Max characters in a password?

I'm not sure if its your root password for cPanel but generaly a password would be safe enough with just 15 characters. Although I do use 20 character passwords too. Try to reset your password through the web interface. If its root, you might have to have your DS admin go and reset the root password. Just use letters, numbers and punctuation for your passwords. Somtimes special characters throw cPanel for a loop. I did that once and it was a good thing that I still was ssh'ed in to change the password back.

 

MD5 passwords can usually be up to 256 characters in length. That said, if you're using random chars, numbers and ascii codes, 8 is probably plenty. It's more likely, these days, unless you have stupidly obvious passwords, that you're more likely to be compromised through vulnerable web scripts of internet facing daemons. I don't know if there's any restrictions within cPanel itself that could cause problems, though with length. Before MD5 passwords in Linux the limit was usually 8 characters and any beyond that were ignored.