You have purchased website hosting space on Advantage Hosting. What’s next? Here is our quick guide to your client area on Advantage Hosting and to your cPanel account. Much more detailed information on specific subjects can be found in our Knowledge base.
Login to your Client Area
Once you place your order with Advantage Hosting, you will receive a series of emails that provide some important information. You will receive your client login details and some important URLS (like your login to your cPanel account) in the ‘New Order Information’ email. Make sure that you save this information somewhere safe. With your new login, go to AdvantageHosting.ca, and click on the ‘little person’ icon in the top right hand corner of our web-page. Clicking the icon will lead to the login screen for the client area of our website. If your login does not work, open a support ticket and we will help you out. Otherwise, you can now explore your client area.
Once logged in, the client area showcases your account information on Advantagehosting.ca. At a Glance, you can:
Home: Always brings you back to the landing page where you can see a summary of our services and important information for accessing your site. If you are planning to use Weebly (a FREE version of the drag and drop site builder is included with your new hosting account), to build your web-site, you will find a link to accessing Weebly to build your account.
Account Details: The area where you can change your account details, change your password, change payment details, change security measures, and review your email history with advantagehosting.ca.
Services: The area where you can see your active services and any available add-ons that may be available.
Domains: Review your existing domains, register a new domain, or transfer another domain that you already own to your account on Advantage Hosting.
Support: Our support section allows you to Check your server status, review our vast collection of knowledgebase articles, open a new support ticket, or check on existing support tickets.
Billing: Our billing area allows to your review your current and previous invoices with Advantage Hosting.
Logout: Finally, the logout link allows you to logout of your account on Advantage Hosting.
Logging into your cPanel account
Your cPanel account on Advantage Hosting can be accessed:
- In your client area (see above), click on your web hosting package listed under Services. if you scroll down, you will find links to common services on cPanel like setting up an email account, adding domains, or looking at your databases with phpMyAdmin. Clicking on any of these links will take you to your cPanel account.
- You can access your cPanel account via https://cpanel.<your domain>. If you are logged out, you will be asked to login using the login credentials in your ‘New Order Information’ email (same log in as your client area).
Once logged in, your cPanel account gives you access to many important features:
Files Block: Within the files block in cPanel, you have several options including: file manager (view all the files directories of your web-site), set-up FTP accounts, and other ways to access your web-site files.
Billing and Support: The billing and support block links back to functionality in your client area on Advantage Hosting. You can open a support ticket, edit account details, search our knowledge base, and more
Databases: At some point you may want to access databases associated with your site. Your cPanel account include phpMyAdmin which is a fantastic open source tool for working with databases. It is also a great way to back up the precious data in your databases. Our knowledge base contains a lot of information about databases.
Domains: In this block you can manage aspects of the domains you have pointing at your Advantage Hosting server. One of the things we would recommend is to turn on ‘force SSL’ (under Domains). Every web hosting account includes a FREE SSL certificate and this will force your site to always use https://. This is a much safer and efficient way for your and your visitors to access your web-site. For more information on domains, review our knowledge base.
Email: The next block is important as it allows you to set-up and manage domain specific emails (like my.name@yourdomain.ca). it also let’s you set-up forwarders, manage spam filters, email usage, and more. Our knowledge base includes many articles on managing email.
Applications: Under applications, you can install and manage WordPress (if you choose) on you site. There are other ways to install WordPress, but we recommend using the WordPress Manager and WordPress Tool Kit under Applications to install WordPress.
Software: Under the software section, can access and install a vast amount of free software with the Softaculous apps installer. Softaculous has hundreds to scripts and software that can be used to build your site. This section also has utilities to manage your perl and PHP modules.
