When hosting websites, whether as a mainstream hosting provider, a hobby, or to supplement another service, it’s your job to make sure your customers have access to technical support in case they need help.  Customer support is one of the highest expenses that a web host can encounter.  Just my making a few small changes, you can reduce the amount of customers that contact you for help, and increase your profit margin.

Revamp your “Welcome” documentation

The welcome documentation is usually an email that is sent to a new client containing server and account access information. It’s important to cover your bases to avoid ending up with confused users that have no other avenue but to ask you for help – something that tends to be frustrating for a new user.  Your welcome email should not be wordy, but rather bulleted and easy to read, and separated into sections.  It should contain any information your users needs to access their account and server, steps to get started, and how to find help.

Use video tutorials

Sites like Demo Demo provide flash tutorials for common control panel software, that can be branded to your company and used in your support center. Making it known to your customers that flash tutorials are available to explain the procedures for common tasks may prevent them from contacting you.

Establish a knowledge base

A knowledge base is generally used by hosting providers to provide information to address common questions and problems encountered by customers.  If you’re seeing a common question being risen by your users, consider making the answer to that question more visible by adding it to a knowledge base full of FAQs, or adding it to your welcome documentation.

Don’t do anything that provokes a response

It should be expected that changes and upgrades will need to take place during the life of a user’s account.  However, unless you’ve planned for the worse, don’t make changes that your customers will notice and likely contact you about unless you’ve notified them first.  If you’re making a change that may affect users, make sure your users know how the change can affect them and what steps to take if they have a problem.  It’s not recommended to play fast and loose with items that will attract user attention in a negative light, so plan your upgrades and changes accordingly.

Be open

Set up a blog or status site that your customers will know to check if they are experiencing a problem.  For example, Dreamhost has a website their customers can access to find out about outages or problems, thus preventing them from contacting the customer support center to find out what’s going on.  Customers tend to appreciate more transparency  when it comes to problems that can affect their site.

Test, test, test

It should go without saying that you should not deploy changes on your hosting servers without thoroughly testing them first.

Keep an eye out

If you are not monitoring your network, you’re a step behind from even the worst of the hosting providers out there.  You should be monitoring anything that could cause an interruption in service, as your customers should not know about downtime before you do.  Knowing when a problem will happen before it does will easily prevent  problems that can result in thousands of dollars in losses and customer support costs.

Be responsive

If you see a problem that is continually affecting multiple clients, do something about it.  Sites getting hacked? Consider implementing a solution to block the attacks and issuing an advisor so your customers know you are looking out for them.  Hosting servers are in constant need of maintenance to make sure they are running quickly and securely.

Get it right the first time

Anyone that manages a support center will know that each response, phone call, chat, and email costs money.  Addressing your customers’ requests and problems correctly and thoroughly the first time will limit your follow ups.

I wrote this nice one-liner for a user in the cPanel forums asking how to change all their current default addresses to :fail: -

http://thecpaneladmin.com/files/changedefaultaddr.sh.txt

Before you do anything like this, you should back up /etc/valiases. Keep in mind also that you can change the default address for new accounts in WHM > Tweak Settings.

Ref: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/force-default-mail-address-all-accounts-158722.html

A common question we get from cPanel administrators is whether it’s Ok to remove /home/.cpan since, on many servers, it tends to grow to a size exceeding 1G.  The short answer is yes – that folder is used by cPanel and Perl, and contains perl module installation files.

If you find that yours is occupying too much disk space, delete it, and run the following commands:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

cpan> install Bundle::CPAN>
cpan> reload index
cpan> reload cpan
cpan> exit

/scripts/checkperlmodules –full

Ftp is easy to configure on a cPanel server using WHM or the pureFTP configuration file.  The FTP service configuration in WHM is a no-brainer, but for those looking to set up FTP from command line (such as for automation purposes), you can use cPanel’s built-in template system to apply configuration options that will not be overwritten during cPanel updates.

The pureFTP template is located in /var/cpanel/conf/pureftpd/main, and is set up YAML style similar to most of cPanel’s internal configuration files. The settings in the template correlate directly to the same options in /etc/pure-ftpd.conf, but it’s better to edit the template since cPanel tends to prefer template-based configuration to regenerate (overwrite) config files.

So let’s change an option in the FTP configuration. I’m going to change the LimitRecursion value from 2000 to 10000, which will allow the FTP server to display more than 2000 files in a single folder. To do this, I’ll edit the value in the template file mentioned previously, and then apply the changes using one of the WHM binaries invoked from command line:

/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/bin/whostmgr2 doftpconfiguration

What if I wanted to specify an option that isn’t in the template? Well, you can do this one of two ways:

1. Add the option to the template

If you do this, note the syntax in the other FTP options – yes and no are enclosed in single quotes, everything else is not. You also need to envoke doftpconfiguration via the whostmgr2 command as shown above.

2. Change the option to pure-ftp.conf

You can change an option in the FTP configuration file and run /scripts/ftpup –force, and the template will add the changed values to the template as long as they don’t already exist. If they do, the template will change the specified option in pure-ftpd.conf to match its own value.

Generally this would com in use if you’re automating server setups.  You can create a standard template for pureFTP, and download it to your server upon setup and update the configuration. This prevents you from having to modify anything manually, which can be a pain when deploying a large number of servers:

wget -O /var/cpanel/conf/pureftp/main http://yourrepo/pureftp/main

/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/bin/whostmgr2 doftpconfiguration

Additional Resources:

cPanel Documenation: FTP Configuration

cPanel 11.25 introduces a new feature: The ability to have RoundCube use SQLite instead of MySQL. After benchmarking resource usage and performance, I’ve come to the conclusion that SQLite is definitely the best way to go for Roundcube. Having trouble making the decision? This article may help clear things up for you.

If you have a server with single standalone drives, you may have considered the possibility of adding additional hard drives to provide more disk capacity to your system. Luckily, this is very easy to set up and use with cPanel.

First things first, I’ll assume that you already have the hard drive physically installed in your system. This guide will show you how to partition, format, and configure cPanel to use an additional hard drive, in the simplest way possible.

There may come a point in time where you need to change the shared IP address of a server, with little to no interruption in service for your users.

This guide will show you how to change the shared IP of your cPanel server with the method I’ve used in the past. This is intended for intermediate to advanced administrators that have some basic knowledge of cPanel and networking.  This will only update the main IP of your server, and will not affect accounts that have dedicated IPs or SSL certificates.

It was announced by cPanel on April 14, 2010 that cPanel 11.25.1 will include a new database mapping feature that’s been long requested: the removal of cPanel username prefixes from the database names.  This is a non-reversible, opt-in feature that some hosts may find very valuable. But is it a feature that you need?

Who is this feature for?

• Hosts migrating entire servers from other control panels like Plesk or Ensim
• Single-customer environments

Who is this feature not for?

• Shared hosting providers
• Larger-scale hosts

The concerns that are initially raised is in regards to shared hosting servers. With the new database mapping feature turned on, if one user takes a database name, no one else on the server can use it. Additionally, you’re creating a conflict if you move that user from one server to another, where the recipient server already has a user with that database name.  For these reasons alone, I would not advise this option being enabled for the general shared hosting provider, if the end users are going to be allowed to pick database names.

One of the advantages of cPanel is that you can move accounts between cPanel servers, even those from other hosts. If one host has the new mapping feature enabled, and one doesn’t (or has an older version of cPanel), you’re likely going to have a problem. For hosts with high conversion rates, this can be a deal breaker if the ease of moving cPanel accounts from other hosts isn’t there anymore.  This feature also creates a break in the standardization that all cPanel servers inherently have.  Most users by now that have already used cPanel know about the current database naming scheme, so enabling this feature without any technical justification can also create confusion among users that are familiar with and have been using cPanel for a long time.

Update: A rep from cPanel added this comment:

As cPanel 11.25.0 builds 46057 and higher, accounts transferred from a cPanel 11.25.1 system will preserve the YAML mapping file. Any databases and database users that lack the old-style prefix will not be manageable in the 11.25.0 cPanel interface, but the information is at least retained for later use (e.g. if a system with such an account is later upgraded to cPanel 11.25.1+ then the pre-existing YAML file will be updated and the databases and user will be manageable in the cPanel interface).

On the other hand, this feature is extremely valuable for hosts converting from other control panels or fulfilling requirements of single-customer environments. Other control panels do not prefix usernames to the database name, so large transfers would be especially painful for a cPanel host that acquires a non-cPanel host. The new mapping feature will help eliminate downtime due to incorrect database connection parameters and the need for mass reconfiguration.

Finally, for hosts that offer VPS and Dedicated hosting to single-customer environments, it’s nice to finally be able to remove the prefix that annoys web developers and IT people in charge of moving their customer sites.

So while this new feature is exciting, it’s opt-in for a reason – and that doesn’t mean it’s right for your hosting setup.

Additional Information:

http://www.cpanel.net/blog/integration/2010/04/a-general-overview-of-database-mapping.html
http://www.cpanel.net/2010/05/backwards-incompatible.html
http://www.cpanel.net/blog/integration/2010/05/more-details-about-db-mapping.html

This article will not go into detailed technicalities on identifying, troubleshooting, tracing, and fixing hacks. These topics are far too broad to cover in a single article, and is outside the scope of this article’s intent. This guide is to help you, the system admin, come up with a plan to handle situations involving breached security.

By default, your main FTP (cPanel) user will have and FTP path to the user’s home folder, and each FTP user you create after that will have a path that you specify with you create the account in cPanel > FTP accounts.

Unfortunately, cPanel’s interface does not currently let you change the FTP paths for your main account or sub-accounts, but you can easily change these in the FTP user configuration files. Each cPanel user has a file in /etc/proftpd (yes, even if you use pure-ftp), which contains the information about the FTP users for that account. A sample FTP user file for the cPanel ‘user1′ may look like this:

newuser:$1$K4v6EN_V$gmV/YZVYP1w/oJRy/72cg.:2110:2098:user1:/home/user1/public_html/newuser:/bin/ftpsh
user1:$1$21PI_llg$mkBe12xsL2K3YZPSkM.3..:2110:2098::/home/user1:/bin/ftpsh
user_logs:$1$21PI_llg$mkBe12xsL2K3YZPSkM.3..:2110:2098:user1:/usr/local/apache/domlogs/user1:/bin/ftpsh

If you want to change the FTP root for any of the users, simply make the change in this file and restart your FTP service.