Why Optimize cPanel?
cPanel is the most popular shared hosting control panel in the world, and for good reason. It provides excellent flexibility, ease of use, and powerful features for managing every aspect of your website.
Unfortunately, some of the default settings in cPanel are far from perfect. Here at IOFLOOD, before we give any customer their cPanel server, we make sure to optimize some of the settings that are unambiguously "wrong" in the cPanel defaults.
This page details the recommended optimizations that we make to each server. This allows you to know what settings we recommend and which of your server settings have been changed.
Learn more about cPanel dedicated servers, or order your cPanel Dedicated Server from IOFlood today.
Recommended cPanel Optimizations
Below is a list of the changes we make to each cPanel installation in order to improve security and performance for our customers:
- Nameserver configuration: We configure working nameservers with accurate glue records that you can use right away. This can save countless hours from trying to get your nameservers configured correctly. If you'd prefer white labeled or "vanity" nameservers, you can still configure and use your own custom nameservers.
- CPHulkD optimizations: The default settings for CPHulkD make it very easy for the root account to get locked out, which can be very inconvenient. We reconfigure CPHulkD to lock out attacking IPs more aggressively, and lock out user accounts less aggressively. This way attackers will be blocked sooner, and legitimate users will still be able to get into their accounts.
- PHP configuration: We configure PHP with FCGI and SuExec for maximum performance and security. A common mistake is to configure PHP in "DSO" mode, which has all PHP scripts on the server run with the same user priveleges. DSO mode will therefore allow a malicious or poorly configured script full access to every users files and data, putting security at great risk. FCGI mode with SuExec is an essential security step to prevent these security exploits.
- Apache configuration: The default apache configuration has settings that are inappropriate for modern servers with lots of ram and cpu. We optimize the apache settings for maximum clients, minimum spare clients, maximum spare clients, and keepalive timeouts to more appropriate settings. Some more information regarding keepalive timeouts on our Apache Keepalive blog post. Although no one configuration is appropriate for every server, our configuration is tuned to the amount of ram in the server and provides far better performance for a wide variety of workloads.
- PHP and Apache modules: We recompile PHP and Apache with the most popularly used and requested modules such as GD, TTF, CURL, Ioncube, etc. This can save time and frustration from trying to get these commonly used modules up and running for your websites.
- Email server optimizations: We enable the relevant email protection options in cPanel so that if any of your accounts get hacked or start sending spam, it is much easier to track down the source of the problem and put a stop to it.
- MySql configuration: By default, the MySql configuration /etc/my.cnf has very important performance features such as the query cache totally disabled! We install a basic MySql configuration that enables reasonable settings for the most important features such as query caching. Very busy MySql servers may need further tweaking, but our optimizations will provide a huge performance boost from the defaults and are appropriate for the majority of customers.
- And countless smaller tweaks!
As you can tell from the list above, the time it takes to learn about all of the correct settings for cPanel can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily, we've done the hard work and trial and error to know which settings are best for the majority of customers. When you order a server with us, we put that experience to work to save you time, improve your website's performance, and enhance your server's security.
Learn more about cPanel dedicated servers, or order your cPanel Dedicated Server from IOFlood today.
