Very soon all our resellers under the Free Reseller Program will be able to offer dedicated hosting solutions (Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers) on their reseller hosting stores. I have prepared a series of tutorials, which will introduce you to the WHM and teach you how to work with it.

The WHM (short for Web Host Manager) is the administration tool for cPanel users. The WHM is a web-based tool used by server administrators and web hosting resellers to manage and maintain hosting accounts on a web server using the cPanel Control Panel platform. The WHM listens on ports 2086 and 2087 by default, which means that you can access it in the following manner – http://yourdomain.com:2086 for non-encrypted connections and http://yourdomain.com:2087 for encrypted connections.

You can alternatively access the service with the default service name – http://yourdomain.com/whm, which will automatically redirect you to the correct port from where you can log into your Web Host Manager. The WHM is the place where you will be able to administer a set of the following most basic and most important functions:

Account Information – for listing accounts, searching for accounts, showing accounts being over quota, showing parked domains.

Account Functions – for creating, suspending, terminating, upgrading/downgrading accounts and for quota and skeleton directory modification purposes.

Packages – for creating, editing and deleting of packages.

DNS Functions – for adding, editing or deleting DNS zones, editing zone templates and parking domain names.

The WHM software has other very useful appliances, but those are to be discussed in separate cPanel/WHM tutorials, as our main goal here is to prepare you to able to complete the three general steps every WHM beginner should start with :

1. Log into the WHM.

2. Create a package.

3. Create and manage a web hosting account.

We’ve already described the main ways to log into your WHM –

http://yourdomain.com:2086
http://yourdomain.com:2087
http://yourdomain.com/whm

(an additional method for accessing your WHM through your main cPanel account – simply log into your main cPanel account, scroll down to the bottom and click on the WHM icon to log into your WHM administration panel).

In our next tutorial we will look at the second step – namely at how to create a hosting package.