Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Hosting & cPanel.

This episode covers how the NZRT hosting account is set up — the interfaces you use to manage it, what’s running under the hood, and some of the key tools and directories you’ll want to know about.

Let’s start with access. There are several ways to get into your hosting environment. First, the main control panel lives at nzrtnetwork.com on port 2083 — that’s your standard cPanel dashboard where most administration happens. If you prefer working in a terminal, SSH is available on port 2200, and you authenticate with a key rather than a password — more on that in the SSH Access doc. For Windows users who want to browse server files like a network drive, there’s WebDAV access on port 2078 using SSL — you connect to it the same way you’d map a network drive in Windows Explorer. Beyond those three, you can also reach phpMyAdmin through cPanel’s Databases section for database management, use the built-in File Manager for browser-based file browsing, open a Terminal directly in your browser for a shell session, and manage Git repositories through the Git Version Control section under Files.

Now let’s talk about what’s actually powering the server. The web server is LiteSpeed — not Apache, which matters for cache and config behaviour. PHP runs at version 8.x and is managed through something called the CloudLinux PHP Selector, which we’ll come back to in a moment. The database engine is MySQL 8.x. For email, the stack uses Exim to handle outgoing SMTP and Dovecot for incoming IMAP. Security is handled by two tools — Imunify360 and CageFS, both of which we’ll cover shortly. Caching runs through LiteSpeed Cache, stored in a folder called lscache. And backups are managed by JetBackup.

So let’s dig into a few of those components. First, the PHP Selector. Because NZRT uses CloudLinux, each subdomain on the account can actually run a different version of PHP independently. The configuration lives in a hidden folder called dot-cl-selector inside your web root. You manage PHP version assignments through cPanel under Software, then Select PHP Version. This is useful when you have apps with different PHP requirements running side by side.

Next, CageFS. This is a security layer that wraps your hosting account in a virtual filesystem — it essentially isolates your account so that even if another account on the same server were compromised, they couldn’t see your files. The config folder is called dot-cagefs and sits in your web root, but in practice this is managed entirely by your host, so there’s nothing you typically need to do here.

Imunify360 is the real-time malware scanner and firewall. It continuously monitors your files and blocks threats as they appear. You’ll find two files in your web root related to it — one called dot-imunify-patch-id and one called dot-myimunify-id. These are identifiers used by the Imunify system. If you ever get a security alert, you can view the details directly in cPanel under the Imunify360 section.

Now, your web root contains a number of important hidden directories — folders that start with a dot and don’t show up by default in most file browsers. Here’s a quick rundown of the key ones. Dot-cpanel stores cPanel user data and session files. Dot-htpasswds holds password files used for HTTP Basic Auth — useful if you’ve password-protected any directories. Dot-spamassassin and dot-razor are both used for spam filtering configuration. Dot-wp-cli is where WP-CLI stores its config and cache, and dot-wp-toolkit holds metadata used by the WP Toolkit plugin manager. Dot-softaculous is where the Softaculous one-click installer keeps its data. Dot-caldav handles calendar configuration, relevant if you’re using Nextcloud or mail-based calendars. Dot-subaccounts stores data for any cPanel sub-accounts you’ve set up. And finally dot-trash is exactly what it sounds like — the recycle bin for cPanel’s File Manager.

Speaking of WP-CLI, it’s fully available for WordPress management. You can run it from the cPanel Terminal. To give you a sense of what it lets you do in plain terms — you can list all installed plugins for a WordPress site by pointing WP-CLI at the site’s directory path. You can flush the WordPress object cache to clear stale data. And you can export the entire WordPress database to a SQL file for backup purposes. In each case, you’re telling WP-CLI where your WordPress installation lives by passing the path to it. The WP-CLI configuration folder, as mentioned, is the dot-wp-cli directory in your web root.

For deeper reading, this wiki page connects to several related topics — SSH Access covers the keypair setup and connection details, Git Deployment walks through how code gets pushed to the server, the Infrastructure HOME page has a full server map, the Subdomain Map covers per-subdomain configuration, and SSL and DNS Overview handles certificate management.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.