Issues with FTP, Email or Cpanel

The Website Firewall (CloudProxy) functions as a reverse proxy, filtering all incoming traffic through the Sucuri networks, parsing good requests from bad requests. To accomplish this a change is made to your DNS settings.

Specifically, a new A record is added to the existing configuration, or an existing one modified.

This DNS change, if not done carefully can have the adverse affect of killing specific features like FTP, SFTP, or CPANEL. The good news however, is that it’s an easy enough fix.

DNS Configuration Updates

To make things simple, during the initial configuration of your website Sucuri provide you a clean Settings Page in your Website Firewall dashboard. This page provides you all the information you require. You can access the page by opening Website Firewall Setting Page

On this page, you’ll find the following information:

Domain:
Plan Purchased:
Service Status:
Hosting IP Address:   1.2.3.4       (Your Hosting IP address)
Firewall IP Address:  200.2.3.100   (Sucuri IP address)
Internal Domain:

You want to pay special attention to the Hosting IP Address section. This IP belongs to Webhosting.net, it’s where all the content for your website lives, it’s where you will FTP / SFTP into to make changes, and where CPANEL is configured.

Accessing FTP

If you’re used to connecting to your domain by navigating to ftp.yourwebsite.com it will no longer work. This is because if you log into your DNS manager, you will see that the FTP record is pointing to your yourwebsite.com domain. This domain is in turn pointing to the Sucuri IP (reference above).

To fix the issue, you will need to access your server using the Hosting IP Address:

Hosting IP Address: 1.2.3.4 (Webhosting.net IP address)

Please be sure to use the IP provided in your dashboard, not this example. You can find your Hosting IP Address in your Website Firewall Setting Page.

Accessing CPANEL

If you’re used to access CPANEL like this http://yourwebsite.com/cpanel the same applies as the FTP.

You will want to adjust your URL string to use the Webhosting.net IP address. It will not look like this:

CPANEL Access: http://[your host IP]/cpanel

• or –

CPANEL Access: http://[your host IP]:2082

You can find your Hosting IP Address in your Website Firewall Setting Page.

Fixing Your Email

If your email stopped working, do not worry, it does not mean you have lost your email. It does mean that your connection has been broken, and it has everything to do with your DNS configuration.

While every DNS provider is different, the basics of what has to happen are the same.

Email work off something known as a Mail Exchange Record (MX Recod). If you navigate to your DNS manager you’ll likely see it referenced as mail or MX, both are the same.

You will also notice that they are often pointing to a Canoncial Name Record (CNAME) of your website. In other words:

CNAME: yourwebsite.com

or

CNAME: mail.yourwebsite.com

There in lies your problem. If you recall the previous steps you took, you changed the domain to point to our Firewall proxy servers.

If you’re working off a typical CPANEL configuration, you will want to change the following in the MX Record section:

mail.yourwebsite.com = >> [Webhosting.net IP address]

Still Not Clear? Need Help?

If for some reason this is not clear, or you prefer someone to help, not a problem.

Please open a general support request, via the form, submit the following information:

Regarding: CloudProxy / Website Firewall
Your Technical Expertise: I am learning. Please explain everything carefully.
Summary: Email or CPANEL or Email not working
Details: [Please include your DNS access information]

This will be assigned by a trained support agent that will access your DNS account and fix whatever issues you might be experiencing.