Mirroring another cPanel account (addon domains)

[blade304]

Hi,

I'd like to create a new cPanel account to mirror another cPanel account the way that when I add a new addon domain to the new account, it loads the /public_html content of the original cPanel account when you visit the domain. Basically I just need a new storage for addon domains since there are too many of them in the original account.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! There isn't a way to do that as cPanel userA can't read the data of userB due to permissions and security. It would be best to copy the data to the new account.

Can you get me more details on what you mean by "too many" addon domains on the account?

 

[blade304]

Hi cPRex, thanks for the reply. I have a few thousands addon domains right now in this account and adding/removing an addon domain works very slowly now. Adding a few addon domains overloads the server, it needs to be restarted, even though I already upgraded my hardware a couple of times. WHM/cPanel is not well designed to handle that amount of addon domains (even though I'm a big fan of cPanel otherwise).

 

[cPRex]

That's definitely a lot! I'm not sure any server would be designed to handle that many addon domains as just the Apache configuration itself would be very large, let alone the other configuration files on the machine.

 

[blade304]

And if I created another cPanel account for new addon domains, do you think it would help a lot?

If I can't mirror another account, I'd have to maintain two accounts with the same content, quite redundant.

 

[cPRex]

I definitely think having multiple accounts for such a large number of addons would be beneficial.

If they are all mirroring the same data, could they not just be aliases instead of full addons?

 

[blade304]

Unfortunately I need an SSL certificate (which I get via WHM's AutoSSL) for every domain...

 

[cPRex]

Aliases do get covered by the SSL, but they wouldn't get a unique vhost.

 

[blade304]

Hmm, last time I checked (a few years ago) I was informed by cPanel team that it would need to be addons, not aliases, for the domains to get an SSL certificate and resolve via https, but perhaps something has changed? What would be the downside of not getting a unique vhost for each domain in terms of managing a website for each domain?

 

[cPRex]

Addons do get included with the free AutoSSL on the domain. If you were manually installing an SSL a few years ago, you would have needed a separate certificate for each domain.

Usually, people use Alias domains when they just want to point everything to the same content. Addon domains are for when you want multiple domains under the same cPanel account, but with different content. If you don't need unique content, you wouldn't need a unique vhost.

 

[blade304]

Thanks. No, it was also done via AutoSSL these few years ago. I'll test it with aliases and I'll let you know if there are any issues.

So would it be a significant improvement in terms of server load if I switched to aliases?

 

[cPRex]

I don't know if it would be a *significant* improvement or not, but it would definitely make the Apache configuration shorter. Instead of 25-40 lines for an addon domain, it would just be the domain name in the Alias line of the parent domain. Multiply that times several thousand, and your Apache restarts would almost certainly be faster.

 

[blade304]

Hi cPRex. It seems I would be able to get only up to 250 domains for a single certificate. So it seems adding domains as aliases would only work for the first 250... Is It Possible to Have One SSL Certificate for Multiple Domains?

Any ideas on a hack to make it unlimited with aliases?

 

[cPRex]

While that may be the case from their documentation, that isn't the certificate we use. More details on our limits can be found here:

Guide to SSL | cPanel & WHM Documentation

SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) encrypts information between a visitor’s browser and a server.

docs.cpanel.net

which says there are 1000 allowed per vhost.

There is no way to get an unlimited number from any provider that I am aware of.