I have been working in cPanel WHM servers for around 10 years now. They have been working great. cPanel is one of the best tools that I have seen which makes life easier for a Sysadmin. From feature to feature, it is becoming one the best product for a shared server, where one server is being used to host more than one websites and the same server is used to host e-Mail, DNS and Databases. They have now brought a stable LAMP compiler, DNS clustering tool. A facility to enable remote database server, a good account migration wizard, DKIM and SPF support and what not. Here’s my cPanel wish list – is someone at cPanel listening!?
1. Enable dedicated IP for subdomains and addon domains
At present, a lot of web hosts are providing ‘unlimited’ resources for their customers and they keep adding domains ( addon domains ). If one of them need an SSL to be installed, I think they need to convert that domain to a new account and then allot a dedicated IP and then install SSL. Or edit the apache configuration files and change the virtual host entry
2. Server migration tool
At present cPanel only have an account migration tool
In the new ‘ server migration tool ‘ it will allow to migrate * ALL * accounts in the server, migrate all configuration – mysql, apache, php DNS, or whatever there is automatically and allocate new IPs to accounts and migrate everything from one server to another within DC or between DCs, So that the entire server can be replicated in another server easily. This need not be a web interface – but a command.
It will be useful when we are upgrading a server or replacing existing one with new one or merging two servers to one.
3. Lockdown WHM access to specified IP numbers
This will cause some difficulty for someone who uses a dynamic IP – but in a broader perspective, it is going to benefit a root level hack of WHM. Given that WHM is a heavily modified version of apache web server, this is not a heavy task for them 🙂 – I know this can be done with firewall, having that configured in WHM itself would be much nicer, I feel.
4. Add IP which is in /23 or in lower subnets
At present cPanel allows you only to add IPs which are in /24 or in higher subnets. If you have to add an IP which is in /23 or lower subnet, you have to add it as /24, then edit the netmask in /etc/ips and then restart IP aliases to get that work.
5. Nginx to drive images and static content.
I am aware of some cPanel servers which are hosting more than 1500 cpanel accounts. And given that Apache have a larger memory foot print, why we should use it to drive images which need nothing else just a web server ? cpnginx.com is providing such a plugin. So is unixy.net‘s varnish plugin ( this actually is a reverse proxy and caching ).
6. Resource limiting app
It is a common headache in the shared hosting environment that one user abuses the server ( overuse the resources allocated ) and bring the server down. cPanel has already started working with CloudLinux.com and they are quite good at what they do. 🙂
I’d rather prefer another tool from 1h.com called HIVE, through which we can run chrooted PHP environments, multiple versions of PHP, and limit the number of executions that can be made by a cPanel account, via web or Cron. ( interesting?!)
Along with that, their Guardian tool will detect if a service is down in 0.5 seconds (faster than u even think?).
I wish cPanel starts supporting 1H tools too 🙂