If you use a VPS or a dedicated server, you most likely have some form of control panel installed to help make management a little bit easier. If that’s the case, odds are better than average you’re using CPanel.

While it is no substitute for SSHing into your site and managing things directly, it can help reduce the burden of many of the more common tasks, such as setting up new sites, updating accounts, restarting services and getting your system status.

However, the CPanel backend is far from mobile-friendly. Frame-heavy and bulky, it is almost impossible to use effectively on an iPhone or other smartphone. This can be a great headache when you have an emergency on the road and need to restart your server or add a new account.

Because of this, an iPhone app seems all-too-natural for the product. But how well does the WHM app do its job? Sadly, the answer is not very well though it does clearly highlight the potential for such a product to do great things.

Introduction to the CPanel iPhone App

Developed by Ollie Kett the CPanel WHM app is actually not an official one and has no connection with CPanel Inc.

The application comes in three flavors. The first two, CPanel and CPanel Lite, are both for CPanel only and the lite version is a limited, free version of the CPanel app. The third is the one we are looking at, CPanel WHM, which is for the full WHM backend.

Currently, in the App Store, the three programs have lukewarm (at best) reviews. CPanel has 2 stars average and CPanel WHM 2.5. Furthermore, at $4 and $5 respectively, they are far from the cheapest apps in the app store, though still not enough to be considered outright expensive.

The main features of the WHM app include the ability to manage accounts (list, suspend, add, etc.), edit packages, view server load, view bandwidth usage, reboot the server and restart various services (httpd, FTP, etc.)

On that front, the WHM app does its job fairly well, and there are many reasons why one would want to have this app on their iPhone.

The Good Bits

In most areas, what the CPanel WHM app does, it does well. You can view your accounts and their status, suspend ones that are running over, reboot your server, etc. and it all works as advertised. It’s also quick, even when not on wifi.

I’ve used the app a few time to restart services on my WHM account, usually the FTP server, and it has been a handy tool for the job. I could easily see being out at dinner, getting a text message alerting me to some kind of outage and then using the app to correct it.

The application also has the ability to work with multiple accounts, great for those who run several different servers and you can connect to CPanel accounts as well, though what you can do from there is much more limited.

However, unfortunately, that is where the good news seems to stop. The rest of the application goes rapidly downhill

The Bad Bits

The most immediate problem I have with the application is the bugs. Sometimes the app will not load and will crash before the first screen. Other times it will crash when trying to save something to the server. The more constant problem, however, is that some of the features simply do not work for me.

First up, the “Add An Account” feature constantly produces an unknown error. Secondly , adding a package simply does not work- though it says it writes the package to the server, I can’t find it either in the app or in the Web-based backend.

Unfortunately, these are two of the more interesting features. I really liked the idea of being able to set up a package or an account from anywhere so the disappointment was pretty hard to deal with!

The bigger problem, however, is the lack of features I actually need. I can view/suspend accounts, but not edit them, and it’s the same with packages. You can’t interact with your IP addresses, there is no way to restore or manage backups, no DNS features and no way to manipulate the server and/or any of the services that run on it.

The app is also built very inefficiently and is filled with minor speedbumps. For example, trying to type in the numbers for creating a new package (to input the various limits) requires me to switch back to the numeric keyboard rather than simply starting with it (like the iPhone does when entering telephone numbers). It may only be one extra key press per item, but across over half a dozen blanks, it can get annoying.

In short, your options are limited to restarting something that isn’t working, adding (but not importing or editing) accounts and viewing some server information. That’s it. To make it worse, some of the more interesting features don’t work (at least on my phone) and what I am essentially left with is an app that restarts things on my server.

While that’s an important tool to have, it simply is not worth the $4.99 that’s being asked for it.

Bottom Line

This app has made me drool even more about the prospect of a real CPanel WHM app for the iPhone. However, this is not it. Simply put, save your money until a better WHM app comes out. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long.

Tags:   App Store • CPanel • cpanel whm • iphone • iphone app • whm