Moving from a shared cPanel hosting environment where server administration is managed by your hosting company (eg. Team Crucial!), to your own Virtual or Dedicated Server environment comes some considerations in terms of admin.

While cPanel/WHM is a very mature & intuitive environment that almost manages itself in most situations, its no surprise that many users can feel a little overwhelmed when starting out. Suddenly you’re responsible for administering services like Apache or Exim Mail server via the WHM web ui, let alone tackling the command line.

It’s for this very reason that Crucial offers Server Management as a paid addon, allowing you to submit support requests to our Support Team to take care of certain tasks/issues for you. However, a lot of customers will forgo this option until they really need assistance. This is certainly a good approach to ‘getting under the hood’ of the new options available to you, provided you are pro-active about it.

Fortunately, there are some extremely useful Plugins available which can make certain system administration tasks more manageable as you’re learning the ropes and I’m going to detail a few of them (including several we use on our shared servers), in this blog post.

1. MUNIN

Munin (Old Norse for ‘Memory’) is a network and resource monitoring tool which will generate detailed graphs for various resources. Whilst the idea of monitoring your hosted services may be unusual at first and fine tuning your monitoring & alert setup can take a little time and experience, it is a necessary starting point if you are managing uptime critical websites.

Additionally, Munin allows you to very accurately gauge your resource usage and identify any bottlenecks, for example if you need more CPU or RAM. This can prove invaluable in making sure your environment has enough resources to cope both process & user load. Statistical data gives you knowledge, knowledge is power!

To install munin, login and goto WHM >> Plugins >> Munin Service Monitor

1. ConfigServer – Security & Firewall aka “CSF”

When administering your own server, the most important thing aside from everything running smoothly is server security. As far as software based firewalls for cPanel/WHM go, CSF is almost a default standard for locking down your cPanel/WHM server, and is both extremely intuitive and powerful allowing you to set some very tough restrictions.

1. ConfigServer – Mail Manage / Mail Queues

Probably the number one issue we see from customers who are new to system admin tasks on cPanel/WHM servers is running into issues with Exim Mail Server. Maybe mail is bouncing, or not being delivered for some reason as simple as a full account inbox. Maybe a website was compromised and a spammer is causing issues risking your MailServer IP’s being blacklisted. Whatever the situation, these 2 plugins will increase the visibility you have over what’s going on with your mail server and the mail queue and all the mail accounts active on your server.

1. ConfigServer – Explorer

Having full access to the linux command line is the biggest option for power users to go with their own VPS or Dedicated Server, for example most plugins can be installed via SSH by copy pasting a few commands. However, if you’re relatively new and adjusting to the learning curve, this handy will plugin will give you a web based interface within WHM to perform command line functions safely and quickly. Mostly useful for checking files or moving/copying things quickly where you can’t do too much wrong. You gotta start somewhere!

1. ConfigServer – ModSec Control

The ConfigServer team are dominating this list and once again, another nifty plugin for managing your server security is ModSec Control. Mod Security or ‘ModSec’ allows system administrators to specify a ruleset which will help protect your server against various attacks, such as MySQL injection attempts or Cross-Site Scripting XSS atacks.

Unfortunately, sometimes genuine web browsing can trigger ModSec rules and may ban users for triggering rules with legitimate activity. This can be a nightmare to troubleshoot for system admins new and experienced and involves a lot of tweaking and back & forth. ModSec Control allows you to customize how your ruleset is applied with much needed flexibility, disabling certain rules based on account or domain. Which can be extremely useful if a particular rule is causing issues for one site but you don’t want to disable it globally for example .

1. CleanBackups

This is a useful script that does exactly what it says, it will clean your backups.The cPanel backup script does not automatically remove backups in certain situations, for example for moved/deleted accounts. Backups will remain until manually removed. This can quickly add up over time for example if you are running a medium to large sized hosting business on your VPS or Dedicated Server. CleanBackups will allow you to go in and clean the backup directory by setting a few easy options.