WebCP

WebCP 2.0.0

We’re excited to be launching WebCP 2.0.0 towards the end of June 2018!

WebCP has been serving the web hosting industry as a reliable, secure and user friendly web hosting panel since 2010. Many things have changed in this space since then and so has WebCP.

We’re proud to announce this version which will be the most reliable, robust and secure version.

What’s changing?

The OS – Ubuntu.

WebCP web hosting control panel versions 1.x.x were based on Centos 6. While we love Centos we decided to part ways with it in version 2.0.0 simply because of package updates. We initially started our development of our web hosting manager on Centos 7, but even there we found that all too often we needed to install packages (like PHP) from source to get the latest version.

This didn’t really sit too well with us. Part of keeping the WebCP web hosting control panel secure is being able to rely on up to date software in the OS repos. Yes, I’m aware we could add repos but we’re not in the business of testing repo after repo to ensure that they’re good, secure, legit. Ubuntu brings that to the party. We now have PHP 7 as one example.

PHP 7

As mentioned already, we’re now running on PHP 7. PHP 7 brings about a whole host of improvements, including security and speed improvements. It means that if you run the latest versions of software you no longer have to worry about an outdated installation of PHP on your server.

Nginx

We’ve switched from Apache to Nginx which uses PHP FPM. This will already improve server loads and page speeds just like that. But there are more improvements you could do to make your website run insanely well on WebCP hosted websites. For instance, if you’re running a wordpress site, the W3 Total cache plugin provides an nginx configuration file that you can include into your nginx config so that cached pages run as purely static pages. No hit on PHP or WordPress what-so-ever. We’ll load another post soon explaining how to do that.

Exim

Besides using the latest version of Exim, Spamassassin and ClamAV, we’ve completely redone the exim configuration files. With WebCP 1.x.x, the exim config was based on MySQL. This meant that every single email you sent or received (and all of the email you didn’t receive because it was blocked as spam) caused multiple hits to MySQL. Combine a fairly busy web server with a fairly busy email server and you get a big load on your MySQL server. We’ve now switched to file based lookups and cached some of those lookups to avoid some file access.

Aside from the configuration changes we’ve also given extra control to your spamassassin thresholds. With WebCP 1.x.x, your only option was to change the spam threshold individually for each mail box. With version 2.0.0 you can set a global threshold for the whole server, you can set a threshold for a domain, or you can set a threshold for a specific email address. As you’d expect the more specific settings override the more general one.

Sendgrid

Sending email out from your own server is a hit and miss affair. You’ll find that very often the servers in your IP range will be sending spam out and that will cause issues for your server. This is particularly prevalent when your web hosting clients send to larger commercial receivers, particularly in the financial industries. We now include the ability to insert your Sendgrid settings to send email through Sendgrid. This can be turned on or off per domain by an administrator, so it could be an additional service you charge for.

 

 

There are other changes behind the scenes. We’ve always had a rudimentary API and version 2.0.0 will see that being turned into a fully fledged RESTful API.

As always, WebCP is based on the freemium model. Its absolutely free to use for up to 5 domains. This means that if you’re not hosting as business, or you’re just getting into the web hosting business you can use our control panel for free for the first 5 domains. There after you’ll need to purchase a license.