5 Things to do after hosting account setup
Your hosting account is finally activated after a bit of research with great efforts. Now what? No matter if you have dealt with other hosting service, you must know about the right procedure to have everything running properly. Based our recent communication to several clients, we found it's necessary to write a dedicated posting about how to work correctly with your hosting account after setup. Because lots of issues are caused by misusing of the service. We have gathered all problems and compiled a list of following guidance
Check account settings
The first thing you should pay attention to after you received account confirmation email. In your client portal, there're lots of settings can be customized such as login protection and account renewal settings. From the problems we received, multiple clients complained their account got auto charged without any notice in advance. But after we checked from client portal, the account has auto renewal "turned on". We can say the hosting is doing bad, but if we have done further investigation, such problem can be avoided. So make sure to check your account settings once you received confirmation email.
Secure passwords for different service
By default, all service is created by hosting account login credentials. It's absolutely not good for overall security. Because if any of your service is cracked by hacker then your entire account is placed at high risk. We highly recommend to configure different passwords for different services. Client portal, hosting control panel and FTP etc should be provided different credentials. So once your hosting account is created, be sure to apply such settings and your account will be operated safely.
Be familiar with the control panel software
The hosting industry is being standalized from the past two years development reviews. However, there're still big difference among different hosting providers. For example the most popular control panel "cpanel" has many versions and lots of hosting companies applied their own custom setups. Justhost is probably the leading one who has fully revised the control panel software. By their most recent control panel customization, everything is provided on the same navigation just like a powerful cms platform. Customer center, support center and control panel are fully integrated and control panel category structures are all redesigned.
Because of this, there're many things to learn about. Don't be scared by the effort and time. It's 100% worthy because you will understand how to manage stuff professinoally. This is also included from hosting company new staff training cource, they must be professional in each single point before they can sent to customer support.
Upload website files and do testing
Now, you can upload or migrate over all files and do testing. Remember, it's always important to confirm everything is working properly before your switch over domain directly. Normally, each hosting account is assigned a termporary address for website testing. Use it to test everything on your website and solve any problem with support before the next changeover.
Sometimes, your application can only work under FQDN. For such case, you can by pass DNS directly from computer hosts file. For windows operation system, navigate to "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc" and open the "hosts" file via notepad then add this line in the end "10.10.10.x yourdomain.com". Make sure to replace the IP to your server IP and use your own domain name. Save the file and browse to it, it will bring up website from your new server. Remember to remove this configuration after your switched over DNS records.
Change over DNS server
Now it's time to change your domain DNS. Unless there's specific reason, we suggest change over the entire DNS server settings instead few DNS records. Because it's common for hosting companies do necessary maintenance on hosting server and they need to apply some changes every few periods. If we use their DNS server, then everything can be handled professionally by support team or else we must monitor such changes by ourselves.
Above guidance is solely written based our working experience on customer accounts. You probably have searched out the perfect hosting service, but it's another thing if you can use it properly. It's crucial to know how to use the service professionally and safely. This will greatly reduce lots of potential problems.
