Many new web hosts are working hard to make money from web hosting. To work efficiently it is important to automate as many business processes as possible. One of those things you can automate is the setup of a new site for a customer. No, I am not talking about the actual process of creating a new account, but to customize and automate how the new account / website shows up afterwards. Every time you set up a new account it comes with an empty root folder and shows the default Apache Web server information. That is a) not very pretty and b) are you revealing critical information to strangers who eventually use that knowledge to hack your server.
It is good business practice as a web host to prestage an index file inside your cpanel account structure that gets deployed when a new account is created. You can either use a blank index file or use it to advertise your own services.
Example: “Future home of xxxx – proudly hosted by XYZ Web Hosting”
How do you add such an index file to your cpanel account structure so that when a new account is deployed this gets setup automatically? The answer is to use the skeleton directory feature in WHM. This directory is what will be used as a skeleton for new accounts. For example if you place an index.html file in /root/cpanel3-skel/public_html, and then setup a new account on your server, that new account will have a copy of your index.html in their public_html directory.
If you are a reseller web host, talk to your web hosting provider on how to do this in their environment. If you have SSH access on your reseller account or your server you can do it easily yourself.
cd /root/cpanel3-skel/public_html
touch index.html
Then just edit the index.html file or upload your own copy that you created on your computer. If you just leave it as it is, you have a blank index file which will protect you from directory browsing and from revealing server information to 3rd parties.
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