cPanel 11.50 Update

All of our servers have been running cPanel 11.50 for at least two weeks and I wanted to go ahead and give you all a quick update on this. The big thing that some resellers are seeing as a result of this upgrade is much slower load times of the “Create a New Account” page and saving package changes in WHM. This issue is related to a change in the way that bandwidth data is now stored that was supposed to provide “significant performance improvement and greater reliability.” Unfortunately we’ve seen quite the opposite thus far, especially for resellers that have many cPanel accounts.

We reported this issue to cPanel support on August 13th and are still working with them to get this sorted out. As of Friday they were able to duplicate the issue with certainty on their own test environment and thought they had a test build that would resolve it but no luck there. We’re hopeful they’ll have a working test build later this week. When this might actually get pushed out to the “Release” or “Stable” build tiers is unknown so a full fix may still be a few weeks off. Rest assured, though, there are no performance issues with our servers and this does not cause any harm. You just need to beware that these actions will take longer to complete until they’re able to provide a solution.

Moving on, as a part of this 11.50 update all of our servers have been utilizing greylisting for at least a week. We’ve manually whitelisted a lot of major ISP mail servers to eliminate some unnecessary delays. Not surprisingly, we’re very pleased with the results that greylisting has had on our mail traffic thus far. During the work week we’re seeing a reduction in deliverable spam that often exceeds 100,000 messages per day. At this point you should not be seeing any issues related to this but if you are please do submit a ticket and we can take a look for you. If necessary you can even disable greylisting via cPanel but we’ve found it to be very effective and it has been in use on our SpamTitan cluster for over a year now.

Lastly, as I briefly noted in a prior post, cPanel’s X3 theme is on its way to being retired. In order to prepare for this you should familiarize your self with its replacement, Paper Lantern. In the near future we will be bulk modifying accounts and packages to switch them over to this new theme. If you make use of cPanel’s branding for the X3 theme you’ll want to take a look at the options available to you for Paper Lantern so that you are prepared for this change.