Upgrading/Migrating Reseller Account to Multiple SSD VPSs at KH

Isaiah

New Member
Hello all,

Let me give a brief introduction/overview then I will dive right into my questions. I’m a web design/front-end developer in San Diego. I’ve had my web design business for quite some time, and a few years ago I finally wised-up and started reselling hosting and switching my clients to a reseller account at another host, running cPanel/WHM/WHMCS. The reseller account is on an aging, shared, problematic server at JaguarPC, and to be very frank I’m no longer happy with the host and want more control over my environment (I’ve had to open support tickets to do things I’m pretty confident in being able to do myself).

I’ve decided to take the next step and upgrade to SSD VPS accounts, and after much research, KH is definitely getting my business. Sidebar: In the very near future I’m also acquiring the hosting clients of my best friend’s web design business (she also has them under a reseller hosting account, but no longer wants to deal with the hosting headaches).

Before I get into it, let me preface all of this with that fact that, while I have a fairly decent understanding of hosting/servers/etc, I am still learning, so please bear with me and my questions, and let me apologize for the small novel, I just want to get everything clear in my head so I can move forward with planning the migration to KH.

Here is my plan for KH Accounts/Setup:

Server1 – SSD VPS – West Coast Datacenter – Will host my WHMCS and company/personal accounts.
Server2 – SSD VPS – West Coast Datacenter – Will host west-coast client accounts.
Server3 – SSD-VPS – Central Datacenter – Will host central/east-coast client accounts.

DNS, Nameservers, and Clustering.

For DNS Clustering, this is how I understand things. Please let me know if this is correct, and if not, what I need to correct.
  1. IF:
    • a. All three servers are clustered together via cPanel DNS Cluster, AND
    • b. The nameserver records are pointed to the IP of at least server1 and one of the other two servers (ie: ns1.mycompany.com points to server 1 IP, ns2 points to server2 IP, etc.) AND
    • c. The DNS records are being sync’d across the cluster THEN
    • d. If server1 goes down, DNS service failover falls to server 2 via nameserver records, then server 3 (if a third NS record is setup for that server), and so on. Is that correct?
  2. With the above cluster, the active DNS server will point a request to the appropriate cPanel account, regardless of the server it is on in the cluster…meaning, if server 1 receives a request for a URL that is associated with a cPanel account on server 3, the traffic is routed to server 3. Similarly, I could (hypothetically) move a cPanel account between VPS servers and the website will still resolve, no?
  3. Can KH support help me with this (DNS Clustering) after the accounts are provisioned? Or at the very least, look over my work once I’ve completed, to make sure it’s done correctly?
  4. Thinking security, for the server that WHMCS is on, it is better to keep that VPS excluded from the cluster or does it matter since the WHMCS is setup using an access hash to control the client servers (so if it became compromised, the associated servers would be compromised anyway)?
Migration

Step one will be to provision/setup the servers and cluster at KH. Step two will be to migrate all of the current cPanel accounts (roughly 30) from my current WHM Reseller account over to the KH Servers.
  1. If having KH help with the migration, can I specify cPanel accounts x,y,z go to server2 and cPanel-accounts a,b,c go to server 3, etc.? I’ll only need migration help for my client accounts, not the ones I’m acquiring from my friend’s business (they aren’t cPanel accounts, so I’ll have to migrate manually).
  2. Do you have a limit on number of cPanel accounts you assist with and if my 30 exceed that, what type of cost be associated to have you migrate them all?
  3. Ideally I would like to copy all of my accounts at the same time, so I can merely change the DNS records for my nameservers to start pointing everything at my KH VPSs. For 30 cPanel accounts (roughly 27GB of data on my current reseller account) what type of timeframe estimate would I be looking at to copy the accounts over to the new KH VPS servers?
  4. For accounts that have a dedicated IP and SSL Certificate (single-domain), Do I just need to specify which accounts those are so that a new dedicated IP is provisioned/assigned? Am I correct in understanding that the SSL Certificate is just a copy/paste situation, or will I need to generate a CSR on the new server and subsequently plug that into the CA records?
  5. For server-wide/shared SSL, is that typically just a wildcard cert installed across servers having the same domain? So server1.domain.com and server2.domain.com both share the same wildcard certificate, even though they are on different IPs, and that certificate is used for the SSL connections to the server? I understand this will cause a name mismatch if clients attempt to use the SSL for theirdomain.com vs their cpanel directory – server.domain.com/~user – at the very least I want to enable secure connections to the server.
  6. Would a multi-domain certificate be preferable to cover all hosted domains under an SSL connection? I know I would have to manually install them for each account/domain, but just thinking overall security for both my VPS and client’s sites as well as the SEO factor that Google has thrown into play now.

Backups

  1. I understand that KH takes full VPS backups every other day, but to do a restore would restore the entire VPS instance, not individual cPanel accounts. I want to do daily, weekly, and monthly backups for cPanel accounts. Is using the integrated WHM cPanel backup the best/easiest way to accomplish this?
  2. I’m eyeing either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage for the backup location – any experience/recommendation of one vs the other?
That’s all on my list right now, I’m sure I’ll have more questions, but the above will get me in a good place to start planning the actual migration to KH.

Thanks in advance!

Isaiah
 
  • IF:
    • a. All three servers are clustered together via cPanel DNS Cluster, AND
    • b. The nameserver records are pointed to the IP of at least server1 and one of the other two servers (ie: ns1.mycompany.com points to server 1 IP, ns2 points to server2 IP, etc.) AND
    • c. The DNS records are being sync’d across the cluster THEN
    • d. If server1 goes down, DNS service failover falls to server 2 via nameserver records, then server 3 (if a third NS record is setup for that server), and so on. Is that correct?
  • With the above cluster, the active DNS server will point a request to the appropriate cPanel account, regardless of the server it is on in the cluster…meaning, if server 1 receives a request for a URL that is associated with a cPanel account on server 3, the traffic is routed to server 3. Similarly, I could (hypothetically) move a cPanel account between VPS servers and the website will still resolve, no?
  • Can KH support help me with this (DNS Clustering) after the accounts are provisioned? Or at the very least, look over my work once I’ve completed, to make sure it’s done correctly?

That setup mentioned is not a failover as much as whichever DNS server is queried. All will point to the domain to the same destination. If one were to die the others would pickup the slack. This is something our support can assist you setting up if you wish.

  • Thinking security, for the server that WHMCS is on, it is better to keep that VPS excluded from the cluster or does it matter since the WHMCS is setup using an access hash to control the client servers (so if it became compromised, the associated servers would be compromised anyway)?

I recommend hosting WHMCS separate from your other installs for security reasons.

  1. If having KH help with the migration, can I specify cPanel accounts x,y,z go to server2 and cPanel-accounts a,b,c go to server 3, etc.? I’ll only need migration help for my client accounts, not the ones I’m acquiring from my friend’s business (they aren’t cPanel accounts, so I’ll have to migrate manually).
  2. Do you have a limit on number of cPanel accounts you assist with and if my 30 exceed that, what type of cost be associated to have you migrate them all?
  3. Ideally I would like to copy all of my accounts at the same time, so I can merely change the DNS records for my nameservers to start pointing everything at my KH VPSs. For 30 cPanel accounts (roughly 27GB of data on my current reseller account) what type of timeframe estimate would I be looking at to copy the accounts over to the new KH VPS servers?
  4. For accounts that have a dedicated IP and SSL Certificate (single-domain), Do I just need to specify which accounts those are so that a new dedicated IP is provisioned/assigned? Am I correct in understanding that the SSL Certificate is just a copy/paste situation, or will I need to generate a CSR on the new server and subsequently plug that into the CA records?
  5. For server-wide/shared SSL, is that typically just a wildcard cert installed across servers having the same domain? So server1.domain.com and server2.domain.com both share the same wildcard certificate, even though they are on different IPs, and that certificate is used for the SSL connections to the server? I understand this will cause a name mismatch if clients attempt to use the SSL for theirdomain.com vs their cpanel directory – server.domain.com/~user – at the very least I want to enable secure connections to the server.
  6. Would a multi-domain certificate be preferable to cover all hosted domains under an SSL connection? I know I would have to manually install them for each account/domain, but just thinking overall security for both my VPS and client’s sites as well as the SEO factor that Google has thrown into play now.


1.) Yes you can specify which cPanel accounts you want to go to which server in your migration ticket.

2.) We do not have a limit of how many cPanel accounts we can transfer, as long as we are able to take full cPanel backups at your current host.

3.) That would depend on the speed of your old host, if everything goes ok this should be able to be completed within 2 hours.

4.) In most cases the SSL's will transfer over with the cPanel accounts, if they do not transfer over you will have to reissue them at your SSL vendor and we can reinstall them for you. With cPanel SNI you do not need a dedicated ip for each SSL. 2 Dedicated ips come with your server and addtional ips are $1/month each you can have upto 4 without justification.

5 & 6) A Multiple domain SSL would work for multiple domains, as for different ips with the same SSL it would depend on the SSL cert. This would be something to verify with your SSL vendor.

  1. I understand that KH takes full VPS backups every other day, but to do a restore would restore the entire VPS instance, not individual cPanel accounts. I want to do daily, weekly, and monthly backups for cPanel accounts. Is using the integrated WHM cPanel backup the best/easiest way to accomplish this?
  2. I’m eyeing either Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage for the backup location – any experience/recommendation of one vs the other?

We do full backups free of charge partial restores such as files and accounts would be $10. The best way to get around this would be to setup backups in WHM which can be stored on the VPS itself or Amazon S3 or Google Cloud as mentioned.
 
So the clustering & nameserver scenario I mentioned isn't truly a DNS Failover (that would be if I had a secondary server mirrored to the primary as a backup/failover and/or for RR load-balancing) but rather simply the DNS resolution falling to the secondary/tertiary nameservers/VPSs, which in turn resolve associated cPanel accounts to the servers (whether that server is online or offline). I think I got it now.

Regarding the VPS the WHMCS install will be on: since two of the VPS instances will be located in the west coast datacenter, is it possible to request that the VPS instances be provisioned on different servers (to reduce the likelihood of both being down simultaneously so my clients have access to the support ticket system)?
 
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