At Bobcares, we often deal with account migrations for web hosts, in our role as Outsourced Tech Support engineers. A common concern users have during such migrations is a way to verify their websites before they go live.

Today, we’ll discuss about how to temporarily access websites in two ways – Using cPanel temporary URL and local DNS hosts file – and our recommendations regarding the two options.

What is a cPanel temporary URL?

cPanel temporary URL is a link that helps users access their site via the server IP address, instead of the domain name. The format of this temporary URL is usually ‘http://ipaddress/~user/'.

The ‘ipaddress’ used is the server’s shared IP address. It can be replaced with the server’s hostname also. The name of the cPanel user account in the server is specified as the’user’ field of the URL.

This temporary URL feature is provided in servers that have the Apache module ‘mod_userdir’ compiled in. For add-on domains, the cPanel temporary URL is ‘http://ipaddress/~user/path_outside_public_html/’.

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What is the use of cPanel temporary URL?

The cPanel temporary URL is used when the domain name is not working. We’ve seen users contacting web hosts for their temporary URL, usually in two scenarios:

1. Your customers are creating new websites and they would like to test it before making them public.
2. Customers who migrate their accounts from another hosting to your server, want to confirm that everything is fine, before switching the DNS to your server.

For servers in which we’ve compiled in the ‘mod_userdir’ module, we provide customers with their temporary URLs when they request it.

However, for customers who run custom web applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc., simply accessing the temporary URL would not show up their sites.

Due to the custom ‘SiteURL’ settings of these web applications, we update the URL settings in the corresponding configuration files and databases, to facilitate users who want to test their applications before making their sites live.

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Why do we not recommend cPanel temporary URLs?

At Bobcares, our primary focus is on security and performance of servers. As a result, we do not recommend or enable the ‘mod_userdir’ module in Apache and do not encourage customers to use cPanel temporary URL, due to these reasons:

1. Due to the security issues related to mod_userdir module, enabling it in the server is found to increase the risks of attacks on the server.
2. As temporary URLs expose usernames, they make the accounts more vulnerable to hacks.
3. It is difficult to track the bandwidth usage into the correct user account while using cPanel temporary URLs to access the sites.
4. Since running mod_userdir happens as the nobody user instead of the account user, the files and scripts created would be under user nobody and hence prone to attacks.

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What is the work around to temporarily access your site?

Though we disable mod_userdir due to security reasons from our customers’ servers, we do enable users to test their websites temporarily, by helping them to locally resolve their domains.

By editing the hosts file on user workstations to point the domain name to the IP address, users are able to access and test their websites using the domain name and make suitable changes, before making them live.

Our 24/7 skilled engineers focus on securing your servers using firewalls and custom security tweaking for all services. At the same time, we do not compromise on the features and support provided to your users.

We’ve been able to prevent server incidents by up to 15% by using our proactive server checks (click here to see how we improve web hosting support).

If you’d like to know how to secure your servers effectively and want to ensure a delightful support experience for your customers, we’d be happy to talk to you.