 And we are back. Again, my name is Tim Owens. I'm the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting. Yeah, and I'm Meredith Hero, the customer support team lead. So the goal of this session is to really talk about supporting and administering domain of one zone. And what does that mean? So in a previous session, we were talking about troubleshooting and really getting into the nitty gritty of like errors you'll run into, support scenarios and those kind of things. Now we wanna take a step back a little bit and look at the broader picture. How do you gather user analytics? How do you find out what activity is happening on the server or who are your heavy hitting users? And then what does a migration path look like for users? How do you not only remove accounts from the system when people graduate, but what does students do if they wanna take their stuff with them? So this session is gonna cover all of that kind of stuff. And let's start with user analytics. It's kind of a difficult scenario because in my eyes, C-Panel is very, obviously focused on being great web hosting software. What it's not great about is saying things like where is the activity happening? Who are your heavy hitting users and like how many pages as a whole are on the server? I always ask people like, well, what do you mean by page? Is a post a page or is an OMECA item? Is that a page? Somebody could have tens of thousands of items. What does that mean? What software is running on it? C-Panel doesn't really have a concept of software. People just upload files and it runs them. So it can be really hard to extrapolate anything out of the server. And so there's a couple of different techniques that I've come across that will kind of help with this. And I put a QR code, we've got a really good guide that I wrote that talks about some of this. The first thing that I like to look at because people wanna know like, well, what's some great stuff happening on my server? And so like I always say, the first thing you should check is bandwidth data because you figure if people are doing really cool stuff, that's the stuff that you get lots more traffic on. And so you may not know that somebody's got a great website, they built out a great exhibit and it's being passed around online, but the server is capturing all of that bandwidth. And this is right here in WHM. So if you search bandwidth, there's this section view bandwidth usage and you can sort over here by, it says expert, I guess that's for transfer. I like to sort it by transfer best fit and have the highest numbers at the top. And if you do that, you can get a sense of what sites are using the most bandwidth. Now, like most caveats that I'm gonna give throughout this session, this isn't a perfect scenario. You could have somebody whose account has been hacked and it's got a lot of bandwidth going out for malicious activity or something like that, but that's probably useful for you to know as well. But in most cases, what I find is that you'll sort by this and you'll go, oh, okay, so our main domain site gets a lot of traffic, but what is that? Oh, wow, there's like this library exhibit that I didn't even know about. And you can start to take that information and go, wow, I should reach out to them. Maybe we could feature them on a website or something like that. So this can just start to peel back the layers and start to help expose some of the activity that's happening on the server for you. The next thing that I like to look at is disk usage. And the reason for this is that you will certainly have a long tail of users that sign up for accounts. Maybe they installed WordPress, but then they didn't get much further with it or maybe they signed up for accounts and they didn't do anything with it. And so you can have hundreds and hundreds of accounts on a server, but many of them might not be doing anything worth really noting, you know, but then you've got a handful that are doing awesome stuff. Usually the disk usage can kind of tell a story there. So you can sort users under the list accounts area and WHM by disk usage. And I like to see like who's using the most. Obviously, if you don't have quota set and we always recommend that you set some kind of quota for users so that you don't run out of disk usage on the entire server. But if you don't have quota set or if you have quota set to a pretty high number, you might find users that are using a lot of storage. And that can be really useful information as well. It might mean that the person using it is not using it in a way you really want them to. We've seen scenarios, for example, where a faculty member uploaded their entire documents folder from their computer, including all of their personal home movies and music up to their account on C-Panel. Not quite what you want a web hosting server to be doing is storing that kind of content in there. But what you could maybe find is that again, maybe there's this great Omega install with tons of archival information. You're like, wow, this is a huge resource. This is great. How can we support this? Are there gonna be issues with the storage and those kinds of things? But still, it's great that this exists out there. So disk usage can be another one of those tools to really help you get a sense of like, where's the cool activity happening on the server? So I like it a lot. The other thing that I really like looking at on the server is getting a sense of what applications people have installed. Now, if someone's going the old school route and they've downloaded something from like a GitHub repo or from a website and they've uploaded it with FTP, you're not gonna necessarily know about it. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. But luckily for us, a lot of people go the easy route and they use Installatron to install software, even I do. I mean, and I'm a geek, right? So I think most people, if they're installing WordPress or they want to run an application, they're gonna use the one-click installers in there. And Installatron has an administrative interface in WHM that gives you an overview of all of the applications that everybody has installed on your entire server. It's a great tool to use, not just to get a sense of what's out there, but also to be able to choose what things you want people to have access to. There's a whole administrative section and that goes way beyond this session that you can tweak the settings and Installatron. But what I really love about this interface is that it looks very much like a single user's, but it's got everybody's accounts in there. And you can search applications by name in here. So in this screenshot, you'll see I search Scalar and I can see there's a single Scalar instance on this server. If I were to search WordPress, I'm sure I would get a lot on there or maybe Omega. And so it doesn't take much time at all to just search some of the applications that you wanna get analytics on and get a sense of, okay, how many people are running this application or this one and you might find really interesting information, you might say, oh, we're really WordPress heavy school. And then you go in here and you find out, oh, wow, well, actually, we've got 25 users running Omega. We should probably beef up our Omega support documentation to really marry the fact that we've got a lot of people using it and maybe it's our heavy hitters. And so this can give you more information about the applications installed on there. The other information that this tells you in here is like how many are out of date and which ones need to be updated. You could actually update applications for people in here. Now, that's a little bit more manual work. Again, you'd be looking at a list of lots of applications in here, but you can bulk select them and click the update button, which is nice by checking the box on the right-hand side for each application you wanna update. And Solitron's gonna automatically try to update things, but there may be times where the user said they don't want it updated, but you might have policies in place to say, no, we're gonna force updates at given times just to make sure that everybody's running the latest copy of code. So it's just a great way to bulk manage the applications that are on the server and really also get some insight into what's happening on the server. The other thing that we've created for folks is trying to gather lots of various pieces of information about usage on the server and bring it into a standard CSV file for administrators to be able to use as they see fit. And so we've got a script that runs and it generates once a night, it refreshes all of the data in there. And this is a CSV file that has all of the accounts on the system, including the last time that they logged in, what their C-Panel username is, what their domain name is, their email address, what that disk usage is, as well as when they signed up. And this is huge. This was a big question for folks because they wanted to get a sense of what that usage looked like in order to figure out what a migration path was or what the default policies would be. You don't wanna keep accounts on your server. If somebody logged in once two years ago, they're using no disk space and they never came back, right? So this kind of data can help you make informed decisions about what you do with accounts and when you decide to start doing cleanup options, whether that be once a semester, once a year, or some other variable time throughout the year. And so this usage script is located on the server. You'll have to use an FTP client to grab it. It's in the root folder, so you'll use your WHM credentials to log in to the server and then you'll find it right in the root folder on the server. If you ever have any questions or you just need us to send you a copy, we're happy to do that as well. Just put in the support ticket and we'll shoot you a copy of that file. But like I said, it's a script that runs every night and generates this file and it keeps it on the server. So those statistics are being updated dynamically every night. Oh, is this me too? I think so. I can talk about it though. No, I'm happy to. So as you've gotten this data, the next step would be like how to remove accounts from a server. Again, I got another QR code down here because we've got really good documentation on how to do this. But you can use that CSV file with the usage scripts or you might have your own CSV file of all of your graduates, for example. And that's totally fine. Really the only piece of information we need is the email address. We don't even need first name, last name, net ID, all that kind of stuff. All we need is the email address. And if you give us a list of email addresses in CSV format, we have scripts on our end that we can process on the server to remove them. For some schools, we've certainly done suspension first and then terminate. We think that's a great idea for folks who want to make sure that nobody was accidentally on that list. So sometimes you suspend accounts and then wait three months and terminate it. And somebody will say, hey, why is my account offline in your life? Well, you graduated. No, I didn't. Now I came to work for the school. I work here. And so it can really save you sometimes for stuff like that. But we can process that stuff for you. All you have to do is provide us a CSV file of email addresses and we can either suspend or completely terminate those accounts. When we terminate them, you will see in WHMCS that the accounts still exist in there, but you'll see it in red. And the reason for that is that WHMCS is kind of a database of all the accounts on the server, but all the activity as well. You don't necessarily want to delete the WHMCS accounts from that piece of software because this provides a record. You'll know when the account was terminated. A lot of times we'll put notes in there to say this was by request of this person and that kind of stuff. So it kind of tells a story for you. So if somebody comes and says, why is my account not loading? And you go into WHMCS to start troubleshooting and you're like, it was terminated. And so then you can say, all right, well, it was terminated on this date. We requested, oh, your email address was a part of this CSV file. Let's see if we have a backup or something like that. So this just provides more information for you in WHMCS so that you know that it existed and that it's there. So not everything is active in WHMCS, I guess it's the best way to put out there. And it's important to note too that we only track the number of accounts on WHM for numbers based on your contract and that sort of thing. It's also good to tell when we terminate the account, we have backups of them for 30 days. So if there is a student that comes in within that 30 day window, we can restore the account very quickly. Anything after 30 days, unfortunately, they have to restart the account from there. Right, yeah. So based on the information that you've gathered with the tools that Tim talked about previously, there's a few things you can do to let the user know that you're gonna remove their account from the server or based on your records, it looks like you might have graduated and that sort of thing. WHMCS has a great mass email tool that lets you send out an email blast to particular client groups. And this lets you determine which, like you can set up the client group like graduated or faculty or something like that and designate the group to then send the emails. You all get to determine how long a counselor are kept, three months, six months, a year after graduation, that sort of thing. So you can customize the email template to include all of that. And then also let the user know what they can do to maintain the account. The easiest option is to purchase the account, purchase a shared hosting account with us at Reclaim. And then we can transfer the account through our transfer tool in WHM, change the primary domain and they're up and running with a new account that they can maintain on their end versus on the school's end. And so continuing with that, this is kind of what students should know. They can move to another hosting plan or purchase with us again. Plans start at $30 per year for a student and personal plan with two gigabytes of space. And it's important to note a pricing change. As of January 1st, we're no longer including domain registrations in that $30 per year. So each domain registration is now $15 per year. We do have options for free subdomain if they're concerned about costs and that sort of thing to keep it at the $30. So it's just important to know that that needs to, the domain registration needs to be included if they want a top level domain. So it's roughly $45 per year. Once they sign up, have them fill out a migration assistance form on our website. That will give us a record that they're moving from the school to reclaim because we don't have a record of the subdomains per project within our system. So it's important that they reach out to us for migration assistance. We'll do it on the house for free because they're moving from a domain of one's own school. It takes about half an hour for us to do. We have a max using the transfer tool in WHM and we will take care of the rest. We work with them directly and that sort of thing. So sure. And I also think like for students, some of them will say, well, I'm not ready to maintain this or keep this but what do I do if I want to in the future? And a lot of times I like to tell folks, take a full C panel backup. Like there's options in C panel for backups. And if you take a full C panel backup, it includes everything. It drops it in a single file and they can store that on their hard drive. They can put it up at the cloud and Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that and hold on to it. And then in the future, if they want to bring everything back online, they can provide that C panel backup to us or to another provider. In most cases that provider would be willing to unpack it as a full C panel account. So I actually think like that can work out really well for someone who says, I want my stuff but I don't necessarily want it to be online right now because I'm searching for jobs and not really sure if I want all this stuff. But in the future, I might. They're just not ready to make a decision yet and they've got to because, you know, their account's getting removed or something like that. So I think a full C panel backup is never a bad idea for someone who's just unsure right now and wants to make the decision later, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And then related to that, you were talking about the domains and a lot, like we said, a lot of schools are using subdomains. So when they're switching to another account, they're going to have to choose their own top level domain or they might get a subdomain from reclaimed hosting and just continue it on or something like that. So again, we would do like the primary domain switch for them and that kind of thing. But if they're not ready, there's no reason they have to, they could get a subdomain from us as well and then maybe buy a domain later down the road. I'm a fan of buying domains. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's, you know, never hurts. Yeah. And we've also set up a migration information page within the WordPress site. So they can, they can see all of that as well, like all the information. It's also handy to just send the email when the time comes, so. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, hopefully this helps on all the various aspects of supporting and ministering domains. We're right there in the Discord chat and certainly happy to answer questions for folks or anything that's come up and drop links to various aspects of this or anything else that might have come up. So thanks for tuning in everybody. Yeah, absolutely. All right, take care. Bye. See ya.