Web hosting is one of the most important services for all organizations since companies need websites to attract clients from the World Wide Web. Thus, uninterrupted and secure hosting servers are the need of the hour for all companies and have proven to be essential for cent percent client satisfaction.
From the administration perspective, cPanel has emerged as the best control panel for server administration and website control. But even this control panel has its demerits, with inefficient security setup being a major problem for all.
Though cPanel is an excellent platform from the user’s point of view, it has a few gaping holes in its armor, which can be fixed through a little bit of tweaking by an expert. Since companies offering web hosting in India and other places in the world provide tailor-made services to float a site on the internet make use of this panel, they must tackle the security problems, which are listed below:
- As everyone knows, a ‘weak’ password can be easily broken, and cPanel has more than its fair share of breaches due to the vulnerability of its passwords. The biggest problem that this creates is that the clients’ site can be modified effortlessly by hackers or even infected with viruses.
- The least that the user can do is to employ a password that includes alphanumeric characters and is at least eight characters long. And, the password trackers that can be integrated into the system can be used to assess the strength of the password.
- A secure SSH is a necessity for all servers and can be enabled through an activated public key authentication for SSH and disabled password authentication system. And in case the administrators feel that the security of the server has been compromised, the access to SSH can be shifted to another port, which will curb the unauthorized users from gaining access to the SSH port.
- Mod_security, which is installed on the add-on module in cPanel of WHM, can be employed for protecting the Apache application from attacks. Of course, experts also suggest making use of PHPsuexec to compile Apache with PHP. Lastly in this category, the open_basedir of PHP can be used for securing a wide variety of functions of cPanel.
- Any individual engaged in rendering the web hosting services will promote the usage of separate partition for that are placed with noctuid.
- In the WHM, the compilers tweak, located within tweak security, can be used for adjusting the cPanel for better security.