SiteCozy

  • My account

The Cpanel WHM review – 2018 –

2018-08-20

SEO & Cpanel

We found that by design, Cpanel created several URLs for the same page when a webmaster created an addon domain. An addon domain is a secondary domain after creating the primary domain.

Example: primary domain: your1stdomain.com (when you subscribe to the web hosting company), addon domain: 2nddomain.com, addon domain: 3rddomain.com, addon domain: 4stdomain.com

On Cpanel, 2nddomain.tld (an addon domain) will be accessible through:

  • http://2nddomain.com
  • http://2nddomain.your1stdomain.com
  • http://your1stdomain.com/2nddomain.tld/
  • https://2nddomain.tld
  • https://2nddomain.your1stdomain.com
  • https://your1stdomain.com/2nddomain.tld/

In WHM there are many ways to access the same page. If Googlebot discovers it, it will be seen as duplicate content. Canonical tags should prevent Googlebot to pick the wrong URL, however, it is just hypothetical that everything would go fine. After years of webmastering, I see this feature as useless and counterproductive. This issue is so big so that webmasters ask how they can disable this feature on Namecheap and people on stackoverflow wonder how to disable this feature.

We found a way to fix this issue, click here to know it.

Apache configuration in WHM

Main options of Apache configuration panel in WHM

It is possible to create a customized apache customization thanks to a Cpanel feature called EasyApache. With EasyApache, you can install the PHP extensions, the Ruby extensions, several PHP versions on the same server. It is possible to choose between all PHP handlers like fcgi, cgi, suphp, dso and mod_ruid2. There is one PHP ini editor per PHP version. global directives can be added to a global HTaccess that take precedence over any htaccess directives on a customer account.

Security in WHM

One of our Cpanel accounts has been hacked on a shared web hosting server and the web hosting company has been unable to do anything against it. Read the full story here. For sure, it would not have happened on a VPS or on a dedicated server since the Cpanel installation does not count any other customer accounts. 

However, there are also good features. Thanks to CPhulk you can block bots trying to hack your Cpanel services using brute force attack. After trying to log in several times, an IP address can get blocked for a certain amount of time.

WHM has no firewall but it is possible to install APF and CSF plugins. Anyways a basic firewall is useless on a web hosting management panel because a web hosting business requires advanced rules like rate limiting.

Free SSL certificate

Cpanel provides free SSL certificate thanks to a feature called auto SSL by default. Once a new primary or addon domain is created on a Cpanel account, it can be accessed from HTTPS thanks to a SSL certificate that was automatically generated.

Portability of data from WHM

Cpanel has an advanced account import tool. It is easy to move accounts from a web hosting company to another using a backup or by providing the credentials to the former web server in the new web hosting account. Cpanel is popular among web hosting companies, it easy to find a new web hosting company and move your data to this new web hosting account running Cpanel.

Backup in WHM

backup admin panel in WHM

It is possible to set up a local backup and/or a remote backup using RSYNC, FTP, SFTP, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and WebDav. A selection of Cpanel users may be backed up with or without the WHM system files. The admin can schedule daily, weekly, monthly backups.

Features

Many features are really useful like the forwarders which forward email to another email address. This has a catchall to catch any emails to a particular domain.

It is really easy to create a subdomain and make it point to the folder where you already have a wordpress installation. 

The Softaculous plugin

Softaculous is a one-click installation plugin to install website scripts like WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla and many other scripts. Softaculous is well integrated into Cpanel. The Softaculous plugin is accessible to every customer and reseller on a server. An icon allows installing WordPress right from the Cpanel account.

Conclusion

WHM is a good web host manager, even if it counts some weak points related to SEO and security. However, Cpanel WHM is part of our three favorite web hosting managers (Plesk, WHM, Directadmin). Those 3 online applications are the best for hosting websites.

Related Posts:

  • How to get rid of the alternate URLs paths in Cpanel for an addon domain
  • How to install an additional domain in Cpanel?
  • 301 redirects vs canonical tags
Download our Broken link checker freeware here Buy a license key for the Sitecozy broken link checker

Customer Login

Lost password?

Categories

  • Webmaster advice
  • SEO advice
  • Web hosting
  • SiteCozy link checker KB
  • WordPress theme & plugin reviews
  • All articles
Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

Copyright Sitecozy 2018