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cPanel hosting on CloudPress

Alongside managed WordPress sites, CloudPress offers cPanel hosting — a classic shared-hosting account with the cPanel control panel, its own disk quota, mailboxes, addon domains and FTP access. You order it, pay for it and manage its lifecycle from your CloudPress workspace, then do the day-to-day work inside cPanel itself.

This page explains what a cPanel account is on this platform, how it differs from a managed WordPress site, who it suits, and how to check whether your workspace has it.

Availability is enabled per workspace

cPanel hosting is not available on every workspace — it is enabled for workspaces that are already cPanel customers. If yours isn't one, the cPanel Accounts item never appears in the sidebar, and opening a cPanel URL directly returns you to the dashboard with the message "cPanel hosting is not available for this workspace." Nothing is broken and there is no setting to switch on yourself — contact us if you want cPanel hosting added to your workspace.

How it differs from a managed WordPress site

Both products are ordered and billed the same way, through your workspace's cart and subscriptions. What differs is where the hosting runs and how much of it CloudPress operates for you.

Managed WordPress site cPanel hosting account
What you get A single WordPress site CloudPress provisions, patches and scales A cPanel account with a storage quota plus limits on how many websites and mailboxes it holds
What runs on it WordPress only Anything cPanel supports — WordPress, other PHP applications, static sites
Where you work The CloudPress dashboard (plugins, backups, cache, logs, Shield, CDN) The cPanel control panel, reached from the dashboard
Mail Not part of the site; handled separately Mailboxes are included in the account's package
Scaling Resize CPU, memory and storage for the site Change to a larger or smaller cPanel package
Managed by CloudPress The full stack — updates, malware scanning, edge security Provisioning, packages, billing and access; the contents of the account are yours to run

Because the two are separate products, a cPanel account has none of the site-level features in the site sidebar — there is no File Manager, Log Viewer, Backups, Cache Management, Shield or CDN page for a cPanel account. Those belong to managed WordPress sites.

Who it's for

cPanel hosting is a good fit when you want:

  • More than one site on one bill — several small sites, staging copies or client sites sharing a single quota, rather than one subscription per site.
  • Mailboxes bundled with the hosting — email accounts on your own domain in the same place as the website files.
  • Software other than WordPress — a PHP application, a static site, or a mix.
  • The cPanel tools you already know — file manager, email accounts, cron, databases and DNS zones in the familiar control panel.

A managed WordPress site is the better choice when you want CloudPress to run WordPress for you: automatic updates, backups, malware scanning, the CDN and Shield's edge security.

Checking whether your workspace has it

  1. Look for the sidebar item. In the workspace sidebar, look for cPanel Accounts. If it isn't there, your workspace isn't enabled for cPanel hosting — see the note above.

  2. Open the list. The page is headed cPanel accounts, with the subtitle "Hosting accounts managed via cPanel", and lists each account with the columns Username, Package, Disk Usage, Server and Main Domain.

  3. If the list is empty. A workspace that is enabled but has no accounts yet shows "No cPanel Hosting Found" with a Get cPanel hosting button — the same button that sits in the header of the list once you do have accounts.

Values can lag behind cPanel

The list reflects the state of the cPanel server, read through a copy that refreshes periodically. Changes you make through the CloudPress dashboard appear straight away; a change made directly inside cPanel — a new addon domain, say — can take up to ten minutes to show up here. A newly ordered account appears as Provisioning… until the server finishes creating it.

Mail-only accounts in the list

Some of the accounts in this list are mail-only — the dashboard calls them MailXXL accounts. They appear alongside your hosting accounts and read the same way, but a plan change for one goes through support rather than the package picker: choosing Upgrade / Downgrade on a mail-only account shows a Contact support panel instead of the package cards.

Ordering an account

Choosing Get cPanel hosting opens Generate Your cPanel Account, whose only step is Select your package. The packages are named Mini, Basic, Pro and Max, and each card shows its storage, how many mail accounts and how many websites it allows, plus the price for the billing term you have selected. One tier is highlighted with a Most popular badge. A monthly/annual toggle switches the prices; annual terms show the percentage saved where one applies.

Choose selects a package and Continue to cart moves you to the standard checkout, so a cPanel account is paid for and invoiced exactly like any other CloudPress subscription. Provisioning starts once payment succeeds.

What this section covers

The rest of this section will cover managing an account once you have one — signing in to the control panel, changing package, managing the account's domains and password, and cancelling.

Dashboard and API

Nearly everything you can do with a cPanel account is also available over the REST API: listing accounts, viewing one, ordering a new one, changing its package, cancelling it, and the four per-account actions below:

  • Changing the cPanel password — PATCH …/password.
  • Deleting an account immediately (Purge now) — POST …/purge. As in the dashboard, the account must already be scheduled for deletion; there is no combined delete-and-purge call.
  • Domain management on the account — list, add and remove.
  • Logging in to cPanel — POST …/session returns a one-time control-panel URL rather than redirecting your browser to it.

Restoring an account that is pending deletion is the one thing that stays dashboard-only. Recovery is a re-purchase that runs through the cart and the payment step, so it has no API counterpart — see Deleting and recovering an account. The API reference calls this out under Still dashboard-only.

See the cPanel Accounts API reference for the full set.

The write actions need an API key

Ordering, resizing, cancelling, changing the password, purging, adding or removing a domain and opening a cPanel session all accept an API key (or a signed-in dashboard session) only — they are closed to OAuth access tokens, which get a 403 no matter what scopes they carry. Reads are the exception: an OAuth token with the cpanel:read scope can list accounts, view one and list its domains.

cPanel accounts also emit billing webhooks, but these aren't something you subscribe to yourself: they go to the endpoint configured on the workspace's billing plan, which is a reseller setting. Nor are they the same events a site sends. A cPanel notification arrives under data.cpanel_account_link rather than data.site, carries "object": "cpanel_account_link", and its actions are created, resized, deleted and owner_change. See Billing webhooks.

Next steps