It’s always safe to develop and test new features on your dummy site rather than messing on the live site.

Sounds perfect right?

That’s why, web developers prefer cPanel duplicate account.

But, cPanel doesn’t provide an easy way to duplicate an account.

At Bobcares, we help website owners to duplicate their cPanel accounts as part of our Outsourced Technical Support for web hosts.

Today, let’s discuss about the 5 simple steps to create cPanel duplicate account.

Create cPanel duplicate account – 5 easy steps!

Website owners usually request cPanel duplicate accounts to develop or test a new feature on the existing site.

Now, let’s see how our Support Engineers create cPanel duplicate accounts.

1) Backup the original cPanel account/domain

Firstly, we take a complete backup of the existing cPanel account.

To do this, we log on to the server through SSH and execute the below command.

/scripts/pkgacct cpanelusername

Here, cpanelusername is the cPanel account username to duplicate.

And, the backup is stored as cpmove-cpanelusername.tar.gz, in one of these locations:  /home, /usr, /root, /web.

2) Modify original account username and domain name

After that, the next step is to change the original account’s domain name and username.

In other words, change the original account’s username and domain name to the duplicate account name.

Our Support Engineers follow the below steps to change the account name.

• Go to WHM > Account Function > Modify an Account
• Select the account/domain to duplicate.
• Change username and domain name to the duplicate account name.
• Click on Save.

Modify An Account option in cPanel

Therefore, this domain now becomes the duplicate domain with different username.

3) Create a new cPanel account with original domain name

Next step is to create a new cPanel account.

But, the domain name and username should be the original domain name and username.

We create a new account from cPanel using the below steps.

• Go to WHM > Account Functions > Create a New Account.
• Enter the original domain name, username and other details.
• Click Create.

Create Account option in cPanel.

4) Restore the backup of original cPanel account

Finally, our Support Engineers restore the backup of the original cPanel account taken in the first step to this newly created domain.

For instance, we use the below command to restore the backup to the original domain via SSH.

/scripts/restorepkg cpanelusername

Here, cpanelusername is the cPanel account username of the original domain.

Alternatively, we use the option “Restore a Full backup/cpmove file” to restore the backup via WHM.

[Need a pain free process to duplicate your cPanel account? Our Support Engineers are at your help!!]

5) Correct the database entries

This step is for database driven applications like WordPress.

For example, our Support Engineers ensure the following things after cloning WordPress sites.

• We update the database name and database username in the wp-config.php file to use the duplicate account name prefix .
• Similarly, any hard-coded  domain name in the database must be replaced with the duplicate domain name.
• Further, update permalinks in WordPress Permalink Settings, else pages will be broken.

You’re done!! You’ll now have 2 duplicate cPanel accounts.

Conclusion

In short, web developers prefer duplicate accounts aka clone domains to develop and test new website features. Today, we’ve discussed how our Support Engineers create cPanel duplicate account in 5 simple steps.