Quite a number of the changes are related to the back-end administration of the server. A number of the features, however, directly impact the way cPanel works, performance and memory utilization. Here is a brief summary of the new features:

cPanel Backup

You can now create a file called cpbackup-exclude.conf in your home directory (/home/user-id) to exclude files from a cPanel backup. Each item to skip must be on it’s only line in the file. Directories should not have a trailing slash. Each entry must have the full path to the file or directory. This file is only used if you manually run a complete site back up from cPanel. It does not affect the Doreo backup system.

Dovecot

Dovecot is a replacement for the current POP and IMAP service (Courier) used by cPanel. Dovecot offers improved performance and reduced server resource utilization. Both Dovecot and Courier will be supported by Panel (but only one can be used). At the current time we do not plan to convert to Dovecot. We are in the process of benchmarking the two options and will be make an announcement at a later date if we will convert.

Error Page Editor

The Apache error page editor has been updated.

Email Disk Usage

The trash folder is no longer included in the email disk usage calculation. This will affect how email disk quotas are calculated but it does not affect the over account disk usage calculation.

Web Log Processing

The web log process has been improved to speed up processing and reduce server resource utilization. These features should allow the web statistics process to complete earlier in the day.

cPanel’s concept of Add-On, Parked and Sub-domains are very confusing for the first time cPanel user. This article will explain each of them and when/why you would use them.

We’ll start out with the easiest concept which is a domain. Before I can explain a domain there needs to be a brief discussion about “Top Level Domains” (TLD). No one really gives TLD’s that much thought. It’s really hard to define what a TLD is, so I’ll simply provide a sample list here:

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .co.uk
• .jp

There are 100’s of different TLD’s (as well as country code TLD’s but you get the idea, right?) Domains then are pretty simple. It’s just any name that you pick (that follow domain naming rules) that are just to the left of the TLD. For the rest of our example here we’re just going to work the really simple “sample.com” domain.

So what are sub/add-on/parked domains?

We’ll start out with sub-domains first. You don’t realize it, but you use sub-domains every day. A sub-domain is simply the name just to the left of your domain name. The universally accepted sub-domain for web sites (drum roll please) is “www”. So while everyone “thinks” of their domain as www.sample.com, “www” is really a sub-domain of sample.com. Other popular sub-domains are “mail’ and “ftp”. See, that was pretty simple, wasn’t it?

At this point your’re probably asking yourself “why would I ever need a sub-domain other than www?”. There are a lot of good reasons. Some of them include “blog.domain.com”, “forum.doman.com”, “secure.domain.com” and “devel.domain.com”. Each of these sub-domains could have been created as www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog but there is one big technical difference. With www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog they both physically have to be on the same server becuase there is only one DNS record for www.domain.com. With sub-domains like blog.domain.com and forum.domain.com each sub-domain has it’s own DNS record and therefore can be on different servers. The fact that you can put the different sub-domains on different servers is not particularly useful for most cPanel web hosting clients but if you have an very large/active site you many want out put devel.domain.com on a totally different server than www.domain.com

Parked domains are pretty straight forward. When you park a domain in cPanel it simply lets one site respond to multiple names. So again, with our sample.com domain you could park sample.org and sample.net on sample.com and you would see the exact same web site for www.sample.com, www.sample.net and www.sample.org. The real confusion with parked domains is that cPanel uses a different meaning for “parked” vs. the rest of the domain world. When most people think of parked domains they think of a landing page that your domain registrar gives you to “park” your web site before you create a real one. If you simply think of cPanel’s parked domains as domain aliases I think it’s a lot less confusing.

Add-on domains in cPanel are also pretty straight forward. They literally let you “add-on” another domain to your hosting account so you can host multiple domains from a single cPanel account. So how does cPanel do this magic? Most of it has to do with the configuration of the web server and of course, you don’t have to worry about that. The only thing you really need to be concerned with is “where do I put my files?”. With cPanel your web pages will be put in your public_html directory. When you add-on domains (unless you change cPanel’s defaults) they will simply be directories under your public_html directory. Visually they look like this:

/public_html/
/public_html/domain2.com
/pubic_html/domain3.com

So what is this 1+1 and 1+10 nonsense on the Doreo web site?

OK, first off, let’s blame that on the marketing guys, ok? This is simply the best notation we could come up with to explain how many accounts you can host on a single Doreo hosting account. With our SH-A plan you can host one main domain (the one you sign up for) and then you can add one more sub-domain or add-on domain or parked domain. With the SH-B plan you can host one main domain and then up to ten more sub/add-on/parked domains. It does not matter how many of which kind as long as the totally does not exceed ten.

Hopefully this clears up the mystery a bit about sub/add-on and parked domains (and why you’d use them). If things are still not quite clear please feel free to contact Doreo sales (by phone, chat or email) and we’ll do our best to explain it.

The changes fall into four main categories:

Memory Usage

This is mostly a behind the scenes change related to how cPanel keeps track of bandwidth usage for web, mail etc. Since all of our hosting servers are at least 4 GB of memory the savings will not really make a big difference.

Mail Flexibility and Efficiency

This will be one of the more noticeable changes. The first change is that RoundCube has been added as a web mail option. We will start with this option turned off but it should be implemented on all servers within the next week or so.

The other email change related to SPF. SPF is a system for validating that an email originates from the server that is should be sent from (i.e. an attempt to cut down on phishing). Since Doreo Hosting clients mail is scanned by our MailFoundry device this extra SPF check is not needed (and will not be enabled) as it is checked by the MailFoundry

Backups and Transfers

These are all internal changes that improve the cPanel backup and account transfer systems. The only change that you will notices is if we transfer your account between servers it will go even smoother than it has in the past.

cPanel, WHM and web mail access

With this new release you will be able to access http://cpanel.yourdomain.tld instead of http://www.yourdomain.tld/cpanel. When you use the new method it will access cPanel on port 80 (standard web port) and then use an internal proxy to communicate with cPanel on port 2083. This will allow clients who are behind a corporate firewall (with all non-standard ports blocked) to be able to access the cPanel interface. Similar URL will be generated for WHM (reseller interface) as well as web mail. This feature will initially be disabled and we will be rolling it out in mid July and we will send out more details and we get closer to implementation.

The biggest change that we will be implementing is that support for NeoMail will be dropped. We are in the process of identifying clients who use NeoMail and will do our best to notify them individually.

We will have much more detailed blog postings of the changes / new features as well as direct email notification to all clients.