Hosting Account Management

From ZebraDots Support

Contents 1 Overview 1.1 Determining Your Username 1.2 Logging into the Account Management Interface 1.3 Making Changes to Email Accounts

[edit] Overview

When you host with ZebraDots Hosting, you can make changes to your hosting account to add and remove email addresses, change email passwords, set options for your account, and more.

WARNING: Great care must be taken not to change your account settings unless you are aware of what you need to do!

If you need to make changes to your billing information or the hosting plan for your website, or if you wish to cancel your service, please see Changing Hosting Plans or Billing Information.

Obviously, you will need to replace the domain name shown in the URLs below with your own domain name. If your DNS settings haven't been set properly, you may need to wait until your website is accessible through the domain name for these steps to work properly.

[edit] Determining Your Username

Before you can manage your account online, you will need to know your username. Here's how to find it:

1. Open http://YOURDOMAIN.COM.sites.zebradots.com (you should already have a printout of this page)
2. Under Account Access Information, find the box containing the field "Account ID"
3. Make note of this username − it is usually your domain name without the extension, e.g. no .com at the end

[edit] Logging into the Account Management Interface

Now you are ready to log in to manage your hosting account:

1. Open https://YOURDOMAIN.COM:10000/ in your browser, being careful to add the https:// at the beginning, and the :10000/ at the end of the URL
2. You may be warned about the site certificate; you can safely click OK and ignore these warnings (Users of Windows Vista's Internet Explorer may find it very difficult to ignore these warnings; we recommend downloading Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/ instead, as it is fast, free, and doesn't have these issues.)
3. You will see a prompt for a username and password
4. Enter your username as determined above (usually your domain name without the .xxx extension)
5. Enter your admin password, the one you selected when you created the account − even if you changed your website's password, you will still need to enter the original password you selected when the account was created
6. You will be logged into the account management interface, where you can use the available tools to modify your account's settings and email addresses

Once you have logged in, you can now manage various aspects of your hosting account, such as email addresses and aliases.

[edit] Making Changes to Email Accounts

An email alias is what most users will need. This allows you to check your single email account, but receive mail to multiple addresses. In other words, with aliases, you can receive mail to "info@yourdomain.com", "service@yourdomain.com" and "support@yourdomain.com" -- and all the messages will arrive in the same inbox, so you can check them all at once.

Alternately, you can create a whole new email account for a separate individual. But be careful -- creating many accounts means you will need to regularly log in and check the account, and delete any junk mail you have received, so that your mailbox doesn't get filled with unwanted messages. If any user's mailbox fills up completely, it may reject new emails that are sent to it! We recommend one account per individual, with each account having any desired aliases assigned to it.

To create and edit your aliases or email accounts:

1. In the left pane, click Servers > Virtualmin Virtual Servers
2. Click your domain name in the right pane
3. Click the button labeled "Edit Mail and FTP Users"
   1. To create an email alias:
      1. Click a username to edit an existing mail account
      2. Click "Email settings"
      3. Add an email alias, (e.g. "bill@mydomain.com")
   2. To create a new account:
      1. Click "Add a user to this server" to create a whole new email account

When you create an email alias, you can receive mail to the same mailbox for multiple addresses. When you create another user, you are given a whole new login to remember (which means more mailboxes to check!), so you should only create a new user when you really have another individual that needs a new email account -- otherwise an alias will work fine.

WARNING: The hosting management settings accessible through this menu can render your account unusable or result in total permanent data loss if they are set incorrectly, so be very careful with these!