Shared Hosting Quick Start Guide

Congratulations and thank you for purchasing a shared hosting account from A2 Hosting! This article will help you get started configuring your web site.

Customer Portal

After you purchase a shared hosting package from A2 Hosting, you receive a Welcome e-mail message that provides information about how to access your account on the A2 Hosting Customer Portal. The Customer Portal enables you to view your account's product information, including:

• Domain name and IP address.
• cPanel URLs and login information.
• FTP server and login information.
• E-mail server and login information.
• DNS name server information.
• SSH account information.

For more information about how to use the Customer Portal, please see these articles.

Configuring name server settings

For your web site to work correctly, you must configure your domain name (for example, example.com) to use A2 Hosting's name servers. For more information about how to set a domain's name servers to point to A2 Hosting, please see this article.

Managing your web site with cPanel

cPanel is A2 Hosting's preferred management interface, and you can use it to control all aspects of your web site. For more information about how to use cPanel to manage your web site, please see these articles.

Accessing your account

You can access your account in a number of ways: SSH (Secure Shell), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and more. For information about how to access your account, please see these articles.

Setting up e-mail

E-mail is an important part of running a web site, and cPanel makes it easy to set up and manage accounts. For more information about how to set up e-mail accounts for your domain, please see this article.

Publishing your web site

To publish web site files and make them publicly viewable, upload them to your account's public_html directory. You can update your web site files whenever you want. However, please note that any files you upload that are not in the public_html directory (or in a subdirectory beneath public_html) are not publicly viewable.

If you already have a web site with another hosting provider and are moving it to A2 Hosting, you may want to migrate your web site data to your new account. For information about how to do this, please see these articles.

Securing your web site

Security is an important part of maintaining a web site. For information about how to help secure your web site, e-mail accounts, and more, please see these articles.

We're here to help!

If you get stuck on something, or just have a question about how something works, we're here for you. You can always open a support ticket on the A2 Hosting Customer Portal at https://my.a2hosting.com.