things you can do to make your cPanel VPS hosting even more reliable.

Always Optimize Your Websites (even on a cPanel VPS)

Your server’s websites need to be optimized before most server changes will make any sort of significant difference. If your site is a WordPress site, we have an excellent wiki about how WordPress can be optimized.

5 Tips For More Reliable cPanel VPS Hosting

You want to make cPanel as easy to manage as possible and super reliable right? By changing a few settings we can make your sever more tough. You’ll make most of these changes in WHM, the “management” portal for your server.

1. Modify the Apache configuration

Depending on just a few values set in this ‘Global Configuration’ area of WHM’s ‘Apache Configuration’, your websites can either be fast as lightning or just struggling to load. Here are the values for an optimized Apache (already preset on our cPanel VPS hosting):

Server limit: 500
Max Clients: 500
Keep-Alive: On
Keep-Alive Timeout: 2
Timeout: 150

2. Monitor Your Server

We monitor the ping, on each and every cPanel VPS. That works great for catching major problems, for more granular reporting we recommend a few extra steps.

Website Monitoring: Use a tool like Pingdom to monitor specific sites on your VPS.

cPanel Contact Manager: Configure the contact manager in WHM to notify you of specific problems with accounts or usage on your server. For this to work properly, you’ll want to have your packages setup with appropriate limits. You can read more about the cPanel Contact Manager here.

Load Monitor (advanced): To be notified about a problem before it happens, you can have your server check the load every 5 minutes and email you if it’s too high.

This resource monitoring script  is extremely simple & efficient.

#!/bin/bash
hostname=$(hostname)
trigger=10.00
load=`cat /proc/loadavg | awk '{print $1}'`
response=`echo | awk -v T=$trigger -v L=$load 'BEGIN{if ( L > T){ print "greater"}}'`
if [[ $response = "greater" ]]
then
sar -q | mail -s"High load on $hostname - [ $load ]" [email protected]
fi

1. Put the above into a file on your server by entering the following in a SSH session:
   

nano /usr/local/sbin/loadavg

• Paste the code above by right-clicking. Then hit CTRL+O and enter to save. Press CTRL+X to exit nano.
• Be sure to replace ‘[email protected]‘ on the second to last line with your email address.
• You can also adjust at what load you would like to be notified by changing the “trigger” value.
• Then make it run automatically with the following command:
  

  crontab -e
  

• Once the new screen comes up, paste the below code at the top:
  

  */5 * * * * bash /usr/local/sbin/loadavg

Done! You now have your own load monitoring script that checks load every five minutes. Read about the “load” in this wiki to understand what it really means.

3. Beef Up Security

cPanel includes some great tools to keep your server secure, like ConfigServer Security & Firewall (CSF) and cpHulk. There’s a few more tools that can be added – to harden your server even more.

ModSecurity: ConfigServer has their own proprietary ModSecurity management suite which is by far the most excellent one out there. You can get that here.

eXploit Scanner:  Another Configserver tool this is a paid addon. You can check it out here.

4. Isolate Websites with CloudLinux

CloudLinux isolates each website from using up so many resources that it impacts other sites on the server. For someone hosting many sites, it’s highly recommended. You can read about CloudLinux here.

5. Support & Reliable Service

To maximize your chances of really great cPanel VPS Hosting, find a hosting provider that is has 24/7 support to handle any server problems you might run into. You should also know what their uptime promise is, as well as their SLA for any downtime.

We guarantee 99.99% uptime, and 200% money back for any outage. More about that in Hostek.com SLA.

Categories: Developers, Hosting