Many VPS or Dedicated server hosting companies now provide cPanel & WHM as their default server administration tool.

cPanel works well for most routine administration, however users come across bugs once in a while.

One such issue is websites not loading even after an account is created.

At the root of this issue is that an IP not assigned to the domain. The users wouldn’t even see the IP in WHM while listing accounts.

Here at Bobcares, we’ve come across this issue many a times as part of our Outsourced Hosting Support services.

Today we’ll go through the top few reasons for this error to occur, and how we fix them.

What causes the WHM IP missing error?

When an IP is assigned to a domain, cPanel records that assignment in many files. Some of them are:

• /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
• /etc/trueuserdomains
• /etc/userdomains
• /var/cpanel/userdata/username/[DOMAINNAME]
• /var/cpanel/users/[USERNAME]

But server issues such as file system errors, cPanel upgrade errors, or domain creation errors sometimes causes IP information to be removed from these files.

It leads to the website to not show up and the IP to be missing in WHM account listing.

How to fix the missing IP error?

The IP missing error is caused by incorrect permissions on cPanel config files or domain records getting deleted from them.

To fix this, there are primarily two ways:

1. Fix the configuration files manually

A quick way to fix this is to add the domain and IP information directly into the configuration files.

Our cPanel experts follow this method if we know that the issue is caused by one specific config file (eg. /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf).

Tip : We’ve seen wrong permissions to also cause this error. So, verify if /etc/trueuserdomains and /etc/userdomains has 640 permissions. If not, fix that.

2. Use Apache scripts to recreate the configuration files

In cases where the damage to files could be extensive (such as a file system error), we recreate the files using cPanel scripts such as /scripts/rebuildhttpdconf.

If a service specific rebuild doesn’t fix the issue, we regenerate all system config files and reset permissions using the cPanel upgrade script : /scripts/upcp

Conclusion

WHM IP address missing issues are caused by cPanel and service config files missing the IP to Domain binding. Today we’ve seen the top reasons and two ways to fix this issue.