5 Ways to Secure Your cPanel in Web Hosting

cPanel is a crucial tool to manage all hosted domains on the server. It is the basic control panel to manage all domains, FTP accounts, and databases to make your website function smoothly. Its software comes with version updates and many other features. If you choose cPanel hosting, there are different security vulnerabilities in it. If you add complexity to the cPanel web hosting, hackers will have more challenges in decrypting the information. Even best cloud hosting services offer the best security to protect data. 

In this blog, we have mentioned some of the best practices that web hosting services in UAE follows in their cPanel hosting that will avoid becoming a cybersecurity victim. Follow these tips and tricks to secure the cPanel of your web hosting account.

How to Protect cPanel in The Web Hosting?

• Configure Your Operating System

Your cPanel should be ready to withstand any cyberattack. Hence, if you want to put a security layer on the control panel, configure your cPanel 100% risk-free. Choose the right operating system for Linux. As there are different Linux distros like Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu, choose which is more secure for cPanel hosting users. 

Do not compromise on the operating system. Or else, it allows hackers to steal data and intrude on the server’s operations. Hence, keep your server updated or ask a managed web hosting service provider to do the same. Whenever the security patches get released, update it on your server. Disable password authentication for sshd and open only the ports necessary for client connections. Furthermore, disable applications not necessary for web hosting or server functions.

• Restrict System Compilers

In web hosting and computing operations, there is a compiler that translates computer programming languages into binary codes. Giving unlimited access to compilers will give attackers the ability to compile their own scripts and upload their own malicious code. Thus, your cPanel hosting server will be compromised. Even antivirus on the server machine has some limitations which will not completely secure compilers.

Therefore, it is better to restrict system compilers’ access and avoid rare circumstances. For cybersecurity purposes, compilers should be removed or restricted. If you can’t remove the compilers altogether, you should restrict access to the root user only. You can disable compilers using WHM. The Compilers Tweak option setting will let you disable compilers for any unprivileged user. The Compiler Tweak setting is found in the Security Center of WHM.

• Monitor the System Continuously

Any kind of issue on the server will cause downtime for website visitors. Therefore, choose managed cPanel hosting services where web hosts like MilesWeb monitor server resources. MilesWeb offers 360 monitoring 24×7 through live chat, email, and phone. There are several other components in the system including user activity, application activity, performance, and network connectivity. It’s the administrator’s responsibility to review monitoring reports, but a good tool should alert administrators when anomalies are detected.

• IP Address Management

A web hosting server has a public and private IP address. The public IP address is limited to clients who are accessing server resources online. However, the private IP address should be restricted to administrators only. For example, anyone within the organization on the private subnet should have access to the server, but anyone with a public IP address should not be able to access specific server resources.

• Configure Hardened Firewall Settings

A hardware firewall can be used to whitelist services that are available on the server. With this, users can block unwanted services and no spammy traffic will reach the server. In web servers, two ports HTTP 80 and 443 are useful to block spammy traffic from reaching the server.

If the web server hosts other services, firewall ports should be opened carefully before they are opened. As an example, telnet and FTP should not be available as they allow data to be transferred in cleartext. For users who wish to use SFTP (port 22) for file management, you can block Telnet and offer an alternative secure SFTP (port 22).

Conclusion

A web server is a critical component in building an online presence for website owners. Hence, a control panel like cPanel provided in the web server should be monitored with the best configurations possible. Manually configuring these elements will be a tedious task. Hence, web hosting companies like MilesWeb offers Immunify360, 24×7 server monitoring, HTTP/2 protocol, free SSL, and other security measures to protect cPanel.

MilesWeb’s strong security shield protects users from DDoS attacks and other cyber threats. Therefore, clients hosted on MilesWeb’s servers get complete protection and user satisfaction.