Giving a developer your cpanel info for an established website?

Well it doesn't take a genius to work out that it isn't safe but I'm wondering is there
any safe ways to hand the website over for the developer to work on.

What is the most that can happen? What can the person do at most.

The user is a member on here, JR VIP with good iTrader ratings so I do have trust
but I just want to make sure

Thanks

Best thing you can do to my knowledge backup everything and change the password before hand. Check on a daily basis that everything looks normal. You should be fine there is really not much harm he can do outside of your website. One thing is if you have you credit card saved on the account he may be able to purchase extra domains or something but I doubt it, if you want to make sure just give your hosting company a heads up. But honestly I don't think there much to worry about.

Have you contacted your host support?

KevinZaki said:

Best thing you can do to my knowledge backup everything and change the password before hand. Check on a daily basis that everything looks normal. You should be fine there is really not much harm he can do outside of your website. One thing is if you have you credit card saved on the account he may be able to purchase extra domains or something but I doubt it, if you want to make sure just give your hosting company a heads up. But honestly I don't think there much to worry about.

Click to expand...

Yes Kevin is right.

Teamviewer

Why do you need to give him access to cpanel? What you could do is set-up a git repository and have your site run off that - then have him fork your repo - work local - and then create a pull request.. merge that in to a branch and pull that in the staging server and test - if thats done then you can just pull that down to your site. He should code upgrade procedures, and so forth. no one should be cowboy coding. bad bad boy. ;p

Whats good with git is you get to see what files are changed.

Setup an FTP account for him. Setup the database he may need. Setup the email for him. Give him the FTP details and MySQL details.

The only time one would need access to cpanel is:
1) Cron jobs
2) Changing DNS records
3) Database changes (without doing the bad and slow practice of using PHP as the interface.)


If you want him to make an application, you should be fine with setting up his information. It's not that hard. If you want him to manage your site then you other problems such as trust and a contract that you need to sort out before any work is done.