Blog / friday roundup
Seven cPanel tools our customers rarely open
Seven cPanel features that answer the problems we get tickets about, from cron jobs and error logs to PHP settings and server-side mail filters.
Every cPanel account we hand over has a few dozen icons in it, and most site owners use about four of them: File Manager, Email Accounts, phpMyAdmin, and whatever installed WordPress on day one. That is fine. The thing is, several of the icons nobody clicks answer the exact problems we get tickets about every week. Here are seven, roughly in the order we reach for them when a customer writes in.
Cron Jobs
WordPress ships with its own scheduler, and it only runs when somebody loads a page. On a quiet brochure site that means scheduled posts, plugin cleanups and backup runs fire hours late or not at all. We set a real cron job to call wp-cron.php on a fixed schedule, then switch off the page-load trigger in wp-config.php. It takes a couple of minutes, and "my post never published" stops being a mystery.
Errors
When a site goes white, the answer is usually already written down and nobody has read it. The Errors page lists recent PHP errors with the file and the line number that produced them, newest first. We check it before touching anything else, because deactivating plugins one at a time is a slow way to learn what a log would have told you in ten seconds. If you send us that line in a ticket, you have skipped most of the back and forth.
Resource Usage
This page shows the CPU, memory and entry processes the account has used over recent days, and which limit (if any) it ran into. It is the difference between "the site feels slow sometimes" and "the site hits its process limit every weekday around 2pm". We once traced a client's afternoon slowdown to a related-posts plugin that rebuilt its index on every uncached request, and the graph is what pointed at it. Pair it with a look at how much space the account is using when a site has been around a few years.
MultiPHP INI Editor
Plugins that want more memory or a longer execution time usually tell you to edit wp-config.php, or paste something into .htaccess, or both. The INI editor sets those values per domain in one place, and the setting survives theme and plugin updates. It is also where upload_max_filesize lives, which is the real reason that 40 MB video would not upload. When a plugin's requirements page asks for a PHP value, this is the place for it.
Redirects
Moving one page does not need a plugin. The Redirects tool writes the rule into .htaccess, so it runs before PHP starts, which is quicker and keeps working while the site is in maintenance mode or broken. For a large migration with hundreds of old URLs we still reach for a plugin or a mapped list, but most sites only ever move a handful of pages. We wrote more about the choices involved in redirects done right.
Indexes
If a folder on your site has no index file, the server will happily show a listing of everything in it. We have found old client contracts and a full copy of a previous site sitting in a browsable folder, indexed by search engines, on sites whose owners had no idea that folder was public. The Indexes tool lets you set directories to "No Indexing" in a few clicks. Do it for your uploads folder and anywhere you have ever parked a file "just for a minute".
Email Filters
Spam rules you set in your mail app or on your phone only apply on that device, and only after the mail has already arrived. Account-level filters in cPanel run on the server, so a rule you write once applies everywhere you read your mail. We use them most for routing (sending everything addressed to accounts@ into a folder) and for killing a specific run of junk that the spam filter keeps scoring as borderline. Our business email accounts all have this, whether or not the site is hosted with us.
None of this is exciting, which is the point. The tools above exist because the same problems come up on every server, and the fix is usually one page in cPanel rather than another plugin. If you are not sure which of these applies to your account, or you would rather we just set one up, open a ticket with our support team and tell us what the site is doing. We will look at the logs with you.