By Ankit Verma
cPanel usually means Apache with a lot of conveniences layered on top. Moving to a plain Nginx box removes those conveniences all at once, and a few specific things break in predictable ways.
.htaccess stops doing anything
Nginx does not read .htaccess. Every rewrite, redirect, deny rule, and cache header that lived in those files has to move into the server block. For Laravel that is mostly the standard try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string, but any custom redirects or blocked paths you had accumulated over the years need to be found and rewritten.
PHP is a separate service now
Apache on cPanel ran PHP in-process. Nginx hands PHP requests to PHP-FPM over a socket, so now there are two services to restart, two sets of logs, and an FPM pool user that has to match the file ownership. A 502 that never happened on cPanel is almost always FPM being down, misconfigured, or running as the wrong user.
Users, permissions, and the web root
There is no public_html per account. You choose the web root, point the server block at the app's public/ directory, and set ownership so the FPM user can read the code and write only to storage/ and bootstrap/cache. Getting this slightly wrong gives you either permission-denied errors or a writable directory you did not intend.
The things cPanel did for you
Certificate issuance and renewal, subdomain and vhost creation, log rotation, and often a firewall UI: all gone. Each becomes a small explicit setup step. Once they are done the box is faster and cheaper, but the first week is spent rebuilding defaults you never had to think about.
None of these are hard problems. They are just the bill for the automation cPanel was quietly running the whole time.
