Recent problems with namecheap hosting cpanel and wordpress

I just started using wordpress recently due to the fact that i migrated this site from drupal to wordpress. I find drupal very complicated. Lots of time was spent figuring out where was what. It’s complicated and adding new plugins wasn’t as straightforward as wordpress. In some sense I was glad I changed from drupal to wordpress. But as there still lies a number of problems when changing systems. I was using a vps (virtual private server) previously and the rules and settings was somewhat different then when I changed over to a web hosting where I was given a cpanel. As previously, I was using cloud flare. I had to change the name servers to namecheap for cpanel. Like for example, DNS problems. I found that my site was always pointing to my old site ip address even though i changed the DNS to point to the new servers. So I contacted namecheap support. I got a few advice from them that I think could be of use to others. Like try not to change DNS TTL to 1 instead change to 1200(20 mins) or 14400(6 hours) and yes I was using the Advanced DNS Editor instead of the basic. I don’t why the changes in the Advanced DNS Editor didn’t appear in the basic. But my advice is not to touch the Basic DNS Editor to add the record even if it doesn’t show. It will end up as a duplicate record later probably.

Email problems

I installed a SMTP plugin to use my own email account to send out emails but I found out that I couldn’t send out emails. I thought it was a problem with my password so I went over to gmail to get it checked. But it wasn’t the problem. I contacted namecheap support again. They told me to use the cpanel internal mail servers to do the sending. Alternatively, I was also offered the choice to open 465 port which was closed by default to do the sending. I told them to open the port then I was able to send my mails now through WP Mail Bank WordPress SMTP plugin.

There was also the slight pain of the username and password. Cpanel doesn’t seem to let you choose your username and password it seems all auto generated which I can’t seem to remember. There are also other some other issues like passwords have to be of a certain strength and database names can’t be too long.

Then again I had a new problem. I was trying to add on this new domain name to my cpanel account. I find it weird since it was saying like a subdomain of my main account already exist. I really wonder why it told me that since I cannot draw a linkage of it with my problem. So I contact cpanel support again. They told me that it was a problem with the username. I think cpanel dislikes the same user name. So when creating a new addon domain I now used a different user name and it worked. Thanks again namecheap for their fast and nice support.

Also some stupid mistakes to avoid. Keep the email contact of the domain name to your constantly watched email account. Because every now and then they will ask you to verify your domain and if you don’t verify you can’t use it. That was one day that my office called me that the email was not working. In the end I found out the contact email was not updated. I went to update it and told namecheap to send me again the verification email. In the end I think it took like 24 hours for the domain to be back up again.

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