When someone is looking for a mechanic, it can be hard to know whom you can trust to do the work using the best practices available for a fair price. Finding a System Administrator often carries some similar challenges. Certifications are one way to show that a Sysadmin is up to date on the best way to secure data and administer servers. cPanel is now offering SafeAdmin certification as a way to appraise a technician’s existing set of skills, representing expertise and proficiency in the field of cPanel & WHM server administration and support. This certification shows that a technician has already mastered a specific skill set, as opposed to providing training on new skills that participants don’t already know.

What is cPanel University? 

We didn’t become the hosting platform of choice by solely providing great software. Our overall mission is to empower hosting providers of all sizes. cPanel understands that learning new software can be daunting. Loaded with comprehensive training modules, cPanel University breaks down all you need to know about selling and using the cPanel & WHM software into digestible modules. This creates an environment perfect for casual, independent learning. cPanel University is part of the way we ensure hosts, server administrators, site owners, and web professionals at all levels have access to learn the tools that they need.

In addition to our Knowledge Base, Documentation notes, and our ongoing blog series, we have a dedicated team of training personnel whose sole mission is to provide resources for our users. These technical trainers manage our completely free online training program, cPanel University is open to anyone interested in cPanel business or technical knowledge. Aside from cPanel University, the team has a variety of offerings for individuals, companies, and a few nifty benefits exclusive to cPanel Partners.

What is SafeAdmin Certification?

Unlike the other certifications available through cPanel University, the format of SafeAdmin certification does not include traditional study or educational material. It provides only generalized topic summaries to help prepare participants for the exam, as opposed to extensive and comprehensive coursework as is available in other cPanel certifications. The SafeAdmin series of exams are used to determine a technician’s skill in general system administration and represents their cPanel & WHM server administration and support expertise. 

Key Components

• A four-part series of exams, leading to SafeAdmin Certification.
• Each of the four exams contains between 15-30 questions and requires a score of 85% or more to pass.
• Includes certification badges for system administration service providers, displaying additional credibility for their listings on our official cPanel forums. 
• No study materials, as the exam is a skill and knowledge test for existing System Administrators, not training for those wishing to become Sysadmins. 
• The exam determines the skill of participants as Linux/cPanel server administrators.
• Focuses on ensuring awareness of industry best practices and knowledge of safe administration procedures. 

Topic Summary:

This summary should help to provide a general idea of the type of material in the exam.

• SSL (OpenSSL, TLS, diagnostics)
• FTP (pureftp, firewall handling)
• Bash (output handling/redirection/piping, command chaining)
• CLI Tools (strace, vi/vim, tcpdump, rpm, others)
• MySQL (basic SQL, troubleshooting, file system, InnoDB & MyISAM)
• Email (Exim, dovecot, spam, file system)
• Security (permissions, users, vulnerabilities, system, configuration, PCI compliance)
• Networking (port/firewall handling, NAT, TCP/IP, IPv6)
• DNS (nameservers, named, PowerDNS, DNSSEC)
• Resource Handling (load handling, resource management, process management)
• Apache/PHP (HTTP, configuration, file system, performance, MultiPHP)
• Troubleshooting (best practices, diagnostics, logging, problem-solving)
• cPanel & WHM (cPanel scripts, WHM interfaces, cPanel file system, basic API)
• Linux/System (package management, file system, basic partitioning)

Why do we offer SafeAdmin certification? 

We want to be able to confidently provide system administrators of service providers with a badge of approval. Certification provides customers some additional reassurance in deciding which company to choose, given the amount of competition that exists in the industry. As a result of this goal, however, this certification provides what is undoubtedly one of the more challenging sets of exams that we’ve created. All four of the exams provided in this course must be passed to receive a “SafeAdmin Certified” status. Each exam contains roughly between 15 and 30 questions, randomly pulled in from a larger pool of questions. The required passing score is 85%, and there is a limit of 5 attempts total on each exam, with the delay between the first attempt before 30 minutes, and subsequent attempts being one day.

If you’d like to learn more about what cPanel University has to offer or have specific questions, please reach out. The cPanel University team can manually override the delays between retesting for individual users as needed depending on the situation and the request. You can find them in Discord or Slack in the University channel if you need help.