How to Setup WHM & cPanel on AWS Instances

Written by Rahul, Updated on October 8, 2019

WHM & cPanel is the web-based system management control panel widely used for the Linux hosting environment. To use WHM/cPanel on the AWS environment, we will face the problem with normal instances. So we prefer to use VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud) in aws for installing WHM & cPanel server. This article will help you step by step in brief details for the configuration of the WHM & cPanel hosting environment on AWS instances.

Follow below step by step details for configuring WHM & cPanel on AWS:-

1. Setup VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

First login to your AWS web console and navigate to below location for creating VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) for your cPanel infrastructure.

Services >> Networking >> VPC (VPC Dashboard)
Now click on Start VPC Wizard button.
Select VPC with a Single Public Subnet
Input your CIDR and Public Subnet

2. Create EC2 Instance

Now go to EC2 instances section of AWS console and start creating a new instance of your choice using the following steps. Remember that cPanel/WHM supports only CentOS, RedHat and CloudLinux operating systems only.

Select an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Select an Instance Type
Configure Instance Details
Add Storage of your preferred size
Tag your Instance Name

3. Create Elastic IP

Basically Elastic IP is public IP, which is required to access the instance from public networks. To allocate a new Elastic IP.

Go to VPC DashBoard
Select Option Elastic IPs
Click button Allocate New Address
Now click “Yes, Allocate” to confirm

4. Bind Elastic IP with Instance

Go to EC2 Dashboard
Select Elastic IPs link under “NETWORK and SECURITY” Section in sidebar
Select your elastic ip and Click “Associate Address”
Select You newly created instance and click Associate

5. Login to Server and Update

Login to Server as root user using pem file generated during instance creation.
```
ssh -i server.pem [email protected]
```
Update all packages on your system using following commands
```
yum update
```
Reboot instance.
```
reboot
```

6. Setup Hostname

Use below command to set a hostname temporarily on you rsystem.

# hostname cpanel.example.com

Now make changes permanent by the editing configuration file.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network configuration file for RHEL & CentOS
```
HOSTNAME=cpanel.example.com
```
For Ubuntu and Debian systems edit /etc/hostname and enter hostname there
```
cpanel.example.com
```
Now edit /etc/hosts for binding hostname with local system ip.
```
10.0.0.100  cpanel.example.com
```

7. Install cPanel & WHM

At this stage, our system is prepared for installing cPanel. Use the following commands to complete the installation. This process will take time as per your network speed and system configuration.

cd /home
yum install wget
wget -N http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/latest
sh latest

8. Setup NAT

Sometimes the system doesn’t automatically detect NAT on your instance. Then you can run below command to do it manually

/scripts/build_cpnat

[output]
info [build_cpnat] 172.32.121.55 => 54.6.169.157

Now to Navigate to Home >> Server Configuration >> Basic cPanel & WHM Setup in your WHM and check for The IPv4 address (only one address) to use to set up shared IPv4 virtual hosts shoud show your public ip address.

9. Open Ports in Security Group

Now open all inbound ports in the AWS security group used by the instance or open specific ports for inbound network listed in the following article.

Read: List of Ports to Open for WHM & cPanel Server

10. Access cPanel & WHM

Congratulation’s your WHM & cPanel setup has been completed successfully. You can access WHM and cPanel using following urls.

WHM : http://cpanel.example.com:2086
WHM with SSL : https://cpanel.example.com:2087
cPanel : http://cpanel.example.com:2082
cPanel with SSL : https://cpanel.example.com:2083

11. More Configurations

You may use following articles for more configuration for WHM & cPanel servers.

7 Comments

Subhash Chaudhary Reply
October 30, 2019 at 1:18 pm
What are the limitations of Cpanel?? Bandwidth or any other issue??
Vlad Reply
October 7, 2019 at 2:17 pm
Hi,
Excellent article, however just a correction needed.
i.e WHM with SSL should use https
Likewise cpanel wih SSL should use https.
JB Reply
August 5, 2016 at 5:04 pm
How do you add additonal IP’s to cPanel for SSL domains?
Abhay Singh Reply
November 21, 2015 at 10:26 am
I get a issue while installing WHM & Cpanel on My Amazon Machine Image (AMI). It showing licence isseu again and again please suggest me how to install WHM & Cpanel on Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and my Redhat / Centos System as well.
clonex Reply
July 2, 2015 at 6:45 am
” 2015-07-02 06:41:05 521 ( INFO): Beginning Installation v3…
2015-07-02 06:41:05 394 (ERROR): The system could not detect ‘/etc/redhat-release’.
2015-07-02 06:41:05 395 (ERROR): The system detected an unsupported distribution. cPanel & WHM only supports CentOS 5, 6 and 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 5 and 6, and CloudLinux™ 5 and 6.
2015-07-02 06:41:05 396 (FATAL): Please reinstall cPanel & WHM from a valid distribution.
Removing /root/installer.lock. ” Thats what happens when i try to install cpanel whm on ubuntu. Any solutions ?
Williams Reply
April 13, 2015 at 5:15 pm
Hi.. Thanks for the steps…. but plz provide detailed instructions will be better….
- Rahul Reply
  April 14, 2015 at 6:36 am
  Hi Williams,
  We will try to provide detailed instruction’s soon.