8 Best cPanel/WHM alternatives (2019)

cPanel recently announced that they will change their pricing and licensing structure starting September 1st. Apart from raising the license prices and changing their names they have also included a limits in number of sites (accounts) a license can have.

New cPanel offer now includes two licenses for clouds: Admin license costs $20/month and allows you to host a up to 5 accounts (websites) per a cloud (VPS), Pro license costs $30/month and allows you to host up to 30 accounts on one cloud (VPS).

Other than these two there is also a Premier license that can be installed on cloud (VPS) or metal (dedicated server) and for price of $45/month allows you to host up to 100 accounts. If you have more than 100 accounts you will be charged $0.20 for each additional account per month.

New cPanel pricing scheme

You can check their new pricing structure at their website at https://cpanel.net/pricing/ . They have also published a Licensing Guide a PDF file that should clarify what will change and how.

What’s interesting is that the cPanel was sold in August 2018 to Oakley Investment and just after a year they have decided to totally change their pricing structure, even then they said that there will be “no immediate customer impact”. Well it took them the whole year to figure out how to make a bank out of cPanel – so it’s not “immediate”.

This price change will affects mostly resellers and users that have more than 100 accounts on their servers and many of these reported that their licensing cost will increase even over 800% basically overnight.

cPanel is probably the best web hosting control panel, but what are the good alternatives? Here’s the complete 2019 list of cPanel alternatives:

Continue Reading

How to backup WHM/cPanel accounts to DigitalOcean Spaces

For the past several years I have been using Amazon S3 to backup my WHM/cPanel accounts. It works quite good but the problem is Amazon’s complex pricing model (that charges you for things like diskspace, bandwidth, requests) making price for the service is quite unpredictable. I’ve read on many places that people often got surprised at the end of the month receiving the bill from Amazon.

Recently I have started testing DigitalOcean Spaces, a service similar to Amazon’s S3 (S3 compatible alternative) but with a pricing structure anyone can understand: for $5/month you get 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of outbound transfer (inbound transfer is free like on S3). If you need more than that it will cost you 2cents per every additional GB of storage and 1cent for every additional of outbound GB. Also first two months for every new space are free!

Continue Reading

CodeIgniter white page on cPanel

After cPanel upgrade from EasyApache3 to EasyApache4 all my CodeIgniter installations just broke on that server, returning just a white page without any error message. I spent more than one hour trying to figure out what the problem is. While testing out I noticed empty files named like these “0bce68a7a37e584ace98f0fd242a237d1662613e” or “296eed9bfb533552b0c3a9c8fdd784067eea216d”   (without any extension) started popping in my project folder. I figured out that these must be session paths so something is wrong with that.

I tried enabling php error logging but it didn’t help since it didn’t log anything since all code is right and it was working before but it just stopped after I started using EasyApache4.

So I went and enabled CodeIgniter logging that proved to be a better idea. To enable it open config.php for editing, locate

$config['log_threshold'] = 0;

And change that value to 4. That will enable internal logging system and logs will be saved in /application/logs folder. What I found out just conf

ERROR - 2016-11-29 22:36:29 --> Severity: Warning --> mkdir(): Invalid path Session_files_driver.php 117
ERROR - 2016-11-29 22:36:29 --> Severity: error --> Exception: Session: Configured save path '' is not a directory, doesn't exist or cannot be created. Session_files_driver.php 119

My session save path at config.php was set to null:

$config['sess_save_path'] = NULL;

Once I got it changed to default (alternatively you can set it up to any other folder you want locally, so you can have full control over your sessions):

$config['sess_save_path'] = sys_get_temp_dir();

everything started working again! Now this is second time I have similar quiet errors with CodeIgniter where it reports absolutely nothing – instead it just gives white screen and this can be really frustrating to debug.

 


	
			

How to install Git on cPanel/WHM server running CentOS

Today I wanted to install Git on a server with cPanel/WHM and have got the following result:

yum install git
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package git.x86_64 0:1.7.1-4.el6_7.1 will be installed
--> Processing Dependency: perl-Git = 1.7.1-4.el6_7.1 for package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: perl(Git) for package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: perl(Error) for package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64 (base)
           Requires: perl-Git = 1.7.1-4.el6_7.1
Error: Package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64 (base)
           Requires: perl(Git)
Error: Package: git-1.7.1-4.el6_7.1.x86_64 (base)
           Requires: perl(Error)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Then I did some research and have found out that Gis is already installed on cPanel as of version 11.36 but the problem is – it’s installed on this path:

/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/git

So for ease of use I advise you to make a simple symlink:

ln -s /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/git /usr/bin/git

so you don’t have to remember the path above and you can simply use it like you got used.

Note: In order for user to be able to login to SSH, it must be allowed in WHM first at Account Functions > Manage Shell Access and there  just switch from Disabled Shell to Jailed Shell.

Happy Gitting!

How to safely install git on cPanel/WHM?

GIT is popular version control system for software development and it’s really common today. Installation on servers without cPanel is pretty simple but on servers that do have cPanel can be tricky because git installs it’s own Perl libraries and that can cause many problems and conflicts and often results in unusable WHM server in the end.

So whatever you do – do not install GIT!
I repeat: DO NOT INSTALL GIT ON WHM SERVER!

Because it’s already installed 🙂
It’s just not in path and you can’t use it.

There are two ways of doing this:
1. WHM/root way that will make git available to all users on the system
2. cPanel way that will make git available only for the current account

Hot to enable it in WHM?
To make git usable to all users (with ssh access) just execute this single line of code as root:

ln -s /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/git /usr/local/bin/git

How to enable it in cPanel?
If you are using a shared (or reseller) hosting powered by cPanel (and you don’t have WHM access) than you need to login using SSH and locate your .bashrc file. It should be in your home directory. Open that file for editing and add git to your path by adding following two lines of code at the end of your .bashrc file:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin 
export PATH

To edit that file enter: nano .bashrc
After you add these two lines your .bashrc file should look like this:

bashrc-git-path

To save the changes press CTRL+X , then press Y and Enter. In order for changes to be accepted it will be necessary to re-log in to your SSH command prompt.

How to check if git now works on cPanel?
Well, that’s really simple. Just login to SSH and execute: git –version
and that should return git version (currently cPanel git is version 2.6.1)

That’s it!
Nice and simple.
Happy giting…