Services, backups and server settings

This chapter is about keeping the server itself healthy: knowing what runs, restarting it, backing it up, and tuning the settings that affect every account.

Service Status

Server Status → Service Status shows load, memory and disk meters, then one row per service: a green or red dot, its name, group (Web, Databases, DNS, Mail, FTP, System, Panel), version, state (Running, Down, Disabled, Unknown) and when it was checked. A banner tells you at once if a monitored service is down. The services the panel knows are Apache, the panel's nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, Pure-FTPd, SSH, cron, the two AIOhPanel services, ClamAV, fail2ban, Redis and Memcached. Server Information, Apache Status, Daily Process Log and Task Queue Monitor sit beside it.

Service Manager

Service Configuration → Service Manager (root) lists every service with its unit name, state and when it was checked. Two switches per service:

• Enabled - started at boot. Switching it off also stops the service.
• Monitored - the panel cron checks it every five minutes and starts it again if it is down, adding a notification "... was down" to the Home page.

Each row has a Restart button; press Save to keep the switches. Check Every Service Now refreshes all states. Switch off monitoring only for a service you stop on purpose.

The Cron Heartbeat card on the same page shows whether the panel cron ran lately (Running, Late or Never ran) and the crontab line to add if it did not. See The panel cron.

Restart Services

The Restart Services group has one page per service: DNS Server (BIND), FTP Server (Pure-FTPd), HTTP Server (Apache), IMAP Server (Dovecot), Mail Server (Postfix), SQL Server (MariaDB), PHP-FPM, SSH Server, Cron Daemon and the AIOhPanel Service. Each asks Are you sure you wish to restart ...? Answer Yes; the page reports the new state. The command line does the same: aiohpanel service:restart httpd. Every restart is written to the activity log.

Backup Configuration

Backup → Backup Configuration (root) sets the scheduled backups of all accounts.

Backup → Backup User Selection lists accounts and lets you leave some out. A backup is a ZIP named backup-<date>_<user>.zip and one of four kinds: full, home (files only), mysql (databases only) or email. The cron checks every hour whether a run is due, and each run writes one row per account in the backup list.

Customers make and download their own backups in the hosting panel, and the Cloud Backups premium plugin can send the scheduled ones to Amazon S3, FTP, SFTP or Google Drive. See Cloud Backups.

Restoring

• Backup → Backup Restoration restores a whole account, or only its home, databases or mail, from a backup file.
• Backup → File and Directory Restoration brings back single files from a backup.
• Restores run through the task queue, so a big one does not time out the page. Watch it on Task Queue Monitor.

The default advice: keep at least one backup on another disk or server, and test a restore on a spare account before you need it.

Tweak Settings

Server Configuration → Tweak Settings holds the small switches. Tabs: Display, Domains, Mail, Notifications, PHP, Redirection, Security, Software, Stats and Logs and System. A few that matter:

• Security: cookie IP validation, Require security tokens in all addresses, session timeouts (60 minutes), reset of lost passwords, File Protect, X-Frame-Options and HSTS.
• Redirection: Always redirect to SSL.
• Domains: allow remote domains, add proxy subdomains hosting., manager. and webmail..
• PHP: default memory (256M), upload size (64M), open_basedir protection, disabled functions.
• Notifications: warn at 80% of disk or bandwidth, and 14 days before a certificate ends.
• Software: Auto SSL, site software installers, Git, Node.js, Python and Ruby apps.

Save the page with Save Changes. A reset button brings every tweak back to its default.

Security Center

The group holds Brute Force Protection (failures per IP before a block, per account, the block period of 15 minutes, a white list and a black list, and the sign-in history), Host Access Control (allow or deny an address for a service), Configure Security Policies, Password Strength Configuration, ModSecurity Configuration, Manage root's SSH Keys, Manage Wheel Group Users, SSH Password Authorization Tweak, Compiler Access, Shell Fork Bomb Protection, Two-Factor Authentication and Security Questions. Run the free Security Advisor after any change. See Security Advisor.