Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

Security is probably the biggest concern when one uses the Internet. As a place where people can anonymously send or retrieve information, anything can happen on the Internet. Today, it is common to find information theft. That is why it is advised that we do anything we can to protect ourselves.

One of the many ways to keep ourselves safe from identity theft is to change our password periodically as this can prevent unwanted people to remember our password. If you have a cPanel account, feel fortunate as changing your password can be done easily and quickly.

Before you actually change your password, there are several things you should remember to help protect you from password theft. To protect your password, you should never write it down. Instead, try to memorize it. If you write your password down, chances are someone can find and break into your account. Do not share it with others or by any chance, provide it to anyone claiming to be from vendors of a particular program or application. You should also use unrelated password for systems controlled by different organizations.

To keep your password foolproof, choose a password that you can easily memorize but are hard for others to guess. Prevent from using a name (including your own, your friend’s, your family member’s or your pet’s) or a variation of your personal or account name. Do not use easily accessible information such as your phone number, license plate number or social security number. Try to use a pass phrase or an understandable sequence of words.

To change your password, go to the “Change Password” option. It is located in the “Preferences” menu, between “Video Tutorials” and “Update Contact Info”. What it does is simply change the password of your main account. This is the password you use to access your cPanel. Probably the simplest section of the entire cPanel, changing your password can be accomplished in four easy steps:

1. Enter your current password in the “Old Password” text box.
2. Enter your desired new password in the “New Password” text box.
3. Enter the same password in the “New Password (again)” text box to verify your new password.
4. Hit the “Change your password now” button to complete the process. Your password should already be changed.

Voila! You have changed the password to your account. Try to memorize it and always remember to change it periodically, as it is easy to do so using cPanel.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

As one of the best of its kind in the market, the cPanel is a great website administration program that comes with a bunch of helpful and easy to learn features. Friendly to even the newest users, cPanel makes setting up a website easy and painless. In these series of articles, we will be discussing about one of the many useful features in cPanel, the “Preferences” menu.

The “Preferences” menu bar is the home of 7 easy access menus: Getting Started Wizard, Video Tutorials, Change Password, Update Contact Info, Change Style, Change Language, and Shortcuts. Using the “Preferences” menu, you can easily change the settings in your account. For example, you can modify the way your account looks, change your password, set up email accounts, choose a language of your preference, create dozens of easy shortcuts, etc.

If you are just starting to use cPanel, it is advised that you first familiarize yourself with the “Getting Started Wizard” tool. The Wizard is a built-in tool that allows quick configuring of your control panel. It gives you an overview of the many features available in your account and also provides some basic knowledge on how to use the cPanel.

The Wizard conveniently provides step-by-step guides to help you maintain your account. For example, the Wizard can teach you to how to easily drag and drop files from your hard drive into your server. It can also show you how to use webmail and set up your own email accounts. It will also help you keep your contact information up to date.

The “Getting Started Wizard” has 7 configuration sections. They are:

1. New Email Account Setup
2. Access Email through Webmail
3. Update Contact Information
4. Setup Default Address
5. Subdomain Configuration
6. Change cPanel Look and Feel

To start using these configuration sections, you are given two options. First, you can use the “Jump to Section” feature that appears on every page and can be used at any point during the Wizard. The “Jump to Section” feature allows you to “jump” to any of the 7 configuration sections. Or, you can also click on the “Begin Wizard” button to go through the Wizard and follow each step.

The Wizard, just like its namesake, makes setting up your account quick and easy, just like magic. You can always trust the cPanel Wizard to help maintain the administration your website.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

Back up type
Choosing your Backup Type will determine the method of which your server will use to backup your files.

We can pick between: Remote Ftp Server (Accounts Only), or Standard.

If you pick Remote Ftp Server, then you will have to configure the options shown below (Ftp Backup Host, Ftp Backup User, and Ftp Backup Pass). Keep in mind that this option will only backup account information and nothing more. Also, it will take a share of your bandwidth, depending on the amount of information being transferred across the Internet. If your server does not have a backup drive, and your information is valuable to you, I’d personally recommend using this option, and setting your Backup Internal to Monthly. Transferring all your account information once a month should not be that big of a deal, especially if your information is valuable to you. Again, this is my personal recommendation, it is not mandatory.

If you do have a secondary backup drive, then picking the Standard option will be your best choice. The Standard option will allow your server to backup all of the information you’ve specified in the options above at the time interval you have set.

Sql databases
Here, you can decide what backups of MySQL are performed. You can either backup per account, per account and the whole MySQL directory, or just the MySQL directory only. I recommend leaving the default option which is Per Accounts and Entire MySQL Dir.

Ftp back up host
If your Backup Type is Remote Ftp Server then fill this field with the FTP Server’s hostname. If your Backup Type is Standard then you can skip this option, and leave it blank.

Ftp back up user
If your Backup Type is Remote Ftp Server then fill this field with the FTP username. If your Backup Type is Standard then you can skip this option, and leave it blank.

Back up destination
In this field, you will have to fill in the destination of your backup drive. This is your backup drive mount point, and by default cPanel will fill it as /backup (scroll back to Part 2 and see how you mounted your backup drive). You can skip this option, and leave it blank if you’re going to use the FTP Backup option.

There are a lot of options to configuring backup with your cPanel. It is up to you to use which feature to make your website more powerful and useful.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

Days to run backup
This part lets you decide which days you wish to have your backups run. If you’re going to use a daily backup interval, you can pick which days of the week you would like a daily backup to be performed. If your backup solution is a weekly one, pick which day of the week your server should perform backups. It is ideal if you pick a day that the server load is at its lowest, preferably a weekend. If your backup interval is set to monthly, pick which day of the month you would like backups to be performed. The day you pick will be 30 days from the last monthly backup performed.

Remount/unmount back up drives
This option allows your server to remount and unmount your backup drive every time it commits the backup routine. That means that your backup drive will remain unmounted just until the time has come to do the backups, only then will the server mount the drive, and start the backup. Once backups are done, the server will unmount the drive.

Bail out the drive
If you have selected the above option (Remount/Unmount backup drive) , then I recommend also enabling this option as well. If you do not enable this option, and your server cannot mount the backup drive, it will continue to try and mount the drive, eventually creating unnecessary load on your server. However, if you select this option, your server will bail out, and will stop trying to mount the backup drive, if it is unable to do so.

Incremental back up
Selecting this option will enable incremental backups, ensuring that only information that has been changed since the last backup will be added to the current backup, thus incrementing the backed up information. Keep in mind, no compression will apply to this backup method. It is also not compatible with remote ftp backups.

Back up accounts
This option basically allows accounts to enable or disable account backups. I recommend leaving it on the default option, which is enable .

Back up configuration files
If you wish to backup common configuration files i.e. httpd.conf, named.conf, you can enable this option. Otherwise, disable it if you do not wish to backup the configuration files. This option is enabled by default, I recommend leaving it enabled.

There are a lot more of configuring backup tips. Find it in the part 3.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

cPanel allows you to easily configure your backup with just a few button clicks. The backup configuration is very basic, easy to use, and effective for your server’s environment.

First of all, scroll down on the left frame until you reach the Backup section. Next, click on Configure Backups as seen in the left snap shot.

We will go over each and every option (shown in the table below), and determine what is the best backup strategy solution for your environment.

Back up status
We have three modes for this option: Enabled, Disabled, and Restore Only.

• Enabled mode will allow cPanel to create and restore backups. You should use this mode when you need cPanel to create new backups.
• Disabled mode will disallow cPanel to create and restore backups. You should use this mode whenever you don’t want cPanel from creating new backups, or you don’t want to use the restore option. One scenario where you want to disable backups is if your backup drive is having hardware issues, and you’re in the process of replacing it. You can disable backups until you’ve replaced the hard drive with a new one.
• Restore Only mode will allow you to only restore backups. You can use this option if you don’t want cPanel from creating and overwriting existing backups, and you wish to only use the restore function.

Back up interval
This sets on how frequent your backups will take place. Either Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. As mentioned by cPanel, keep in mind that selecting Daily Backup will give you monthly and weekly as well, selecting weekly backup will give you monthly as well.

Choosing how frequent your backups will take place is very crucial to your server operation. If your server holds large amounts of data (e.g. 40-60G of user information), picking the Daily backup routine will not be the best choice in my opinion. Your server will be compressing, and then copying 40-60G on a regular daily basis. That’s quite a lot of server processing each and every day. I’d say this is an unwanted server load. In this case, weekly backups would be a better choice than a daily backup. You will have to think carefully as what your server will function as, and then pick what is best for your server proper functionality.

There are more about the configuring back up in the part 2.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

Customers complain often that s/he cannot receive e-mail through their mail client. There could be many reasons as to why they are not receiving their e-mail. Before a reason is established by the system administrator, it is necessary to determine if the problem is occuring from the user’s side, or the server’s side. How do we find out where the problem originates? – Very simple. We need to see for ourselves, if we are able to check our customer’s email.

How can that be done? – Two ways:

1. Configure our customer’s email account on our mail client, and try to receive his email.
2. Check our customer’s POP3 account through Telnet.

Configuring our customer’s e-mail through our own mail client can take some time, and if we forget to check the box that says to ‘Leave mail on server,’ then we basically download and wipe our customer’s email from his POP3 account. The quickest and safest way would be to check it from the CLI (command line), using Telnet on our side.

Step 1: Telnet to the mail server through port 110 (POP3 port)
Step 2: Listing and viewing your customer’s current email

Now that we have connected to the mail server, we need to authenticate ourselves with our customer’s username and password. Type in your customer’s username, followed by his password:

+OK Welcome to MailEnable POP3 Server
user user@e-hosting.com.my
pass 1234567890

Our next step would be to get a listing of our customer’s mailbox (be sure to send a test email prior to checking the mailbox, just in case the mailbox is empty). Type ‘list’ at the CLI to list all the current mail, following by ‘retr’ (where is the message number) to retrieve a specific email.

That’s all! – If the above steps worked, then it means that there is nothing wrong with the customer’s email account on the server’s side. If your customer continues,

Here is a summary of the POP commands that can be used in the CLI:

1. USER user@e-hosting.com.my - Log in as “pete.freeserve.co.uk”
2. PASS password - Substituting “password” for your actual password
3. STAT - List number of messages, total mailbox size
4. LIST - List messages and sizes
5. RETR n - Show message n (where n is number of the message required)
6. DELE n - Mark message n for deletion (where n is number of the message required)
7. RSET - Undo any changes
8. QUIT - Logout (expunges messages if no RSET)

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

This article will provide information on how backups are handled in cPanel, what are our options as system administrators, and a few tips on how to pick a good backup strategy for our server. The information contained within this article is based solely on my experience with cPanel, and Linux based servers.

Part 1: Backup Overview
Backups are the most important factor in every server environment. Backups are a crucial stand point for possible hardware and/or software failure. If your data is important to you and your clients, setting up backups will be your first consideration. Backups are usually done on a separate hardware device (e.g. second hard drive), although it is possible to use the same device for backups. I highly recommend not using the same device, as you leave no second recovery option in case your only hardware device fails.

Part 2: Preparing Your Backup Drive
[Skip this part if your hard drive has already been formatted and mounted]
If you have an unformatted secondary drive in your server, you will have to format and mount it as the backup drive. WHM (Web Host Manager) will allow you to quickly perform these steps to setup and configure your secondary hard drive as a quick backup solution. This will be your first step toward a complete backup configuration.

Log into WHM, and scroll down on the left frame of your web browser until you see the Disk Drives section as seen in the snap shot to the left. Our first step will be to mount, and format our new hard drive. Click on the Format/Mount a new Hard Drive button.

cPanel will quickly scan your system, and display its findings as seen in the snap shot below.

Note: If cPanel didn’t find any available unformatted drives, it will display a message stating so.

Our next step will be to partition, format, and mount our new hard drive. Click on the Partition, Format, and Mount Disk button. cPanel will display several file system selections, and a Mount Point as seen in the snap shot below.

By default, cPanel will assign /backup as your server’s Mount Point . If you’re going to use your second hard drive as a backup drive as presented in this example, I recommend using the default Mount Point assignment, although it can be just any name you want to use (e.g. /home2 ). I personally prefer using /backup as it makes sense that it is the backup drive.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

One of the many advantages of using a cPanel to administer your website is that it makes so many functions easy and fast to do. With cPanel, you can quickly and easily access all the features available to your account and manage your website efficiently. For example, you can manage your e-mail accounts and check your web mail simply with a touch of a button.

As cPanel is a web based software, you will need to have an active Internet connection before you can access your account. The advantage of having a web based control panel is that you can easily access your files easily from anywhere in the world, at the time of your convenience.

To add an e-mail account, first you need to open your browser and type in the URL address of your cPanel. It is usually located at http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel or http://www.yourdomain.com:2082. Once you’ve typed in the URL and clicked Go, an authentication window will pop up to prompt for your username and password. Once you’ve inputted your username and password, click OK. The browser will proceed to load the cPanel main menu.

To access the mail menu, click on the Mail icon. A new page, Mail Manager Main Menu will pop up. To manage your e-mail accounts, click on the link that says Add/Remove/Manage Accounts. A new page, Mail Account Maintenance, will show. The page will list the e-mail accounts already available on your domain. To add an account, choose the link Add Account.

Once the Add Mail Account page has loaded, you can then proceed to input the desired username and password. Optionally, you can also supply the quota of the e-mail account. If you decide not to change it, the default size is 10 MB per e-mail account. Click the Create button to create the account. A confirmation page will load if the creation of e-mail account succeeds.

Removing an account is as simple as creating it. First, you need to go back to the Mail Account Maintenance page. The page will list the e-mail accounts already created on your domain. Next to each e-mail account, there will be a text link that says Delete. Click on the link to delete the account. You will then be asked for confirmation. Click the Yes button to proceed deleting the account. A confirmation page will load if the deletion succeeds. And voila, you are done!

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

As a leading website administering software in the market, there are many advantages that you can get when you install cPanel. Not only is the cPanel easy to use, it also has many features that are necessary to run a website. It also helps automates many basic functions that can save you plenty of time and energy. A task that cPanel can help simplify is creating back up files.

You may already realize the importance of creating backup files in case something goes wrong with your website. Using cPanel, it is easy to create backup files. First, you need to log in to your cPanel account. You can choose to click on either Backup Wizard or Files > Backups. If you have never done this before, then it is advised that you use the Backup Wizard to help you learn the step-by-step processes of backing up. Either way, both options will go through the same steps.

Next, you can choose between two backup options: Full Backup or Partial Backups. It is advised that you choose full backup if you can save your files to a remote server. Otherwise, the cPanel will create a copy of all your files in the home directory. Of course, this doesn’t save you should your server crashes. The second option, partial backup, allows you to save some files to your local hard drive.

To restore your backup files, first you need to log in to your cPanel account. After you’ve logged in, choose either the Backup Wizard or File > Backups. Again, it is advised that you choose Backup Wizard if you have never restored your files before, to walk you through the step-by-step process in restoring backup files.

To restore your backup files, simply find the backup files that you previously downloaded to your local hard drive. Click on the Browse button to locate the files. Next, click the Upload button. You should be warned that by uploading your backup files, you will overwrite any existing files on your server. So you should always make sure that it is OK for you to rewrite any files or lose any data that is not within the backup files.

Now that you know how to easily backup and restore your files using the cPanel, hopefully you can prevent yourself from losing any important data. If you want to, you can also schedule routine backups by creating Cron jobs.

Author: Web Design / e-Hosting
We specialize on hosting solution, server solution and web solution. Besides providing web hosting and web & graphic designing services, we are also able develop custom web-based solutions, e-commerce hosting and custom web programming.

Fantastico is a third-party add-on for cPanel that allows users to quickly install various open source scripts. It can be easily purchased and added to the cPanel interface. By installing Fantastico, you can easily add many useful features to your website. Below are some of them:

1. Scripts for content management, including:
   • Drupal: a portal that has complete features, including online help, content search, blogging, thread watching, etc.
   • php-Nuke: a popular community-based portal that has many language choices and modules.
   • SiteFrame: a CMS that is dedicated to document sharing. It is a good choice for rapid deployment of community-based websites.
   • Mambo: a professional CMS that uses a WYSIWYG content editor. It has many features, including newsfeeds, RSS, content archiving, etc.
2. Scripts for weblogs, including:
   • Wordpress: the popular personal publishing tool.
   • Nucleus: a blog script that allows users to have multiple blogs and multiple authors, keep drafts or future posts and bookmarks.
   • B2Evolution: a blog script that allows users to have multiple blogs with different categories, changeable skins, search function and a selection of languages.
3. Scripts for customer relationship, including:
   • Help Center Live: an all-in-one help center that has unlimited operators, visitor monitoring system, visitor information collection system, auto save chat transcripts, unlimited FAQ, etc.
   • osTicket: a customer relationship software that supports unlimited e-mail addresses, POP3 login, e-mail piping, etc.
4. Scripts for discussion boards, including:
   • Invision Board: a popular open-source bulletin board that has a simple and clean user interface.
   • SMF: a powerful bulletin board that has many features but spends little resources.
5. Scripts for e-commerce, including:
   • Cube Cart: an easy, modifiable shopping cart that comes with plenty of features, including unlimited products and multiple payment gateways.
   • Zen Cart: an open source shopping cart system that is free to use.
6. Scripts for image galleries, including:
   • Gallery: an image gallery with many features. It can thumbnail a specific area of image, create image captions, mirror albums, rotate and reorder pictures.
   • Coppermine: a popular image gallery that can create albums, categories and thumbnails for images. It also has a search function and can receive user comments.

The add-ons listed above are only some of the many interesting add-ons that you can choose when you install Fantastico. With these add-ons, you can spice up your website and attract more visitors.