Setting Up Your Enhance Server? Read These 20 Practical Tips First!

MediaLabz

We are so fortunate to have cPFence as part of this community.

cPFence

cosmoshosting

That’s a fair point, UTC is definitely a great choice to avoid the daylight saving chaos!

As long as both the server and PHP are set to UTC, that’s usually enough to prevent issues with client software like WHMCS and others. We’ve had occasional warnings in the past when this wasn’t configured properly, which is why it made it onto our list.

Regarding server reputation monitoring, cPFence now includes this as a feature, running daily checks and notifying you if there’s anything wrong. It’s a great addition to ensure everything stays in top shape.

MediaLabz

Thanks, buddy! Glad to hear you’re finding it useful.

Kosta

I strongly suggest cp on dedi with veem backup off site. For production environment! And a your own switch to manage firewall before hits server

xyzulu

Kosta I strongly suggest cp on dedi with veem backup off site. For production environment!

Why? Enhance backups are far better.. and if needed you can offload the backups to a 3rd location.. ie S3 storage.

Kosta

xyzulu for compliance we need to backup OS arrays

xyzulu

Kosta well.. if it's what you need.. do it. No need to think it's a good idea for everyone else.

Kosta

xyzulu as I said for production environment

Kosta

Does enhance backups taking care of cp server ? I tough it’s only for websites data

xyzulu

Kosta Does enhance backups taking care of cp server ?

Perhaps you should try Enhance backups yourself before you throw around all your "expert" opinions on this forum.

Kosta

xyzulu i am using enhance backups, but as business owner from research I come to a point where I will need separate solution for backups and disaster recovery solution. And I don’t want to be relying only on one option I to be able to recover from disaster. I know it’s getting much more expensive…
For cp backups I never seen in my setup cp to be backed up in enhance backup server. Imagine all my cluster gets infected from some hacker I prefer to have something on the side I to recover completely from this kind of disaster. And from my research veem seems good option to me, just to have one backup server veem to backs up OS drives from main servers at least like DNS, CP etc. I am wrong with this ?
I mean i am trying to build something solid from beginning. Currently I am starting to test security solution from Sophos to manage all kinds of security issues on my business IT. I was happy with their trials so I signed contract for a year. Basically I am also looking to be ISO and NIS2 certified so that’s why it’s my points. And reasons me to post suggestions like you need dedi for cp is that many of people here run to issues with VPS on cp especially when they try to import big data website bc they choose cheap VPS with less than 100GB space etc

Kosta

I believe all servers in the cluster need separate backup solution off site for OS arrays apart of www data witch enhance does

xyzulu

Kosta I believe

Why do you believe that? Why does the OS have to be backed up as well?

Kosta

xyzulu it’s my disaster recovery plan for dedis ( production environment)
On vps we have snapshots etc, on dedi needs separate backup solution to be able to recover quickly or when I want to replace server without much downtime.
Also its saves me the time to configure again each server. Also its make my business bulletproof to any disaster…

JohnB

Kosta Also its saves me the time to configure again each server.

The servers shouldn't be black boxes where you don't know whats been changed. Make a provisioning script or use Ansible etc. That's where your configs should be. Then just install fresh OS and run script. Way more flexible and doesn't require rescue mode.

This is the 2025 way.

Kosta

JohnB I was looking at Ansible few months ago, I just left it as im not production rdy and I think I need more than 10 severs to use it. Its in my plans from my research last year… thanks for pointing it btw

JohnB

Kosta I think I need more than 10 severs to use it

Pretty sure you can use just 1 in theory. You may have read that if you're managing less than 10 servers its not worth setting up lol. But its great for disaster recovery unless of course Ansible is the issue lol. Personally I just use a bash script but if I had a more complex server setup I def would use it. Puppeter is another option you could look at but its more complicated. Has its pro and cons over Ansible.

8Dweb

Kosta We have found ansible to be valuable for us in handling our Enhance estate. It does take a tiny bit of hand-holding at times, but is far faster and more reliable than logging into a dozen servers to handle updates. In addition I get a concise (ok, terse) report of what took place.

However, you really have to love the command line to want to use Ansible, lol.

cPFence

Kosta

Pro Tip: Never use Veeam or snapshots for Enhance servers handling apps, databases, DNS, or email. They can create a cascade of inconsistencies, leaving you stuck with manual SQL fixes. If you opt for dedis for your main control panel server, the only real benefit is complicating your workflow and making life harder. Learn more here.

JohnB

Kosta For cp backups I never seen in my setup cp to be backed up in enhance backup server. Imagine all my cluster gets infected from some hacker I prefer to have something on the side I to recover completely from this kind of disaster. And from my research veem seems good option to me, just to have one backup server veem to backs up OS drives from main servers at least like DNS, CP etc. I am wrong with this ?

The vulnerability in your plan is that if a hacker infects your servers with time delayed malware. Its not uncommon that malware chills for a week or month so that images are affected. You're screwed if its ransomware and you haven't been testing the backups to see if they actually restore.

If you just install fresh Ubuntu, enhance, restore SITES, you don't have this risk. Backups of sites are more easily reviewed and tested than a full server image.

That said I 100% agree that you shouldn't rely on Enhance backups (or any vendor). Enhance backups use btrfs snapshots though and those can be exported into a tar file. The backups files are just the website files and a mysql dump so its not a proprietary format. You can make a script that restores the sites to a normal LAMP stack if you wanted to.

So backup to enhance backup server then export the btrfs snapshots to another server or S3 etc. Can be automated.

Kosta

cPFence I’ve read this post, what if I make MAAS or MicroCloud cluster with snapshot backups and VPS es is this better ? I need some backups solution.. on the side

cPFence

Kosta

For the main control panel, any decent VM with reliable snapshot backups will do the job perfectly. However, for all other Enhance servers, avoid relying on snapshots as backups, you'll run into serious issues. We've been down that road and learned the hard way.

Kosta

cPFence I believe I will have to get new License and give it a try to learn myself more on this next month. Thanks

Kosta

cPFence the problem is only related to the database inconsistency, correct?

cPFence

Kosta the problem is only related to the database inconsistency, correct?

If you restore a snapshot backup for a busy Enhance server, you’ll end up with the main CP having no record of missing changes, new users added, removed, or canceled ..etc, leading to a complete mess that’s very hard to fix.

The best approach is to use a VM for your main CP and add as many dedicated servers to your cluster as you wish. For the main CP, rely on snapshot backups, and for other servers, if one goes down, simply deploy a new one and restore your websites from backups. In less than half an hour, you’ll have a fully replicated server with the same settings, thanks to Enhance’s clever unique backup system.