 This is our deeper dive in WHM session, so we're going to talk about WHM, Web Host Manager, I believe, is what it stands for. Sounds right. Yeah. And if in our ecosystem of tools used to manage Domain of One's Own, just as a reminder, we've got the WordPress wrapper of Domain of One's Own that most people are going to be interacting with, WHM CS, which lets you look at people and what they have access to, basically, with a lot of other little things in there, too, that are related to what folks have access to. And then WHM is really focused on the server and accounts themselves. So it's, I think, kind of an important distinction to make when we talk about accounts, most of the time we're talking about hosting accounts or cPanel accounts, right? You can, in a lot of cases, accounts are related to people, but technically, a person can have more than one account, right? We saw that in the WHM CS demo that Pilot just did where there was a previous account and an existing account that you had access to, well, you had access to one of them because the other one was gone. So that's kind of an important distinction, I think, is that accounts. So WHM can manage the server and individual accounts. It doesn't have a lot of information about what people have access to things. So yeah, we're going to kind of showcase what you can do in here. There's a lot of stuff in WHM, frankly, an overwhelming, insane amount of stuff. I'm still learning a lot about it, and I work at Reclaim. You don't need to post it. Yeah. As a domain of One's Own admin, I think there's a couple key areas that you'll want to use, or at least know exist, but you're not going to need a lot of it. A lot of this is stuff that actually we use to manage your server that you won't really need to get into too much. So with that, Pilot, I'll get your screen ready to go and we'll dig into WHM. You ready? Yeah, sounds good. All right. So this is the WHM homepage. Once you log in, this is what you're going to see. You're depending on your version of WHM, it might look a little different, but I think most servers have this rolled out now. Our documentation is still we're working on updating that and getting that up to date with this, but the principles are sound. And basically the only difference between the documentation theme that that you'll see there in this is that this one has a search bar at the top that is mostly a duplicate for the search bar on the left because the left will search for tools in that big long list of tools. And the top one will also search for tools. It'll also directly search for accounts, which is kind of handy. But then the big stuff about like what things are called and what they look like, that's all really exactly the same at this point. None of that has actually changed. It's really more just the theme of blue and white and orange and those search bars. Yeah, so with that, we're going to just get started on these sort of core tools that Taylor was talking about earlier. And I think the most important one is list accounts, which, you know, it's first because it's important. Top tool, they say it is a top tool on the old theme. It was also a top tool, but it was listed over here, rather than, you know, upfront, right, the first thing, which I thought was a little misleading. But, you know, this is it's right here. It's easy now. So we're going to hop into list accounts right away and list accounts. We're going to just quickly search for mine. List accounts is has a list of all the accounts on the server. You saw a bunch of accounts just now, but that the this is it. This is what on account listing looks like. They're all they're all going to look like this. If they're suspended, they'll be highlighted in red. This one isn't suspended, but this is the account that you just saw me using in WHMCS in the last session. So accounts have different data associated with them. They have the domain, the C panel IP address, username, contact, email, set update, all of this stuff. The particular things to look at right now are the quota, disk usage and package, because that's all stuff we're going to talk about a little bit later. But this is just a pretty good place. If you want to get an overview of particularly these three, which is data that you can find in WHMCS, but it's a little bit less centralized. It's a little bit you have to go to each account, each C panel account page individually. So just taking that into account, I think the next thing actually we're going to look at disk usage real quick. So this is the disk usage section for a for my account. I'm using one megabyte, which isn't a lot. The quota, which is the maximum amount I'm allowed to use is 500 megabytes. Luckily, I'm nowhere near close to going over. But if I was, I would start getting emails around the 75, 80 percent mark, which would say, hey, you're creeping up on your maximum. You maybe want to either clear some stuff out or talk to your admin about that. And those emails would just be sent to my contact email. It is possible to have an infinite quota. I we don't recommend doing that. For a bunch of reasons. Ones up by default that way, unless you ask. Yeah, and it's not a great idea for long term. Management. Yeah, exactly. In part, first thing, because you will never get those, hey, do you want to maybe take a look at your account and clean it up a little emails because you're never going to hit 75 percent of infinity. And also just because if a user keeps using up space, lots and lots of space, there is a maximum amount of space that you can use on the server, which is 250 gigabytes per 500 C panel accounts. So that goes up in blocks the same way the number of accounts does. You can add more storage. You can just say, hey, can we add 200 more gigabytes? We don't want 500 more accounts for not using that right now. But can you just add an extra 200, 250 gigabytes onto the account? We're happy to do that. That's priced at like 10 cents per gigabyte per month. So for 200 gigabytes, it would be $20 a month. And that's. Sorry, I was going to say, and it's it's important to note that that limit, that 250 gigabyte or whatever, you know, if you expand it limit is that's what the server has attached to it for storage, right? So if you meet that and we will we will be emailing you if you get close to that. But if you if you get close to that and actually hit it, that's very bad for the server. That means your server is out of space. If you've ever completely used up the hard drive on like a laptop you own, you know that it's not a great time. So that is kind of a hard limit. I mean, we can expand it, right? But my point being, you would never want a individual user to have the capability to just use up all the space on your server without you even noticing. So that would be that would be kind of rough. And there's all kinds of things that could do it, right? Like you could have, of course, someone just uploading a lot of stuff, but also more innocuous things. Maybe they're running a strange plug-in or application, you know, that is just writing data to their account and they don't even notice. Comments, spam comments are the one that we often talk about is just if someone leaves a whole bunch of comments that can add up. Yeah, we'll talk about spots a little bit more tomorrow, but many of them make it easy for public contribution to a site, including images, sometimes video, audio. And if you just have like hundreds of people upload really large images, and again, maybe the user is not even really thinking of that or they're not aware. So having that quota be a cutoff and say, like, look, you're almost there or you're done, you use your one gig, half gig, two gig, whatever the quota you set, right? It's a really good checkpoint, even if you're just going to allow them to go beyond that and say, all right, let's move you up to five. Yeah, I think it's a good checkpoint. Yeah, it is possible to adjust the quota for a user on a per user basis as well. So if you have a couple of just like one or two heavy hitters, people who are doing larger projects, you can say, all right, you guys get five gigabytes, you guys get maybe 10 gigabytes because your projects are really big. I would caution against making that policy, the general policy, where if a user comes to you and says, can I have some more? You just automatically give it to them, because if you give a mouse a cookie, they're going to want more storage space, which is a perfect metaphor. Yes, exactly. It sets a precedent for the user that if no matter how they're managing their space, they can always get more. It's functionally infinite for them, which we've just talked about like why that's not always a great idea. We also try and encourage just good image management. So, for example, if art students are making portfolios, they might be uploading print resolution images when they really don't need that. That's not going to be useful to them on the web, and those will take up a lot more space. So, it is a good opportunity to talk about just responsible account management. And give them some tools to deal with that, right? Like, in the example of an art student, you can, maybe they need to be resizing their images in Photoshop or something and mentioning that. And I will say, when I was an admin at a school, I made that connection a couple of times between the student and faculty member who was like, great, they're taking my Photoshop class next semester. And that was kind of great to bridge that gap. But then there's also other tools that are easier to use or more accessible, like not expensive like Photoshop is. So, they're one of my favorite recommendations. One of my favorite WordPress plugins in the world is called Insanity, I-M-S-A-N-I-T-Y, and it resizes your images for you as you upload them. And that's super great for folks that kind of just don't want to have to worry about it. There's all kinds of things. We're happy to make those recommendations, by the way, if you're looking for something, reach out to us at Reclaim. We can send you suggestions, depending on what you need. But I think it's a good place to meet that and say, all right, it looks like this is using up a lot of your storage. So, you may want to consider this and have that kind of... It's a learning opportunity. Conversation with them a little bit, via email, in person, whatever works, right? But... Yeah. Yeah. It's just a good learning opportunity, I think. It's good. Totally. Yeah. And actually, pivoting on that, pivoting, I don't know, looking at quota disk usage. And we'll come back to package as well. We can hop over to the Disk Usage tool, Show Current Disk Usage. So, List Accounts is great for looking at which accounts are taking up the most or how much a particular account is using. You can use the Show Current Disk Usage tool to see how much of the available storage you're using. So, you can see we're using about 40, 50 gigs and we have about 100 gigs available. We are using 34% of our available storage space. And that's, you know, totally fine. Once you start getting up towards that 75, 80% mark on the entire server, we're going to start sending you emails just saying, like, hey, how do you want to think about managing growth? It's always important to think about what the future of the project looks like. How do you want to manage that sort of thing? That's pretty much all you can do with this tool. It's really more of an information gathering tool than it is a management tool. But I like to let people know it's here because it's just a good way to do a spot check. It's just useful. We're going to hop over to Installatron real quick. Installatron applications installer. So, earlier in the WordPress session, actually, Amanda and I showed off some of the applications that are available through Installatron and then we walked through installing WordPress using Installatron. So, this is the section of WHM that controls the settings and the tools that Installatron offers. So, you can use this section as a sort of bird's-eye view to take a look at all of the applications that have been installed on the server. So, if I had installed a site, I did install a site earlier on my previous account during the WordPress demo session, that would be in this list. But so would a site that Taylor had installed if Taylor had installed a site on his account on this server. Everybody says. If you want to look for one, there should be one called Community for the Community Showcase. It's on the state unit. Oh, yeah. Community Showcase. I don't know if the word Showcase will be in there. Oh, it is perfect. So, these are actually sites that we showed off earlier. Amanda and I took a look at these, both the Community Documentation Templates for StateU. Those are running a little behind. And the Community Showcase Template for Domain and One Zone, or not for Domain and One Zone for StateU, which is a template that you can get installed on your server if you want. Talk to us about it. So, yeah. You can also look at all of the backups if you need to use them and the applications browser. We're not going to look at that right now because we're actually here. We're here for that. And we're also here for another tool called Access Control. These two are probably the big two, I think. In terms of earlier, we talked about there are a lot of applications available through Instaltron. You can see them all here. We have, I think, most, if not all of them, made available to users. We have a couple of them highlighted, graph, known. At some place in here, probably close to the top is WordPress because everybody loves WordPress. But we have lots and lots of options. Okay, here's one that's not enabled. Great, that's a perfect example. So, up here, we have the Power button. We have the Feature button. And then we have a couple of others that I have never used. The Power button dictates whether it's available on a given to users, basically. So, all of these are available, but OpenBiblio is not. We've decided not to make that available to our users on state.u.org. Just because I am not familiar with the reasons. I know someone decided that on purpose. Yeah, I think I've never actually seen that one before and I'm not familiar with it. But there's a lot of reasons you may want to not have an application. Either you don't want your users to use it because it goes against what you're trying to do with your project. It may be something where the application is not really being updated and doesn't work properly or doesn't work the way you would expect it to work. It may be a lot of different reasons, right? So, whatever your reason is, it's pretty easy to prune this list if you'd like to. Yeah, so, for example, we have a section on e-commerce and business. Some schools have this as a portfolio site for their business school, I believe. If there is not a school that's doing that, there's definitely a school that could. That's super possible. And they'd probably want those applications to be on there. Other schools have a section in their tech terms of use that say if it's something that the school is providing you, software, hardware, whatever, we don't want you using this for commercial purposes. Please don't do that. And so you can just go through and turn off all of the e-commerce and business options, and then they're gone. I will say you can turn them off. You can also come to us and say, here's a list of things. Please get rid of them. And we're happy to do that work for you. We do this tour of WHM because we want you to feel comfortable to know what's going on so that things aren't necessarily a mystery to you. You can sort of think through your options, but we are also happy to manage this for you. You can always come to us and say, please change these settings for me. I don't want to touch WHM. No, thanks. Taylor? I just wanted to mention the... Well, and I don't know if you're going to move on to another tool, but I wanted to mention one other thing in Stalatron that we'll talk about a little bit tomorrow. Planting the seed is there's a template section in here that lets you make site templates. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that tomorrow in a session. Amanda and I did mention that actually, so we can take a look at that real quick. Yeah. So from here, you can manage templated content. Basically, you can take a WordPress site in most cases, but it works for a bunch of every application on this list here. And kind of save the content in there and make that something that folks can install WordPress with, say, some demo content, some plugins configured, all the kinds of stuff. We've got the empty content is just the empty WordPress install, but there's... You can see in here there's a... The domains community site template is in here and it looks like Lauren at one point made a template. You can see the minimum version. Basically, that's probably when it was made. But a template doesn't deploy with an old version of WordPress by default. So you can actually... They'll actually be updatable. That's totally easy to do. It's a really great tool. I've seen admins use it to make a starter site for blogging in a course or maybe podcasting or all kinds of things that are possible with templates. And we'll, like I said, we'll go more into it, but it's a really powerful tool. When I was an admin, the studio or department was interested in making portfolios available to the majors in general and who weren't necessarily familiar with WordPress, with how to do things in WordPress. And so they asked, we collaborated on a template that had good image forward options, just thinking through things to make it easy for the studio art majors. And then we turned that into a template. Yeah, that's awesome. I did something similar when I was an admin. It was really nice to be able to have... They laid out a structure for the students of like, here's a page we'd like to see. You may want to include this. And they literally wrote that on the page. Right? So it was pretty clear and kind of well documented in that way. And that's a really good use of this option, I think. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention in here too is that in the main My Applications page, and we don't have to really showcase this too much, but because you get a list of every single application on the server, those clone tools that you would normally get inside of a C-Panel account also work, except here, they'll let you clone things to a different account if you want to. So that can be really powerful if you have a situation where you need to move a WordPress site from one account to somebody else's account. That's something you can totally do. Just note that when you're working with Installatron with a ton of applications like this, in this case, it's 148. So it's actually not that many. A lot of times on a domain in one's own setup, you'll see closer to like 1,000 or 500 or something like that and more. When you click these clone buttons and the info buttons, sometimes it takes 10, 15, 20 seconds for it to load that screen. You'll get a little spinner. That's just one thing that I always notice when I'm showing people this is that it looks broken, but no, it just takes a second. Like if you click that clone button pilot, you'll kind of, folks will kind of see, in this case, it's really fast. Okay, so amazing. But sometimes when the list of accounts is really, sorry, when the list of applications is really high, that can take a little bit longer. You'll see a little indicator. So yeah, cool. Yeah, that is very cool. Thank you for pointing that out, Taylor, because I totally forgot that was an option. The next thing that we're going to do, this is sort of bouncing from access to control, control to something pretty similar. It's called feature manager. So earlier, if you remember in list accounts, I was showing off the quota, the disk use, disk usage, and then the package. And we're going to get to quota as well. We're talking about the package in general, and then the quota will be a specific feature of that. But first, we're going to look at the feature manager. So by search package here, you can see there's a couple of different options. Add, delete, edit, and feature manager. So we'll start there. So the deal with a package is it defines the settings for a particular account. So that includes the quota. That includes processes. It includes what applications are available, not necessarily an install-tron, although you can use install-tron to say, in this particular package, only these applications are available or all these applications are available. And how do packages get rolled out to users? Like, how does that determine? So we have default packages. It says there's a system default. We usually configure a different default that is specifically designed for domain one zone. And so the feature manager controls all of the C-panel tools that are available. So when a user signs in and gets their account set up, like Amanda and I were showing earlier, you can, that WHM CS connection is saying create an account using the default, basically. And this is something that you can change with SSO. So for example, if you want to have different types of packages available to students versus to faculty, you want faculty to have a higher quota, you want students to have fewer tools available to them because they don't need everything. They just need to know these particular things for what they're doing. You can create two different packages, one that's called maybe faculty and one that's called student, and change those settings. And then- You can also change them after the fact, right? That's true. If you wanted to do that manually, you could have a different package for more storage. Faculty with two gigs of storage or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. And that's something that you can change in WHM CS. You can change it in WHM, but in a similar thing that we were talking about in the last session, WHM CS is a really good place to do any of that because that's where the logs live. So you can find the packages in WHM and you can apply them in WHM CS. Exactly. And so a single sign-on would just look at a user and say, oh, this user is a student. We'll give them the student package. This user is a faculty member. We'll give them the faculty package. There is, by default, one default package that everybody gets, but we can work with you to get multiple packages set up if that's something you need. So we are going to- We'll look at the feature list. Yes? I was going to say WordPress in the classroom is the default one in StateU, if you want to look at that one. Yeah, so we'll take a look at that. And we'll just hit Edit. And this has a list of all of the potential tools that are available in C-Panel. You'll notice some of them are checked and some of them are not. The ones that are unchecked, users just won't be able to see. They won't have access to those tools in their toolkit. And there's different reasons to do this. So for example, we have email accounts disabled on this server. Email has some particular settings. It's just not something that we want to make available on this server. We have it on our shared hosting servers, but not here. A school, schools will often ask for the email account section to be disabled because you guys are providing email through your own systems. The users don't necessarily need to have their own email accounts set up through their C-Panel. And so that's just something that you can change with the feature manager. It's just pretty similar to Installatron, which is why I wanted to go here first because it seemed like a pretty good transition. But there are other things, other settings that you can control with the package. And we're just going to hop over to that because we were talking about quotas, what the quota is, for example. So we're going to hop into WordPress in the classroom again. And here you'll see this is very different from feature manager. What this is defining is the maximum amount of space, the maximum monthly bandwidth, a couple of other different settings that can be defined here, that if you want to change them, that's definitely possible. And again, that's something that we can talk to you about and help you with if you want to change how quotas are defined. But this is just the place where you would change settings for a particular package. So the C-Panel theme is set here, the feature list, you would say the default feature list, you would say which ones you want. It's a bit odd that WordPress in the classroom doesn't use the WordPress in the classroom feature list. Confusingly, yeah, that's not lined up. To be fair, state U is sometimes our testing ground, so sometimes it's configured in strange ways. But normally it's a good practice to name the feature list the same as the package if there's a one-to-one matchup. Sometimes there's not, right? Sometimes you've got like, we have one faculty list that apply, sorry, one feature list, maybe called faculty that applies to multiple packages that faculty could have, right? There are times when that is a little bit different, but very often for folks, they've got a feature list that goes with the package or just one feature list and one package, right, for everybody. Yeah, this is, I think, most of what I wanted to cover, is there anything that you think we should hop into? I think we're almost out of time as well. That's really all you're going to need for administering things in here, is knowing that, hey, you can check out the accounts, you can also log in the C panels from that list account screen that we showed earlier, seeing how you can manage things in Installatron and manage packages. That's the main stuff. Like we mentioned at the beginning, there's a ton of stuff. Can you actually hit the little X button in your server bar for a second? Like there's whole categories of stuff that we haven't covered. In fact, there's entire categories of things that I personally haven't even used, including support ticket functionality that is not just reclaim support, right? Like that's its own support tickets inside of WHM that can be managed. It's a whole own thing. But a lot of this stuff is, if you have done any server management, you'll recognize, oh, here's like, I can look at the processes running on the server. If you find yourself getting in there for some reason, I think you're well into the point it's probably time to reach out to us for help, right? Because there's a ton of stuff in here that you're really not going to need. We can manage things like the server updates and what processes are getting up. So just mentioning it in there, it's in there if you want to look at something you can, but that's the point of which I think it's time to reach out to our support. And sort of a quick example, we're almost out of time, but just to say now, for example, this top tool, create a new account, let's you create new C panel accounts, don't bother with this. WHMCS also has an option for this. It gets logged to there and most often you won't even need it because users will be signing up for their own account. They usually only need one, maybe a faculty member needs two for some reason. They're managing a departmental account and their own personal account, something like that. But for example, this upfront looks quite useful. It's not really something you need at the server level. It is, it's something that the other tools are designed to help you with higher up. So yeah, I don't think I have much else. Can you stop the screen chair? Yep, absolutely. Okay. So I think up next, we're going to run right into the next session, which is how to talk about domains. So we'll see you all then. If you have any questions about this, of course put them in the Discord and we can touch on them throughout. And we also have some time at the end of the day today and tomorrow actually for Q&A and wrap up time at the end of the day today, stuff like that. So please put any questions you have in there and we can reach out. And also keeping in mind too, it's probably, it's been brought up I think already, but our support documentation, our support site has a lot of this stuff documented, especially there's a whole domain of one's own section that will have a lot of things available, which is also great to touch on things we just showed, but also kind of get into some of the more advanced stuff if you're interested of WHM and what's possible in there. That's all in the support, support.reclaimhosting.com. So check that out. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you all for joining us.