For some reason, I was struggling to find the correct code to have in my .htaccess that would work not just for the index page but for all other URLs on the website.  Ultimately, I found a solution that worked:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

For whatever reason, the other examples I had seen online that claimed to work to redirect a domain name to another domain were not working.  Usually, the index home page did redirect, but not the other URLs.  The above code worked for me in openlitespeed on a Cyberpanel server.

I’m not sure what the problem is with forwarding emails from an add-on domain, but I saw someone else had posted the same issue on the Cyberpanel forums, and there was no solution posted.  I figured it was easier to just avoid using an add-on domain.

Warning:

550-5.7.1 Our system has detected that this message does not meet IPv6 sending guidelines regarding PTR records and authentication. Please review 550-5.7.1

I first mentioned the problem with the IPv6 warning in this thread.  And then I mentioned it again here.  And I had thought it was just gmail being overly strict and had about given up and switched to Hotmail after this thread.  And hopefully this will be the last in the series.  The IPv6 issue was a bit complicated to fix with Cyberpanel.  Here are the steps:

1.  IPv6 is not natively supported in Cyberpanel.  To add IPv6 support I followed these directions.
   1. I added webadmin console for cyberpanel following this guide
   2. I went into webadmin console and created 2 new IP address entries as described in the guide – one for general and one for SSL
   3. I copied most of the settings from the IPv4 listeners set-up natively by cyberpanel
   4. I added each of the domains I want to use for sending email and/or have an IPv6 address for the website – make sure you add the domains for both the regular AND the SSL listener you created.  At first I forget to add the domains for the SSL IPv6 listener and I got an unsafe website warning and then a 404 page not found message from the server
2. Go to Cloudflare DNS settings and I added the following additional entries:

AAAA           mydomain.com               myIPv6address
AAAA           mail                                 myIPv6address    (set to DNS only – NO PROXY)

I wanted the mail IPv6 to be visible for mail servers to be able to verify the actual IPv6 and then it can run a reverse DNS on that IPv6 and verify that it points to the mail.mydomain.com (I can set the reverse DNS from the vultr website where I have my VPS).

I checked that things were working for both IPv4 and IPv6 using this tool

I definitely am a noobie when it comes to DNS settings, so I am not 100% sure that the way I configured things is the best method.  But it seems to be working for now.

I almost had the correct solution earlier when I added AAAA records and IPv6 addresses into my DNS settings.  Unfortunately, Cyberpanel does not natively support IPv6.  I only found this out when I was trying to access the website while out of my house.  My home wifi will use IPv4 by default apparently.  My cell service will use IPv6 when available.  I was getting frustrated trying to troubleshoot why my website seemed down when I was out of the house, but I was able to reach it just fine through a VPN.  At first I thought that it was a new Jetpack security plugin that was blocking my phone IP address, as an explanation why the site could be accessed fine from a VPN but not without.  After looking up the error messages as to why my site was unreachable without the VPN, one suggestion was to check and make sure my DNS records are correct.  I removed the AAAA records I had created earlier, and then I was able to access my website again.  It was only a fluke that my cell phone used IPv6 and I noticed this issue.  Otherwise I may never have known that anyone would get a site unreachable error if their network was trying to use IPv6.

Next I had to figure out why IPv6 settings which looked accurate were not working.  I came across some messages on the cyberpanel forums saying that IPv6 is not natively supported, but you can add it by following the steps I listed above.  Unfortunately, any additional sites I add, I will need to manually add to the IPv6 listeners.

So the next question is, do I need to do that for my other websites which do not use email?  I’ll have to put some more thought into it and see.

This issue came up again when I created a new forum on my server, and the registration emails were not going through to gmail – getting the IPv6 warning message in the title of this message. Hopefully everything works as it is supposed to now.  And I did learn a little about IPv6 and DNS settings and Cyberpanel in the process.

I have very mixed feelings about the experience.  First, the good:

Vultr (follow this link for a $100 credit for the first 30 days to test it out) makes it very easy to set-up a VPS with Cyberpanel installed.  I had no major issues with setting up all of my websites, although migrating them was a hassle.  That’d be true moving hosts between pretty much any.  Cpanel maybe makes it easier with other cpanel hosts.  Cyberpanel did have a script to import cpanel backups and it worked somewhat.

Using Vultr’s high frequency intel cloud compute is inexpensive ($6/month at the time of this writing, and I pay the extra $1.20/month for backups – I am glad I did as it made recovery very easy on the one occasion the server was acting funny) and plenty powerful for hosting a dozen low traffic wordpress sites – I am generally using around 10% CPU utilization and have almost never gone about 25%.  They run much, much faster than they did on my reseller account at Hawkhost.  And probably faster than they would on any shared host, even ones with pretty generous resources.

Cyberpanel also seems to be faster and less resource intensive than other server configurations because of the use of openlitespeed.  In hindsight, I’m not sure how critical that is, given that I have plenty of CPU overhead, even on a small VPS.  Of course, I don’t know for sure how much more taxing it would be without litespeed.

As to the downside, I have had occasional bugs that required some tracking down.  The SSL renewal one was getting very frustrating and I’m glad they posted a solution.  Perhaps they had posted the solution before, but I only found it today to fix my issue.  I have also had occasional issues with my email accounts.  I had an email forwarded set-up and it suddenly stopped working.  I think it may be a combination of issues, but I’m still not confident I have it fully fixed.  As I don’t use the domain emails for much, that hasn’t been a deal breaker issue.  At some point maybe I’ll confirm all of the email settings are done properly.  That is likely more of a lack of knowledge issue on my part as much as a lack of user-friendliness of Cyberpanel.

When I initially unable to get the SSL issue fixed, I did explore other free control panels.  I actually went ahead a set-up another server with HestiaCP as that seemed like a nice alternative.  People seem to choose Cyberpanel over Hestia mainly because of litespeed.  People seem to choose HestiaCP over Cyberpanel due to more stability / fewer bugs.  At least that is the sense I get.

If I continue to run into problems with Cyberpanel, I will likely give HestiaCP a try.  I really don’t want to migrate all of my sites again.  It is either try another free control panel, or go back to a reseller hosting account for slightly more money and a slower website.  I don’t mind the slightly more money as having a good host takes away a HUGE amount of potential aggravation.

Vultr has three main servers to select from currently – it seems they change their offerings slightly over time.  And even within those three options, there are several additional options. <Follow this link to test it out for yourself – this will give you a $100 credit for use in the first 30 days>

They offer a bare metal server – which to the best of my understanding is you actually are using your own complete dedicated server – that’s their most expensive option.  There is no “virtualization” on the bare metal servers.

Then they have “cloud compute” which is what this site is currently running (as of the date of this post at least).  You can choose how many shared vCPUs you want your VPS to have, as well as RAM and hard drive space, etc.

Recently, they added an “optimized cloud compute”.  Going through their description, the main difference seems to be “no noisy neighbors” – in other words you don’t share your vCPU, whereas the basic cloud compute has vCPU sharing.  They must have a way to guarantee that you always have full access to the vCPU amount you are paying for.  With the shared vCPU, they must have some overselling of the available resources, knowing most people don’t use 100% CPU most of the time.

I don’t know how much control they have over abusive neighbors to prevent overuse of resources for lengths of time, or how they handle if multiple people on the same physical server use most of their resources most of the time – that would be a set-up for poor performance.

I did test out the various options a bit.  I don’t have a need for the Optimized Cloud Compute, as none of my websites are mission critical, especially with regards to speed.  Optimized Cloud Compute seems like a good option if you need to have the resources guaranteed available at all times.  For me, I have found the regular cloud compute plenty good.  I also found that the Intel High Frequency option seems to outperform the other options.  I did some simple load testing and testing of the SSD speed and settled on that option.

The bottom line of my test was that getting additional resources did not improve my already fast website loading.  I was trying to improve my TTFB to get it below 100 consistently, but having more CPU power did not make any difference.  I’m guessing the “slow” TTFB (250-350ms) is more network or other overhead in the system.  The only way I was able to get the TTFB to be consistently below 100 was by using a “cache everything” option on Cloudflare.  In other words, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache entire state webpages.  That’s great if you have a static website, but not so great if you have dynamic elements to your site.

Bottom line – more CPU power won’t help TTFB if you have low loads on the server.  What I expected, but now I’ve tested it out.

Doing a search found a few people with similar problems, but I didn’t find the solution that worked for me (hosting a VPS with Vultr and a Cyberpanel image) – it would be the same if you were at DigitalOcean or Linode, as the issue is with cloudflare and litespeed webserver.

The problem is that phpBB uses the REMOTE_ADDR information for comparing with Spamhaus.  The thread I linked above does have a potential solution, but it involves changing the phpBB code:

OPEN ROOT/phpbb/session.php (line 293 approx.)

FIND

$ip = htmlspecialchars_decode($request->server('REMOTE_ADDR'));

REPLACE WITH

$ip = (htmlspecialchars_decode($request->server('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR') != '')
    ? htmlspecialchars_decode($request->server('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'))
    : htmlspecialchars_decode($request->server('SERVER_ADDR'))
);

And re-enable Spamhaus. And see what happens.

I did not try that, as I’d rather find a solution that does not involve changing the code.  I eventually found the solution with this thread explaining how to show the real visitor’s IP address instead of a cloudflare IP address.

It involved logging into to the litespeed control panel directly, which I hadn’t done yet.  Instead of going to the domain:8090 for the cyberpanel control panel, you go to domain:7080 and use the same username/password as for cyberpanel.

Within litespeed control panel, you change the “Use Client IP in Header” setting to “Keep Header from Trusted IP”

The original instructions I found also had me add Cloudflare’s IP addresses to the “allowed list” under “Security” and “Access Control”, but the most current instructions say that litespeed automatically includes Cloudflare IP’s in the allowed list now.

I was all excited I had figured it out, only to have it make zero difference.  I missed one important step – restarting the litespeed server!!  Once I restarted the litespeed server, it worked exactly as it is supposed to do.

Hope this helps someone else get to the solution more quickly.

Unfortunately, my biggest challenge is loading Google Adsense ads in a way that doesn’t dramatically hurt my pagespeed score. Using a domain that is not currently serving any ads allowed me to do some tests on what Litespeed Cache settings are best for PageSpeed insights, without messing with the appearance.

When I got to the Generate UCSS option under Page Optimization / CSS Settings, there is an option to turn on “Generate UCSS”. Here’s what they say about the Generate UCSS option on the official LiteSpeed page:

Generate UCSS

OFF

Unique CSS (UCSS) is a QUIC.cloud service that can be used along with the CSS Combine setting, to create a single streamlined CSS file for each page of your site. This combined file will potentially be unique for each page, because it will only include the CSS that is needed to render that specific page.

Benefit: By only including necessary CSS, the size for each combined CSS file remains small and processing time may be significantly reduced.

Unfortunately, when I turned on that option, my page formatting got all messed up. I think it basically prevented the usual CSS file from being loaded.  The description within the plugin says: “Automatic generation of unique CSS is in the background via a cron-based queue.”  Perhaps I just needed to wait for the cron-based execution of it generating the unique CSS. (Update 5/5/22 – I have tried it again and made sure that I created whatever files needed to be created by manually executing the cron job, and so far the formatting seems ok – I’ll update again if it breaks again.  I hope to eventually do another post explaining all of the LiteSpeed options that I’ve used and which caused me problems and which didn’t.)

I’m not that patient, so I just shut it off for now.  It seems  I’ve been able to get my mobile pagespeed insights score to be 99/100 each time I’ve checked since enabling almost all of the other options within the Litespeed plugin.  And that was without using a CDN.