First, there are a couple of improvements to the control panel’s email options. Most notable is the Email Accounts page — this has been completely re-written to make use of JavaScript (AJAX), meaning that email accounts can be created, edited and deleted much more quickly, without the need for the page to be reloaded after each action. Also, the MX entry editor, which controls how email for your domains is routed, has been expanded with additional options to allow you to have more control over exactly how the server routes your incoming email.

This upgrade also adds a new “Simple DNS Zone Editor” to the control panel, which allows customers to easily create and modify entries in their DNS records. This means that customers who wish to create custom DNS entries can do so without having to get us to do it for them.

As well as upgrading cPanel, we added the mod_cache module to Apache. This module provides efficient caching of pages to disk, allowing you to significantly reduce the time it takes for pages to be rendered, and reduce the amount of CPU time required to load each page. Caching can be configured using a .htaccess file — check out the Apache manual pages for mod_cache and mod_disk_cache for more information. (mod_mem_cache is not supported at this time.)

We have also taken this opportunity to upgrade the Account Control Panel, and beyond the behind the scenes changes there are a few new noteworthy features I’d like to explain.

Sub-Accounts

Clients can now create sub-users under their main account to allow multiple people to access the same account without having to use the same login details.

We call the primary login the “master account owner”, and any users they create under their account are called “sub-accounts”. Each section of the client area has its own permission setting so the access rights can be fine-tuned by the master account holder (and any sub-accounts which have been given permission to manage contacts), so different people can perform different actions. For example, you might wish to create an account for your web developer to allow them to communicate with our technical support staff without having access to your billing information.

Mass Pay

The new Mass Payments feature allows you to pay for multiple due invoices in a single payment attempt, which will be more convenient for you and more efficient for us since we will have fewer transactions to process. To use this new option, select the invoices you want to pay from the Dashboard and click “Pay Selected”, or just click “Pay All” to pay all your unpaid invoices.

Domain Renewals

The renewal system has received some attention. It is now possible to renew multiple domains in one go, and it is easier to see which domains are eligible for renewal.

I hope you find yourself using these new features. And as always, if you have any comments please feel free to reply to this blog post or drop us an email to feedback@valcatohosting.com.

For some reason, by default cPanel logs all errors from all accounts into one big file, then then the error log viewer just looks for the lines containing the path to your home directory (i.e. the location of your account’s files). The problem with this is that not all errors relating to your account actually contain this path — this is especially true of Django applications, for example — so it was impossible for customers to see some of the errors their sites were generating.

To remedy this, we’ve reconfigured the web server to log errors to a file called “tmp/error.log” in each user’s home directory. This makes cPanel’s error log viewer useless because it doesn’t know to look at that file for errors, but since the error log can be viewed/downloaded in SSH and FTP we feel this trade-off is worth it so that customers can actually see all of their errors.