Change website with dedicated IP on addon domain and its subdomain

Question

I had a problem of changing an IP address of just one of the few addon domains on a cPanel/WHM account, but I managed to find a solution (by manually editing A records in DNS zones of the main account and the addon domain, and changing the IP in /var/cpanel/userdata/username/addon.domain.com).

However, this addon domain (example.com) also had a subdomain attached to it (sub.example.com), so I replaced the IP in the A records for it too, and I also changed the IP via SSH in the above mentioned path.

Now both example.com and sub.example.com are correctly resolving to the new dedicated IP and that's okay. But when I type this IP address in the browser, it loads the sub.example.com website instead of the main example.com website.

I have no clue as to why is this happening. How do I change the main (primary, default) website of a dedicated IP address?

Answer 1

You have two virtual hosts on the same address, so Apache (assuming that you use Apache) considers the virtual host that is loaded first the primary one. Any request that does not match a ServerName directive will go to that virtual host.

You need to change the order in which the two VirtualHost sections are loaded. In Apache you'd switch the sections if they're in the same file, or (if they're in separate files) you'd name the files something like 000-addon.com and sub.addon.com, so that the addon.com configuration would be listed first, and thus loaded first.

The above would require shell access, though. I'm not familiar with CPanel, so I can't tell you how to do this change using the CPanel interface.