I'm trying to make the jump to VPS from shared hosting for better performances and greater flexibility, but am stuck with the fact that I can't access the machine via ssh.

First of all, the machine is a CentOS 6.3 cPanel x64 with WHM 11.38.0. Sshd is running (it appears in the current running processes).

Making a port scan I see that port 22 is not responding. Port 21 is, but I am not able to access the machine via ftp (I think it's a security measure, but I don't know where to disable/enable it).

So, I'm stuck in WHM and have no way to access the configuration of the machine, neither via ssh nor with ftp/sftp.

When trying to connect with ssh via Terminal I only get this:

ssh: connect to host xx.xx.xxx.xxx port 22: Operation timed out

I also tried to access with the hostname instead of the IP address and it's the same.

There seem to be no firewall in WHM and I have whitelisted my home IP address to access ssh, though there were no restrictions in the first place.

I have been wandering through all the settings and options in WHM for several hours now, but can't seem to find anything.

Does anybody have a clue as to where I should start investigating?

Update: Thanks everyone. It was in fact a matter of firewall. There was a firewall not controlled by the WHM software. I managed to crack into the console from the vps control panel (a terrible, terrible java app that barely took my keyboard input) and disabled the firewall altogether running service iptables stop so that I was able to access the console via ssh with the terminal.

Now I will have to set up the firewall again because the command I ran looks like having completely wiped the iptables. Can you recommend any newby-friendly resource where I can learn how to go about this and what should I block? Or should I just go with something like this: http://configserver.com/cp/csf.html ?

Thanks again to everyone who helped me out.