Knowledgebase: cPanel
Set Up a New VPS
Posted by on 17 April 2014 12:42 PM

This is a quickstart guide to getting your new VPS up and rolling.

Verify Settings

First, you need to verify settings in your WHM... use this Basic cPanel & WHM Setup page as your guide. If you have questions about how to login to WHM check out this article.

  1. Log in to WHM using the credentials provided in the welcome email you received
    Note: you will see an SSL warning upon first logging in. This is normal and is due to the fact that cPanel automatically generates a self-signed SSL certificate to encrypt data when you access system services. Since you know the site you're visiting (in this case your server) is legitimate you can just click accept/proceed and continue on to the login portal!

  2. In the search bar text field located near the top left-hand side the page search 'basic'

  3. When it populates, click Basic cPanel & WHM Setup page 

  4. Double-check, or enter new, information on these pages including contact information, basic config options and more

    The default settings populated in the Basic Config section are totally fine for you to use. You won't likely need to change anything in there, we just want you to know how you CAN change the info.

    The most important part is the contact information... make sure you fill out the contact information section. That way, you can get cPanel warnings anytime anything goes wrong. It makes it easier for you to be aware of issues quickly so that you may contact us to help remedy the situation as soon as possible.

    Note: you can change which shared IP address that new accounts are created on from this page.

Create a New Account

To create the first account/cPanel instance for your VPS:

  1. Log in to WHM using the credentials provided in the welcome email you received

    For this guide we'll use a fictitious site with the domain name of 'yourdomain.tld', where 'yourdomain' is the beginning of your site's URL and '.tld' is your 'com' or similar.

  2. Click Account Functions then Create A New Account in the left-hand side toolbar

  3. Fill in the Domain, Username, Password and other blank text fields to create the account

  4. Save your changes 

Create A Records for Nameservers

Now you have to create A records for your nameservers. To create those records:

  1. Click DNS Functions in the left-hand side menu again, and then click Edit DNS Zone

  2. Select 'yourdomain.tld' and then click Edit

  3. Scroll down to the Add New Entries Below this Line section

  4. In the first blank text box type 'ns1', make sure 'A' is selected in the adjacent dropdown, and the provided IP from the welcome email you received in the third blank field on that row

  5. In the second blank text box below 'ns1' type 'ns2', make sure 'A' is selected again, and enter the other provided IP from the welcome email in the adjacent blank field 

  6. Click Save, located at the bottom of the page

Glue Records

What are Glue Records?

A glue record is simply the association of a hostname (nameserver, or DNS) with an IP address at the registry. In order for a nameserver to "work,” it needs to be able to be found first. This is done by creating a glue record. Glue records are required when you wish to set the nameservers of a domain name to a hostname under the domain name itself. For example, if you wished to set the name servers of 'example.com' to 'ns1.example.com' and 'ns2.example.com ' you would need to also provide the glue records (i.e. the IP addresses) for 'ns1.example.com' and 'ns2.example.com'. If you did not provide the glue records for these name servers then your domain name would not work as anyone requiring DNS information for it would get stuck in a loop:

What is the name server for example.com? -> ns1.example.com
What is the IP address of ns1.example.com? -> don't know, try looking at name server for example.com
What is the name server for example.com? -> ns1.example.com


...and so on.

Create Glue Records at Registrar

Now, ONE last thing. Go ahead and register the two nameserver hostnames/IP’s at the registrar. DNS propagation and activation of new nameservers may take up to 24 hours. To finish up, contact Support to request an RDNS ( reverse DNS) record change, so that your mails won't go into Spam temporarily while everything gets set up. In your request please provide us with the main IP address of your server and the hostname of your server.

Tips and Tricks

Restart Services

From WHM you can restart any of your services, including DNS, FTP, IMAP, Mail server, SSH, and more. If any of your services are running funky or slow sometimes it's a good idea just to restart them. Simply:

  1. Log into WHM as we did above

  2. Click the Restart Services icon 

  3. Click the icon for the service you wish to restart

  4. Click the Yes button, if you'd like to restart a service

Background Process Killer

Just like Task Manager in Windows, the Process Manager can show you all the current processes running on your server and allows you to kill an individual process, or all processes if need be. The Process Manager is also very helpful in identifying errant processes, or running processes you did not download or haven't seen before. To see and kill your running processes:

  1. Log into WHM

  2. Click the Load Averages link near the top right side of your screen 


    A screen will populate that shows all the current running processes.

  3. If you want to kill all processes for a specific user (for instance dovecot, which is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems) then select the specific user from the 'Kill all processes by user' dropdown and then click the big Kill User's Processes button

  4. If you'd like to kill a specific task, and not all tasks, click the blue Kill link in the PID column for the process you want to nuke

And just in case you're lost, floundering, or need some assistance, just hit us up! We are more than happy to help with these steps.



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Help Desk Software by Kayako fusion
ERROR: This domain name (kb.asmallorange.com), does not match the domain name in the license key file help.asmallorange.com.

For assistance with your license, please contact the Kayako support team: https://support.kayako.com