Overview
After you create an instance with the cPanel & WHM Amazon Machine Image™ (AMI), you can manage that instance from within the Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) Management Console. This document describes common instance-management tasks that your cPanel & WHM instance may require.
- For more information about AWS instance management, read Amazon’s® Working with the AWS Management Console documentation.
- AWS systems may encounter package conflicts when the system attempts to update certain libraries (generally,
libstdc++libraries). These errors occur due to the way in which AWS manages packages. To resolve this issue, use theyum removeorrpm -ecommands to remove the conflicting package. - For video tutorials about this process, view the cPanel and Amazon AWS playlist on our YouTube channel.
Access your instance for the first time
- To improve security for your system, the cPanel & WHM AMI automatically runs the
/usr/local/cpanel/upcpscript after the instance initializes. This script may alter the AMI’s version number. Also, the WHM interface may display a license error if you click any update links while the update script runs as a background task. - New instances may require several minutes to initialize. Until the initialization process finishes, the Status Checks column of the EC2™ Management Console will display Initializing and an hourglass icon.
To access a new instance, perform the following steps:
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Sign in to your AWS account.
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From the Services menu in the top-left corner, select EC2 under Compute. The EC2 Management Console will appear.
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In the left-side menu under Instances, click Instances. The list of instances will appear.
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In the list of instances, or at the bottom of the interface in the Description tab, locate the following values:
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Public DNS (IPv4) — The public DNS address for the instance.
Important:You must set the hostname correctly before you can license the server.
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Key Name (Key pair name in the Description tab) — The name of the key pair that you used when you created the instance.
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To connect to the instance via SSH, run the following command, where
examplerepresents the key pair name andIPADDRESSrepresents the public DNS address:ssh -i "~/.ssh/example.pem" centos@IPADDRESS -
To escalate to the
rootaccount, run thesudo sucommand. -
To change the
rootuser’s password, run thepasswdcommand. The system will prompt you to enter a new password. -
Enter the desired password and press Enter. The system will prompt you to confirm the password.
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Reenter the desired password and press Enter. A confirmation message will appear.
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If you wish to access WHM in your browser, perform the following additional steps:
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Navigate to the following address, where
IPADDRESSrepresents the public DNS address:https://IPADDRESS:2087Important:The cPanel & WHM AMI’s cPanel-provided security group only allows connections via HTTPS.
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Use the
rootpassword to log in to the WHM interface as therootuser.
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For more information, read our How to Access the Command Line and How to Log in to Your Server or Account documentation.
Manage instances
- We strongly recommend that you stop unused instances to avoid unnecessary costs.
- If you stop an instance, Amazon retains the instance’s basic information, but removes some data. For example, when you restart the instance, AWS will generate a new DNS hostname and IP address.
To start, stop, reboot, or terminate an instance, perform the following steps:
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Sign in to your AWS account.
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From the Services menu in the top-left corner, select EC2 under Compute. The EC2 Management Console will appear.
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In the left-side menu under Instances, click Instances. The list of instances will appear.
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Select the desired instance from the list.
Note:To update multiple instances, select all of the desired instances.
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At the top of the list of instances, click Actions. The Actions menu will display.
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Select the desired setting from the Instance State menu:
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Start — Restart the instance, which you must have previously stopped.
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Stop — Pause the instance and retain some, but not all, of its data.
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Reboot — Reboot the instance.
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Terminate — Permanently delete the instance.
Warning:When you terminate an instance, the system will delete the instance’s data.
- Termination will not delete EBS volumes unless you enable the Delete on Termination setting.
- You cannot restore a terminated instance.
A confirmation message will appear. Confirm your action. The system may require several minutes in order to stop or terminate the instance.
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The Instance State column in the list of instances displays the instance’s state and the following status icons:
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A green icon — The system has successfully started the instance.
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A yellow icon — An action is in progress.
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A red icon — The system has successfully stopped or terminated the instance.
Important:After you terminate an instance, that instance will only remain in the list of instances until you refresh the list.
