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My last article explained that a cPanel reseller password provides access to any client account without need for the client account’s own password. That makes life simpler for us resellers. There’s another benefit of that feature: single login to manage multiple accounts.

Once logged in using a reseller password, the top of each cPanel page displays a drop-down list. On that list is every account under that reseller. You can jump from one account to another simply by selecting the desired account. This is a time saver and another reason why, if you manage more than a couple of domains, it’s well worth it to upgrade to reseller hosting.

As I’ve said before, if you have more than a couple of domains reseller hosting is much better than standard shared hosting. Here’s another reason: you can reduce your logins.

The cPanel reseller password, the same one used to login to WHM, serves as a sort of master password. When logging in to any of your cPanel accounts you may gain access using the reseller password. This is a useful feature, as it saves you having to remember all the client account passwords.

If you have a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server, you may also use the root password for the same purpose, though I prefer to use the reseller password and save use of root for when it’s truly needed.

Are you ready to create your own personal nameservers? I recently covered the benefits of personal nameservers and wrote that I wouldn’t want to manage my multiple domains, and those of my clients, without them. Today I’ll summarize what you need to do to create and use personal nameservers.

First, you must have a domain name registered to you (or at least under your control), on which to create personal nameservers. For example, if you have the domain name bigdog.com, you could create personal nameservers ns1.bigdog.com and ns2.bigdog.com.

You must have a hosting plan that includes the ability to use personal nameservers, such as a reseller or VPS plan. If you don’t currently have this, ask your host about upgrading. Your host will assign you two IP addresses for use as personal nameservers: typically one for ns1., and one for ns2.

Your host should also configure your control panel, such as cPanel, to automatically use the new personal nameserver as the nameservers for any new domains you add to your account. They may also be able to change your existing accounts to use the new nameservers, so it’s worth asking. If you don’t have many domains, it’s not hard to change them yourself. Don’t make this change until after the new nameservers are properly registered and active though.

Create personal nameservers

1. Check the DNS Zone of your main domain (the one on which you will create personal nameservers) for existence of “A” records for the personal nameservers. This will be in the form of ns1 14400 IN A 66.45.34.91, where that IP address is the one assigned by the host for that nameserver. While this record is not absolutely necessary, it will reduce DNS errors and speed lookups. If on cPanel, you can view and edit those records using the WHM command Edit DNS Zone.
2. At your domain registrar, register the nameservers. Most domain registrars have an on-line tool. (example from my registrar, eNom, is below).
3. After allowing a few days for propagation, edit the DNS for your hosted domains to specify that they will use the personal nameservers. This should also include your main domain which is the parent of the personal nameservers. That’s right: a domain can use its own nameservers, so rabbit.com can use ns1. and ns2.rabbit.com for its DNS.
4. Go to the domain registrar for each of the client domains to edit the nameserver list to specify the new personal nameservers. If someone else, such as a paying client, has control of the domain then ask that person to do this.

Registering personal nameservers at your domain registrar

As an example, here’s how to do it at eNom:

1. Login to your account.
2. Domains menu, Advanced Tools, click Register a Name Server.
3. Enter “ns1.domain.com”, where “domain.com” is your domain name.
4. Enter the IP address that your host assigned you for use as ns1.
5. Click Submit.
6. Repeat those steps to register ns2.

Registering personal nameservers at eNom

Note that eNom and many other registrars allow automated nameserver registration only onto .com, .net and .org domains. A different process may apply for other top-level domains.

Additional information
WebHostingBuzz has two relevant wiki entries:

• Private nameservers FAQ
• How to register private nameservers with a domain registrar

When you resell hosting to paying clients, personal nameservers allow your domain setup to look more professional and complete. Even if you don’t resell, personal nameservers make it easier to manage and move multiple domains.

For those of you with your own domain names, a few questions:

• Do you host multiple domain names?
• Do you resell hosting to clients?
• Have you ever moved to a new server or web host, and had to spend time at your domain registrar changing nameservers for every domain individually?

If you answered “yes” to any of those, then you should consider using personal nameservers.

As I stated in an earlier post, personal nameservers are one of the great advantages of a reseller, VPS or dedicated hosting plan over standard shared hosting. Instead of using nameservers provided by your host, with their name in the domain name, you create nameservers tied to your reseller domain or main domain. If your main reseller domain is “AcePro.com”, you may create ns1.AcePro.com and ns2.AcePro.com. You can configure all your “client” accounts to use ns1. and ns2.AcePro.com as their nameservers.

If you’ve ever had to move several domains to a new host or a new server with your existing host, you’ll know how much work it is. You must change the nameserver list for each domain individually at the domain registrar. It can be worse if you have paying hosting clients who maintain control over their own domain names. Before the move, you must inform your clients that you’re moving, asking them to change their nameservers (by editing the list at their domain registrars) by a certain date. Naturally some of them do not, so after the move you’re dealing with client complaints due to failing e-mail and site inaccessibility.

With personal nameservers, you need only register the new IP addresses for your personal nameservers, and all client domains will resolve to the new location automatically based on your nameservers. When I have moved servers (which I have done a few times) all I’ve had to do is to update my nameserver IPs for my reseller domain, the main domain that “contains” the personal nameservers, at my registrar. It takes less than a minute.

Personal nameservers, when enabled by your web host, are a way of exercising greater control over your domain names. The nameservers, which provide lookup services to direct Internet traffic to your domains, become part of one of your domains (usually your main domain). While they aren’t different servers, as you’ll still be using the physical nameservers provided by your host, they’ll now be identified with your domain name.

More importantly, personal nameservers mean that all your many domain names, and resold client domain names, will all be tied to your main domain. That eases management tasks.

In addition to the efficiency benefits, personal nameservers are a way to add more professionalism by further branding your on-line presence. This is feature that many hosting resellers like to use to disguise the fact that they are reselling. They like the nameservers to be part of their own domain. Many large companies also do this, both for the control and the branding. For example, a domain lookup on microsoft.com shows that it uses the following nameservers:

• ns1.msft.net
• ns2.msft.net
• ns3.msft.net
• ns4.msft.net
• ns5.msft.net

As msft.net is registered to Microsoft, those are personal nameservers.

Terminology
Nameservers may be spelled as “nameservers” or as “name servers”. Personal nameservers are often referred to as “private” nameservers, though I dislike that term since they are certainly not private. Nameservers are, by definition, accessible and queryable, so they are not private. A truly private nameserver would be of little use. I believe that “personal nameservers” is more descriptively accurate. The idea is that the nameservers are personalized to you.

An ideal term would be “branded” nameservers, but I’ve yet to see anyone call them that. Whatever you call them, I think they are a great aid to anyone managing many domain names. In an upcoming article I’ll explain how to create personal nameservers.

Sub-domains are useful. When you have your own domain name and a hosting account, you can create sub-domains.

Domain extensions such as .com and .ca are called top-level domains (TLDs). A second-level domain is a domain that is directly below a top-level domain, such as webhostingbuzz.com. That’s what we usually think of as a domain name which we can register. The next level down would be a third-level domain, also called a sub-domain, such as sales.domain.com or www.domain.com.. In fact, there can be multiple levels of sub-domain.

cPanel makes it easy to create sub-domains, as it’s done through a web-based interface and all the hard work is done automatically. By default, a cPanel sub-domain of dog.domain.com would have its URL resolve to domain.com/dog, but you can change that using a redirect. Combining a sub-domain with a redirect makes it possible to have short, elegant looking URLs that resolve to deeply nested paths.

For example, to more easily access each of the cPanel webmail clients via SSL, I made three sub-domains each redirected to an https URL:

• horde.domain.com redirects to https://domain.com:2096/horde/
• round.domain.com redirects to https://domain.com:2096/3rdparty/roundcube/
• squirrel.domain.com redirects to https://domain.com:2096/3rdparty/squirrelmail/

To create a redirected sub-domain in cPanel:

1. Click Subdomains.
2. Click Create a Subdomain.
3. Enter the desired sub-domain name.
4. Click Create.
5. When you see the message indicating that the sub-domain was created, click Go Back to return to the Subdomains screen.
6. Under the Modify a Subdomain section, click Manage Redirection.
7. Enter the path to which you want the sub-domain to resolve, and click Save.
8. Enter the new sub-domain in your browser, e.g. .sub.domain.com, to see it work.

When working on early frameworks for a client web site, they might be accessed at a nested folder such as domain.com/clients/workshop/empire-surfboards/master.php. I create a sub-domain redirected to that URL. It’s far easier for me to remember empire.domain.com, and easier for my client.

When travelling, I often upload digital maps, itineraries and other useful documents to my web server. These serve as accessible backups for me, in case I lose the paper files I’m carrying, and family can also access these. Again, to simplify access I create a redirected sub-domain such as france.domain.com.

Once you realize how convenient redirected sub-domains can be, and how easy they are to create, I’m sure you’ll think of plenty of uses.

In my article Secure your web hosting account logins I recommended that you use an SSL (https) connection to login to your account. Logically, my same reasoning for better security also applies to using webmail.

For secure access to cPanel webmail, use: https://domain.com:2096
That will take you to the same webmail client selection screen I described in an earlier post, but with this URL your access will be secure under SSL.

If you wish to directly access a particular cPanel webmail client via SSL, use these URLS:

• Horde: https://domain.com:2096/horde/
• RoundCube: https://domain.com:2096/3rdparty/roundcube/
• SquirrelMail: https://domain.com:2096/3rdparty/squirrelmail/

In my next article, I’ll explain how you can more easily access those URLs using sub-domains.

Responding to my article Setting a preferred cPanel webmail client a blog reader and a WHB forum member each asked whether it’s possible to entirely bypass the countdown to go directly to a particular client. Yes, it is.

Instead of accessing the main selection screen at domain.com/webmail/ (where “domain.com” is your cPanel domain), use these direct URLs:

• Horde: domain.com:2095/horde/
• RoundCube: domain.com:2095/3rdparty/roundcube/
• SquirrelMail: domain.com:2095/3rdparty/squirrelmail/

Bookmark whichever one you use the most, for easy access. As when using the selection screen, you don’t need to restrict yourself to always using the same client. You can switch from one to another at any time, as all are just different ways of accessing your same mail accounts.

I gave you some incompleteinformation in my last post. I said that once you set a preferred webmail client in cPanel, you would no longer see the selection screen displaying all three webmail clients. That’s not exactly correct.

On the selection screen that appears after login at domain.com/webmail/ (where “domain.com is your cPanel domain), click the Enable AutoLoad link underneath your chosen webmail application. You will then select the number of seconds you want the system to wait before automatically loading your chosen client.

The next time you login, you’ll wait your chosen number of seconds for your webmail client to load. During that countdown, you can stop the AutoLoad (by clicking the Stop button) and select a different webmail client.

Recently I wrote about cPanel’s three webmail interfaces. As I wrote, you can use any or all of the three, and it’s good to try all of them out to judge for yourself which one you prefer. Once you find your favourite, it can be annoying to have to select it each time you login. Well, you don’t have to.

When you login and see the screen listing the mail choices, click the Enable AutoLoad link underneath your chosen webmail application. The next time you login, your chosen interface will load automatically, bypassing that selection screen.

Addendum: further detail on the auto-load process in my next post.

Webmail is a useful tool, even if you rarely need it. Perhaps your regular e-mail method is to have your new mail downloaded into a mail client on your computer, such as Eudora, Windows Mail, or Apple Mail. When you’re away from your computer but want to check your mail or send a message, webmail is the answer.

Of course, webmail can serve as your primary mail tool. I used to have my mail downloaded into Microsoft Outlook running on my PC. Once I began travelling extensively, often without a laptop, it became more convenient to make webmail my primary method. No matter where in the world I am, I can connect to e-mail account on my web hosting server to see new mail, past mail, and all my contacts.

cPanel hosting provides three webmail interfaces:

• Horde
• SquirrelMail
• RoundCube

To access any of these, point your web browser to domain.com/webmail/ (where “domain.com” is your cPanel domain). Login using your full e-mail address and password. You’ll then be presented with this menu screen:

Click to select the webmail application you want to use.

Many hosting clients are confused as to how these webmail applications work. Clients will post in a help forum about how some of their mail is “in Horde webmail” and they aren’t sure how to send it to RoundCube. Here’s the key point: these webmail applications are just interfaces. They do not store your mail. They are just different ways of viewing and using your mail account.

A cPanel mail account resides on the server, within a part of your web hosting account. Mail server software handles the receipt, storage and sending of mail messages. All that happens no matter what mail software you use.

When you use, for example, Horde to view your mail account, your mail remains in the same place. You can use Horde this morning, SquirrelMail this afternoon, and RoundCube tomorrow, still accessing the same mail account. In fact, it’s a good idea to do this, to decide which webmail interface you prefer.

Now, if your regular mail method is software running on your local PC or Mac, things work somewhat differently. You may have that software set to download new mail and then delete it from the mail server. If so, you’re likely using a mail protocol called POP (short for Post Office Protocol). This differs from IMAP, the protocol used by those webmail interfaces. In a future post I will explain the differences between POP and IMAP.

Check out cPanel’s webmail options. Whether for occasional use or as your default tool, you’ll find them useful.