What is WHM?

WHM (WebHost Manager) is an administrative control tool that provides management capabilities for dedicated servers or VPS, enabling hosting providers to oversee customer accounts effectively.

In this article, you’ll learn why you should use WHM and how it can be useful in website management.

Download glossary for web beginners

Why use WHM (Web Host Manager)?

These are the key points why you should use WHM for managing multiple websites:

1. Higher security for sites. A separate cPanel for each site means that if one domain gets hacked, the others won’t be affected, thus making them more secure.
2. Better management. You have the power to monitor all activity on your websites and jump between cPanel instances easily. WHM also allows you to adjust the bandwidth and disk space of each account.
3. Reselling hosting. You can monetize your hosting by creating new cPanel accounts that people can buy.
4. Unique cPanels for branding. For reselling purposes, a WHM interface can be changed to reflect your brand.

What does WHM do?

Here are some major WHM functions:

Create, delete, or suspend accounts

WHM lets you add multiple cPanel accounts and set a default page for each of them.

To do this, go to Account Functions and fill in all information including the domain’s details, DNS settings, and mail routing options. Then, click Create.

What is more, if one of your customers violates the agreement or their account is expired, you can delete or suspend it by going to the List Accounts menu.

Monitoring servers

All activity on your server can be tracked through WHM. For example, there is the Process Manager that registers all running processes on the server.

Secondly, with the Service Manager, the owner can manage services and their background activities.

And last but not least, Current Disk Usage will inform about remaining storage and what it’s used for.

Set up multiple hosting packages

As the WHM account owner, you have the freedom to decide how you will divide up the storage on your server. This is useful when you want to provide various hosting packages at different prices.

What’s great is that you’re easily able to upgrade an existing domain without having to move all the files.

Transfer files

It’s possible to move files from a remote server to your own in a case where your new customer has an existing website with another host.

Customize your reseller brand

You might want your server to be unique even though you’re reselling it from the original hosting company.

With WHM, you’re free to have your own logo, documentation links, cPanel style, and public company profile.

These settings can be found in the cPanel tab -> Customization.

Market provider manager

This feature lets you manage and display products that the customers may purchase through their cPanel, such as multi-year SSL contract or package upgrade.

SSL certificates management

If you are a reseller, customers will expect that your hosting has everything they need, including an SSL certificate. Luckily, you’ll find the feature to install and manage it in the SSL/TLS tab.

Enable cPHulk for increased security

Turning cPHulk on will protect all domains from brute force attacks.

Backup and restore files

You can activate automatic backups to run on a single account or on all accounts. The data can then be uploaded to remote storage, such as Google Drive, WebDAV, and so on.

The backup settings, alongside the restore features, are located in the Backup tab.

Provide CMS for cPanel Users

We suggest that you provide several options to make sure your users can install the content management system of their choice. This function can be enabled under Manage cPAddons Site Software.

Tweaking

There’s a ton of features in this section that can add to or edit many things on your server, including spam protection, the default login theme, and notification warnings.

Plugins for cPanel

cPanel is compatible with plugins like Munin (server monitor), ClamAV (virus protection), and Solr (text indexing) and if you find some of them useful for your customers, you can add them through the Manage Plugins menu.

Conclusion

WHM is a powerful tool to manage multiple websites and hosting user accounts. What’s more, WHM makes reselling hosting possible and offers many other options for managing and adjusting your web hosting services.

I hope this article has given you a better understanding of WHM and how you can use it for website management. Also, you might want to have a look at alternative control panels.

All of the tutorial content on this website is subject to Hostinger's rigorous editorial standards and values.

The author

Irfan F.

Irfan believes that technology and the internet can help improve our lives significantly. That's why he shares his experience as a WordPress blogger to educate others. In his free time, Irfan enjoys good films and books.

More from Irfan F.