Web hosting

What it is

A web hosting account is one cPanel user on a server that hosts many accounts. It is created against a hosting package, and that package is what sets the disk quota, the monthly traffic allowance, how many mailboxes, databases, FTP accounts and extra domains you may add, and the CloudLinux limits on CPU, memory, disk operations and running processes. You manage the account through cPanel. You do not get root on the server, and command line access is itself a per-package setting rather than something every account has.

Getting started

1. Choose a package on the web hosting pages. Each package is a separate product with its own price and its own limits.
2. On the order form, give the domain the account will be created for. You can name a domain you already own, or register one in the same order.
3. Pick a billing cycle and pay the order. Hosting is invoiced per cycle, not metered by the hour.
4. The account is created on our cPanel server with a username derived from your domain. It appears under Hosting in the panel once provisioning finishes.
5. Open the service in the panel and use the cPanel button. It creates a one time session and sends you straight in, so your password is never put in the browser.
6. Set your own cPanel password from the same page if you would rather log in to cPanel directly.
7. Point the domain at the account. The service page shows the IP address the account was given.

The service page also lets you check whether an IP address of yours has been blocked by the server firewall or the brute force detector, and unblock it yourself. That does not need a ticket.

Limits

Every limit below belongs to the package, not to your account, and the exact figures are the ones shown next to each package on the pricing page. A value of zero on a package means unlimited. Because the limit is a property of the package, support cannot raise it for one customer: editing it would move it for every account on that package. The way to get more is to change package.

Changing package is something you do from the service page in the panel. An upgrade is offered only where every single limit on the target package is at least as large as the one you have now, so an upgrade never quietly costs you a mailbox or a database. It is charged on an invoice and applied once that invoice is paid. A downgrade is applied immediately and the unused part of the difference is credited to your balance, but it is refused if what you are currently using would not fit inside the smaller package. Delete what does not fit first, then downgrade.

Package changes are blocked while the service is not active, while it has an unpaid invoice, and while an earlier package change is still waiting for payment. Those are not support cases: settle or cancel the invoice and the option comes back.

Mail

A hosting account can send mail from the moment it is created. The outgoing SMTP block documented on the cloud servers page is a property of a cloud account and is applied to the network interface of a virtual machine. It has nothing to do with a cPanel hosting account and is never applied to one. Do not read the two as the same rule.

What does apply to hosting mail comes from the package. Each package sets how many messages one domain on the account may send per hour, and what share of an hour of messages is allowed to fail or be deferred before the server stops accepting more. It also caps how many mailboxes and how many mailing lists the account may have. Those figures are on the pricing page beside the package.

If your package includes a dedicated IP address, we set that address reverse DNS for you when the account is provisioned and again whenever the address changes. We point it at your own mail host when that host already resolves back to the same address, and otherwise at a hostname of ours that does. This is deliberate: large mail providers reject mail from an address whose reverse DNS does not confirm, and we would rather your mail arrive under our hostname than not arrive at all.

If your package does not include a dedicated IP address, outgoing mail leaves on the server shared address, together with the other accounts on that server. The reverse DNS of a shared address stays the server hostname and is not changed to any one customer domain.

What needs support

• Any change to the figures in the table above other than moving to a different package. The numbers live on the package, so they are not adjustable per account.
• Getting a dedicated IP address on its own. It is part of the packages that carry one, and there is no way to buy one separately.
• An upgrade that does not appear or does not complete. The panel decides which upgrades to offer partly from the dedicated IP state we have recorded, and that record can disagree with what the hosting server actually has. We run a scheduled check for that disagreement, but when it happens the upgrade list can come back short or empty and a person has to unstick it. Tell us the service and what you expected to see.
• A package that includes a dedicated IP address when the server has no free address left. The change is applied but the address move is not, and it has to be finished by hand.
• An account whose creation was interrupted after the cPanel user was made. We deliberately refuse to create it a second time, so it has to be handed over and its password reset manually.
• Reverse DNS on a shared address. It is shared with other accounts and is kept pointing at the server hostname on purpose.

Where to go next

• Web hosting packages and pricing
• Domains documentation