A few best practice questions.

I

Ichiban

Member
I'm moving a few sites from HostGator shared hosting to a KH managed VPS, but find that I'm so far behind the curve on some things that I'm not even sure what to request.

1) Is there a recommended way to utilize my 2 IPs? IE, any reason, besides adding a second SSL domain, to put anything on the secondary IP?

2) domain.com and www.domain.com...looks like best practice is to have one of these as the website and have the other redirect to it. Which should be primary? The www sub or the root? I'm assuming here that having www.domain.com actually mirror domain.com (as I actually do now for a few of my HostGator sites) is a bad idea.

3) Is it better to add my other domains as add-ons to my main account or add new accounts for each? That's assuming no need to have anyone else manage them.

4) Does it matter if the root domain of the hostname used for cPanel is being used to host actual sites? Should I consider changing to an unused domain food cPanel (I do have one which is currently used just for email via Google Apps)
 
Ichiban said:
1) Is there a recommended way to utilize my 2 IPs? IE, any reason, besides adding a second SSL domain, to put anything on the secondary IP?
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There's not really a reason to use anymore IPs than you have to. It will provide you 0 benefit to SEO rankings (contrary to what "SEO experts" want you to believe).

Ichiban said:
2) domain.com and www.domain.com...looks like best practice is to have one of these as the website and have the other redirect to it. Which should be primary? The www sub or the root? I'm assuming here that having www.domain.com actually mirror domain.com (as I actually do now for a few of my HostGator sites) is a bad idea.
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This is all personal preference. www is just a CNAME of non-www. They serve the exact same content.

Ichiban said:
3) Is it better to add my other domains as add-ons to my main account or add new accounts for each? That's assuming no need to have anyone else manage them.
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I'd definitely add them as their own cPanel accounts. This makes managing them in the future much, much easier.

Ichiban said:
4) Does it matter if the root domain of the hostname used for cPanel is being used to host actual sites? Should I consider changing to an unused domain food cPanel (I do have one which is currently used just for email via Google Apps)
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This is fine, and common practice.

Let me know if you have any other questions, and welcome to KnownHost :)
 
If you have multiple sites on your server, it's good to utilize separate IPs that way (when sending email) - so when other sites on my server send mail, receiving mail servers aren't deciphering my content with theirs.

Less chance of me hitting a blacklist if they upset too many recipients. Though this won't help you if the entire IP block gets blacklisted.

I also use a separate IP on my site's nameservers vs everyone else's, too. Though it's probably not necessary, I just feel more comfortable splitting my site from the others.
 
Well that sort of brings up another question. One of the reasons I use Namecheap is that they provide a decent DNS service for free. Even for domains registered through other registrars, I believe. Anyway, all my domains are both purchased and have name service hosted through Namecheap.

Would I get any sort of benefit out of moving my DNS to my VPS and managing it via WHM? Does WHM use knowledge of the DNS to, for example, automatically add vhost entries?

As a related question, does WHM automatically add a vhost entry for www.domain.com when I add domain.com as an add-on or separate account? Seems to be the case as both my KH VPS and HostGator shared accounts respond correctly for www.domain.com but not...say....test.domain.com. So it looks like handling for the www sub-domain is being explicitly added vs some sort of catch-all/wildcard.
 
You can add subdomains for test.domain.com easily via cpanel. I've never used off-site DNS so I can't comment on that, currently my DNS is all on the VPS I have with Knownhost.
 
Ah, geez...I think I've been missing something big about the relationship between WHM and cPanel. Since it's pretty much just me on this VPS, I thought I had latitude to use either WHM or cPanel accounts to configure all of my web-sites. But it's only just dawned on me that the reason I can't find anything about sub-domains etc in WHM (except for listing them) is that all the web-site management options are only in cPanel. So, without creating at least one cPanel account, I'd be left managing my domains completely outside WHM\cPanel. Wow...not sure why it took so long for me to see that.

So, just to clarify/summarize, if my WHM host was setup as host.domain.com and I want to create a managed website at http://domain.com and/or http://www.domain.com via WHM\cPanel, I need to create a cPanel account for domain.com and mange the domain specific stuff through there, correct? And there should be no conflict with the WHM hostname as long as I don't try to use host.domain.com as a sub-domain under that cPanel account, yes?

BTW, I never properly thanked Jonathan for the detailed answers. Many thanks to both Jonathan and zombie with all the newbie questions. Hopefully they're almost over. :)
 
So, just to clarify/summarize, if my WHM host was setup as host.domain.com and I want to create a managed website at http://domain.com and/or http://www.domain.com via WHM\cPanel, I need to create a cPanel account for domain.com and mange the domain specific stuff through there, correct
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Correct.

You can still manage the VPS root by visiting https://www.example.com:2087 (whm) and the site itself, at https://www.example.com:2083 (cpanel)

The hostname of my VPS is currently host.example.com and the site runs flawlessly on www.example.com
You can also create test.example.com through the "Subdomain" section of cpanel, if you want a subdomain, too.
 
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