 last session was about common troubleshooting tips for domains, and this time we're going to move into supporting and administering domains, which is going to cover both getting some analytics and seeing basically how you can track to some degree how people are using your project, and then exit strategies and deprovisioning of accounts, which is something that we get asked about a lot. Yeah, we can just hop right into it. I have a list of topics that I want to hit, but please feel free to step in and go. Pilot, you missed something. Let's get to that right away. So I have my screen share up right now, and I'm also gonna get out my notes. But the first thing that we're gonna hit is just a couple of the tools that you have in WHM for tracking different sorts of usage. So bandwidth usage is basically a measure of how much traffic and a particular account is getting, how much work it has to do on the server, which means that accounts that get lots and lots of hits, so big research sites, things like that, are going to take up more bandwidth. So what you can use that for is just a good way to see which users are taking the most bandwidth. So this is stateU. There's not gonna be very much, but we can sort, hey, Sandbox is using a lot of bandwidth. That's not great. We maybe wanna take a look at that. And that's another, and the one that's actually taking the most is stateU.org, but because that one is unlimited, it is 0% of infinity, basically. And it just keeps going down from there. You can sort of see the different usage and you can get a sense of, hey, maybe we should take a look at standbox.stateU.org because something could be going on there. Maybe it's just sort of getting too much. You see that there's a limit on it. Maybe it's just getting sort of more than it's really set up for. Maybe it's getting pinged by people who just wanna spam the site. Either way, it's a good way to take a look and see maybe this is a really big project that you didn't even know someone had started on their account. And you want to be able to contact the account owner and say, hey, this is really cool. Do you mind if I put this on our community showcase or something like that? Just different ways to get a look at what people are doing. And similarly to that, we're gonna go back to list accounts. Everybody loves list accounts. We're back in list accounts, everybody. We're going to, so we just talked about bandwidth, which is sort of how much work each account is doing on the server. And we're gonna hop over to disk usage, which is how much space each account is taking up on the server. Oops, ah, no, let's just be very careful. And I don't appreciate this. Oh my God. If I'm very careful, it'll all work out. So this is sorted smallest to largest. We're gonna actually sort largest to smallest because that's what I prefer. Similarly, you can see that state U is taking up the most space at what looks like 10 gigabytes. And that makes sense. That's sort of our main section. But that would be a different way to get a look at what accounts are sort of doing the most work. So bandwidth would be this account is getting lots of traffic, lots of hits. Maybe they've set up something really popular and cool and you didn't even hear about it. These accounts are taking up lots of space. Maybe there are some heavy hitters who are uploading a lot of images and a lot of large files. So studio art portfolios could be one of them. Anything that really wants, any one where the user would want to upload high quality, large image files. This is also a good way to track people who maybe aren't using their storage efficiently. If there are people who are always close to maxing out their quota, then you can go to them and say, hey, how are you managing this? Is everything okay? Do you want to sit down and review some sort of best practices for your final file management? And making sure that your users are aware of how to track their usage and I talked about people who want to upload high quality images. It's the web, your images don't have to be print quality. It doesn't have to be all that. So the ability to sit down and say, wow, this is a really cool big project or wow, maybe I should talk to this person just as a way to keep track of what your users are doing over time because as your project grows and as people's own sort of projects within projects, as their sites take on the vision that they want to achieve, things are going to scale. And this is a good tool to come back to every once in a while and say, okay, let me just check in on these things. Those are some of the analytics that C-Panel keeps track of. We have more documentation on the analytics that you can look at in our support center that we've talked about a couple of times before. There's also the install a tran section. We've been here a couple of times today already. We've looked in the applications tab. I'm just gonna take you there one more time because again, this is a really good way to get a bird's eye view of all of the sites that exist on your server. So much like the bandwidth one, which tracks how much traffic, how much work a given account need is using like list accounts, which tracks how much space. This is a great way to just sort of go in and say, oh, we have 172 sites installed. We have this many WordPress, this many Omeka. I know that when I was an admin, one of the things that I was asked to deliver were some analytics on how many people were using our project, what types of applications they were using, how many installations we had versus how many accounts on the server. And these are just different ways to get those numbers. I'm sort of bouncing around. Let me check my notes. Oh, there is one more thing. I can't show it to you right now, but I promise you it exists is the last logins CSV. Last logins CSV is stored on the server, not in WHM, but if you access the server via FTP, that is... And I can show that if you want to actually have that... Oh, sure. ...for state U. That would be cool. Yeah, I can't pull it up in this window, but if you can pull it up, Taylor, that would be great. Yeah. Just let me share that in here. If you want to kind of continue explaining it, I'll just kind of have it... Sure. So last logins is a CSV that is generated nightly. We actually have two CSVs generated nightly, but last logins is the really popular one, and we'll come back to it in a minute when we talk about deep provisioning and account management like that. Last logins tracks all of the C-panel accounts on your server, what the last time someone logged in via SSO was, what their C-panel username is, the domain name, the associated email address, how much disk usage, how much space they're taking up, and when they signed up for an account. And it's not perfect because if someone is not signing in via SSO, if someone is signing in via the FTP or via the C-panel portal, which they would have to work to get a hold of, but it's not out of the question, then it'll say that their last log in column will not be up to date, but most people are signing in via SSO, that's the whole point of domains is to make it very easy to sign in, one of the whole points of domains, but that column will be a very good starting place to track what people are, how often and how much people are using their accounts. You would get this, as I said, via signing into the server via FTP or SFTP with the root credentials, but this is also a thing that we can grab you, you can put it in a ticket and say, hey, can I have a copy of this? We'll say, yeah, sure, here you go. We have a similar one that just tracks all of the applications, so a report similar to the one that you could find if you went to my application section that I just showed you, it's a CSV generated the same way that last logins is and you can pull that and do whatever data analysis you want to on that. That is most of what I wanted to talk about. The applications isn't going to cover things like, in the same way that last logins isn't gonna cover people who sign in by FTP, installatron my applications and the applications CSV are not going to cover things that are installed by HTML, by GitHub, people just manually uploading WordPress into their file manager. It only tracks what was put in by installatron, but most people are gonna use installatron because it's a very useful tool. So we can't get a hundred percent perfect data. Thank you, Taylor. This is also what the application looks like. So the username, what the application type is, the version it's running, the URL, when it was set up and when it was last updated. Last updated is a little iffy because installatron is not perfect at tracking when that happened, but these are the sorts of data that you can get out of the CSV and you can use them just to analyze usage and to bring that to your head of department or whoever's asking you these questions. Again, it doesn't work for HTML or GitHub but it's a pretty good start. I'm gonna hop to deprovisioning accounts right now because there's a lot of ground to cover there and I'm a little worried that I've used up too much time already, but the main first thing to remember throughout all of this is that reclaim is always happy to help you with deprovisioning accounts. And what that means is that you are going to, we don't set policies for you, we don't ever want to sort of overstep and inflict our own opinions about account management onto you because every institution is different, every institution has its own needs but will help you get some criteria and some data that you may want in order to determine your own policies. And then once you have that you can take all of this data, generate a CSV full of emails and send us the CSV full of emails and we have scripts. We'll suspend the accounts for you in WHMCS, we'll terminate them for you and that'll be that. And that's important for, we showed you earlier in WHM, the total number of accounts in the list accounts page that is the number that we want to occasionally sort of trim in order to keep the server healthy and that would be what we're suspending and terminating. I actually have a quick, I have, I can reshare my screen I think just because I wanna show you what in WHMCS, the, this would look like if you were gonna do it manually by yourself very quickly. It would be, pop that back in. So we're back on the I Love Domains state you.org page that we were talking about earlier. We're using those buttons that we talked about in the WHMCS session, suspend, unsuspend and terminate. So our policy is generally, if you don't give us any sort of timeline and you just say, hey, terminate these ASAP please. We would suspend them. We would keep them suspended for about two weeks just to give your users enough time to say, hey, what's up? My site got turned off for some reason and come to you and say, actually I was using that. Please turn it back on. That you may want a longer timeline for that and we're happy to work with you. Just let us know whatever it is that you need. So I would suspend and terminate. We might end up using this again for another demo later. So I'm actually not gonna go all the way through with that. But if you were to want to do it for one account manually, here's how you'd go about it. Let me just move that. Let's see, what else do we have? Because I have a lot of notes and some time to get through them. I will note, oh yeah, the next thing would be to note that terminated accounts aren't on the server anymore but they are in WHMCS. And the reason for that is WHMCS is the log book. They'll be marked in red just so you know that they're not there anymore but they will be there just so you know that they existed. Their ghost will be there. The actual data is gone. The ghost of that account will remain. Ghost of accounts passed. Exactly. And I'm not talking about the application ghost. I'm talking about the ghost of the account, see, Val. Mm-hmm. We do keep terminated account backups for, oh, I want to say 30 or 60 days but one of you guys can correct me on that because I feel like my memory is hidden. There should be backups for 30 days. 30 days. In some cases it may be worth asking about beyond that because it's possible that there's sometimes other server backups but about 30 days is like what would be in Jet Backup where we could put a code back. That's right. Yeah, we can also work with you to basically offload backups. So the Jet Backup backups will cycle out over a period of time but you can say, hey, we still do want to keep those backups. They won't be on your server anymore but we'll upload them to AWS or some other third party storage solution. And we can work with you to get those transferred as part of the suspension termination process. That's a really good point, Pilot. And it actually is something we recommend now when you're doing a massive deprovisioning of 50, 100, 200 more sites, it's probably a good protocol to take full backups and store them on S3 for X amount of time or wherever you do that storage and we can help you with that but we do like for you to own those accounts and for them to be restorable should someone's account have been terminated by mistake as someone who works in the hosting company the worst possible thing to happen is when someone says I lost all my stuff. So having that insurance is great. We have Jet Backup on our side for 30 days but when you're doing a major deprovisioning and termination of accounts we do recommend that you take that extra insurance step and back that all up. There's also the other thing that you can do if you don't want to go through having an external place for backups is you can change your process to be suspension first. So you can suspend accounts for a while and like however long you want, right? The accounts are still on the server so they're still using storage but you can't visit the websites and users can't log into the account so it's a pretty good indication if someone's having like, hey my account's not working, you know, that's one that we didn't mean to delete or something like that. So I really like that method because you can suspend them and even wait for six months, three months, year, however long you want and then at that point terminate all the accounts that are currently suspended or whatever you wanna go with. And it's good for just getting a user's attention maybe. I was gonna say that every school sets its policies differently but if you do want your timeline to be something like three months, six months, often you'll send out communications maybe using those WHMCS mass mail or email marketing tools we talked about earlier and say, hey, are you using this? Please respond if so and they won't respond. And so at whatever day you said, you say, all right, I'm gonna suspend these for two months or for a month and you do that and I guarantee you within a week, someone's gonna go, why is my site not on? Why did you turn my site off? And the answer is because you did not respond to that email but thanks for letting me know that you are still using this. I just wanted to mention too that the Jackie in Discord said if there's a legal issue and Lauren answered in saying that, you know, that would be a good, if you wanna keep backups longer that would be a good reason to put them in S3 and we can work with you or some other storage space. I just wanted to mention too that it's probably worth mentioning if you're putting together like a terms of service or privacy policy, which came up earlier in the day that the length, the 30 day backup window is something that I would include so that people know that, hey, like, even if you ask for your account or you don't want your account, the backups are 30 days, they're not longer than 30 days unless you are keeping them longer in certain cases. That's a pretty good thing to include in that type of language as well. Yeah, the last thing that I wanna talk about while we're here, there's many things that I wanna talk about what we have five minutes. So the last thing that I wanna talk about is just working with your users when you wanna deprovision because it doesn't just have to be, you say, all right, we're gonna suspend you and if you don't tell us that you want to keep your account, we're gonna kick you out. It doesn't have to be that. It's a really good opportunity, particularly if people are graduating to help them migrate their accounts to another hosting provider so that they can take their web presence that they've worked on developing with Domain of One's Own with them when they go. And they can do that, they can download a backup all by themselves by going into have many, many things set up. So here is what it looks like. We switched into I Love Domains and up here, there's the manager account, user information page. And so you can sign, this is where the sign-in via FTP is but also you can generate a backup and that'll generate a tar GZ backup that the user can download, keep on their own computer by themselves so that you have backups upon backups upon backups just in case. And then really big letters over here, there's the migration option. So C-Panel is industry standard, but that means that you can take it to pretty much any hosting provider, including Reclaim. And Reclaim specifically also works with Domain of One's Own schools to opt for migrations and to offer migrations to the users at no additional cost. They set up an account and they can say, hey, can you just move all of my stuff off of the school server? And we say, yes, absolutely. Here's the migration assistance form, tell us what you want, tell us which account you have and we will help you take care of that right away. And I wanted to point out too that that backup you showed how to generate, that is a C-Panel backup that many hosts, many other hosting companies will be able to use to restore accounts that way too. So that's another method basically of getting your account someplace else if you need it. Yeah, that's part of why I wanted to share it because you generate the backup, you download it and you have that in case you ever want to restore your account, it gets terminated but you can also come to us and say, hey, or for example, someone says, oh, I took this back up just in case and then my school terminated my account and there's no backups. I have the only backup somehow. Just in case, everything absolutely goes wrong but I have the only backup. You can still bring that to us and say, yeah, we can restore that for you. Now that you have the C-Panel backup, we or any other hosting provider using C-Panel which is an industry standard can set that up for you. That's, you're absolutely right, Pilot. And I think one of the things worth mentioning here as we're getting ready to jump to the next session is we'll be talking in more depth about deep provisioning and tools for deep provisioning tomorrow in domains 201. So if this is something you still want to talk about or think through or want to see what other tools are out there, this was a very kind of introductory discussion of that and some of the best practices, but more tools to dig in to know what to get rid of and how we'll be coming tomorrow. So keep that in mind. Yeah. You have maybe one minute left which is not a whole lot of time for questions but I will use it instead to underscore the fact that deep provisioning and setting policies around it is a super personal thing for an institution. And so while we would never tell you how to do what you're doing, you can always ask us for advice. We're happy to help with that. Yeah, and I think a lot of people underestimate just how ready we are to get those names for you to figure out what you need to do and to help you back it up. So don't hesitate, don't make something that seems like oh a chore, don't drag it on because it is good to clean that stuff out. Yeah, it's definitely something you want to make use of the support in that way, especially when it comes to deep provisioning. I would recommend if you haven't done it before just ask and say, we're looking to do something like this, how should we do it? When I was a domains admin, I should have added in another thing for that panel is I wrote a script to collect a bunch of names and put them in WHMCS client groups. And like I didn't, I should have just asked the port if they could do that. And the answer was totally yes, just let us know what emails. Okay, we'll see you next session talking about splots and site templates. See you soon.