I can’t login to cPanel and it keeps saying “Your IP has changed”. I really need to log in. Please help!

That was a recent support ticket received at our Server Support department where we resolve support queries for web hosts.

After successful login to cPanel, website owners get automatically logout within a few seconds with an error message like “Your IP has changed”.

Quite frustrating, right? But, fortunately there are solutions to this problem.

Today, we’ll discuss the main reason for this error “Your IP has changed” and how our Server Support Engineers fix it.

“Your IP has changed” cPanel error – When do you see this?

Based on our experience in managing websites, we’ve seen mainly 3 situations in which this problem occurs.

• The ISP provides dynamic IP address or ISPs with short DHCP lifetimes.
• When customers try to login to the same account via 2 different devices with 2 different IPs.
• Customers use a proxy or VPN that changes the IP every few minutes.

What causes “Your IP has changed” cPanel error?

Now, let’s see why cPanel blocks the connection and shows “Your IP has changed” error.

Website owners see the error like this:

cPanel error – Your IP address has changed.

cPanel uses ‘Cookie IP Validation’ security restriction to prevent account hacks.

Usually, cPanel uses cookie based logins, and this setting validates the cookie IP address.

In other words, as part of the cPanel login system, it links the login session to a specific IP address, so that website owners can access cPanel only with the right token and from the same IP address.

Sometimes, web hosts set this parameter to be strict.

In such cases, the current IP address and the cookie IP address should match exactly.

Otherwise, it will log out automatically and website owners will see the error “Your IP has changed. Please login again“.

How to fix “Your IP has changed” cPanel error?

Now, we know the main reason for this error. Next we’ll see how our Support Engineers solve this problem.

Usually, re-login to cPanel will succeed. But, to fix this permanently, we must ensure that the IP remains static.

Let’s see what our Hosting engineers do to fix it permanently.

1) Buy a static IP

As we discussed, some ISPs constantly change IP addresses. As a result, users must enter the credentials every time to access cPanel.

In such cases, our Support Engineers recommend that customers contact their ISP and request a static IP address, so that the connection IP doesn’t change.

Alternatively, we suggest customers to use a VPN tunnel, so that they will get a more static IP that doesn’t change frequently.

2) Access cPanel via static link

Unfortunately, not all ISPs provide static IPs.

In such cases, we suggest that customers access their cPanel using a static link that contains the server name and the cPanel port.

For instance, website owners can use the static link  ‘https://server_name:2083/’ to access cPanel.

Here, server_name is the server name and 2083 is the cPanel port.

3) Change cookie IP validation settings

Similarly, in VPS servers, another workaround we suggest is to adjust the Cookie IP validation settings.

Usually, web hosts set this parameter to be strict to improve the security, so when IP changes constantly, it conflict with these settings.

Therefore, we suggest server owners to set it to Loose to reduce the re-authentication frequency.

Further, Loose validation only requires the current IP address and cookie IP address to be in same range.

Cookie IP Validation in WHM

Additionally, to ensure maximum effectiveness of this setting, we disable Proxydomains setting in cPanel.

[Need assistance in tweaking your WHM server security settings? Our Support Engineers are here for your help.]

4)Setup ProxyServer

Alternatively, in shared servers and users behind strict firewalls, we sometimes setup Proxyserver for the domain to set a static IP for cPanel access.

Here, we create a sub domain and install a cPanel proxy script, which gives access to cPanel via port 80, acting as a proxy.

So, customers can access their cPanel using the URL https://subdomain.domain.com.

Here subdomain is the new sub domain and domain.com is the main domain name.

[Need to setup cPanel proxy for your account? Our cPanel experts will fix this for you in minutes.]

Conclusion

In short, “Your IP has changed” cPanel error occurs mainly due to the Cookie validation settings in the server. Today, we’ve discussed the top 4 alternate solutions implemented by our Server Support Engineers to solve this problem.