WHM – Beginners Guide – Introduction

First of all, what’s with this new category? We’ve found that some of the customers we manage servers for wish to take some jobs from us. For example they want to handle on their own the DNS and Apache updates, but there are only a few and very basic guides on how to do these things efficiently, so they fear to take action. We will try to cover the most basic things, spiced with some suggestions to help these customers and anyone who wants to manage his or her own server.

For the beginner server managers, especially if they want to manage UNIX based servers, we strongly recommend to do this job with a server management software. There are dozens of server management software on the market; we recommend you to invest in “cPanel + WHM” because you can save for yourself a lot of pain by managing the server this way. Operating system updates become seamless, account management simpler than to write down your own name.

What is “cPanel + WHM”? It’s the abbreviation of control Panel + Web Host Manager, a server management software licensed, maintained and actively developed by cPanel Inc. It is a web-based tool, written in (mainly) Perl. You need a license to run this software, usually the datacenter offers this license to be leased with the server for a reasonable fee (about $20-$35 USD). You can also buy this license from cPanel Inc. itself, though the price is more scary, about $425 (USD). From now on we will talk only about WHM, because this is the side of the software-package which we will use to manage the server.

This software is limited to the following operating systems: CentOS, Red Hat and FreeBSD. Yes these are all Linux distros. There’s also a Windows based cPanel/WHM, called cPanel Server Suite, but since it’s a Beta release and also requires a whole category to explain everything, we won’t talk about it now. Also worth to mention that currently the only possible way to get this software seemingly is to be part of the development team.
As for operating system, we recommend using CentOS. Reason? There’s no good reason, but our experiences with this Linux distribution: it’s fast, stable, easy to maintain; that’s all.

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