Website setup

bubinski

New Member
I'm moving my website from a hosting environment to the new VPS account I just had setup with KnownHost. I have cPanel installed, which is nothing like the cPanel on my shared hosting server where I'm coming from. I am fluent in several coding languages and pretty good with building a website but this is my first with VPS.

I feel a little like a deer caught in the headlights looking through my cPanel and trying to learn where to start. My first real question is really where to start. I have no intentions of doing any reselling and will use my VPS entirely for my website only. So, do I have to upload my files to the root OR do I have to create an account on top of my root and upload my files to that account? I've managed to convince myself that account creation through cPanel is for resellers. Am I right or wrong? Thanks for any info.
 
When your VPS is first setup, you only have access to the WHM control panel as root user. There is no cPanel control panel access at this point.

You will need to create a package with the resources you want to allocate to this new account. WHM -> Packages -> Add packages.

Login to your WHM as root and create a new user account. WHM -> Account Functions -> Create a new account.

This creates a new cPanel account for your domain eg example.com. You can then login to your domain cPanel control panel and it should be the same as what you are used to previously with shared hosting.

Upload your website files to the public_html directory of the newly created user account for example.com domain.

Submit a support ticket for further help. Maybe they can point you to a tutorial or knowledge base article on this.
 
The first time you log into WHM it should prompt you with the initial set up (hostname, DNS, etc). Some of these questions can be intimidating but just take your time and do a little research. Far as I know all the settings can be changed even after the fact if you do decide to do something different. You can always post questions here or even submit a ticket, support would be very happy to help you.

Also KH can move your domain from your old server to the new one if you would like them to. You can do this yourself as well of course and there should be a How To in the cPanel How To section.
 
OK thanks for your input. I've been able to create a package and account, login to my cPanel account, and now things are looking pretty familiar. It took me a while to figure out cPanel login was on port 2082.
 
OK so far so good thanks to you guys. I created my account, nosed around, feel pretty comfortable with cPanel. Felling not to bad about WHM. I can logon to everything unsecure and secure (SSH). I downloaded and installed PuTTY on my computer so I can login SSH to server directly without cPanel.

Now, my next order of business is to harden my site a little further. Reading around the past week I'm pretty sure I should install firewall software and brute force defender software. So far most people seem to like APF and BFD. I noticed that cPanel already has a brute force defender software called cPUulk. Not too many seem to think very highly of it so I'm thinking I should just go BFD.

Anyway, getting back to the APF and BFD, I understand I can put in a ticket to support to have them do it for me. I'm in no way a Linux guru, perhaps only a Linux nooby wannabe. Knowing that, would it be way out of my realm this early to install these on my own? I've read the tutorial on installing APF here and think it doesn't look to bad. I haven't looked yet at the instructions for installing BFD yet.

Thanks for any tips anyone can give me.
 
Hello bubinski,

I'd say to go with CSF with LFD instead as it integrates with WHM and does both functions. There is no How To here but the majority of the settings (ports, eth_device, etc) will be set to the same as in the APF write up and the descriptions are very similar if not the same. This is an actively developed package with a forum and good documentation whereas APF/BFD I have not seen an update in years.

I personally disable CPhulkd completely but you can leave it running it just won't do anything with LFD running.
 
Top