Using BOA — your hosted account

This guide is for you if you have a site on a BOA/Aegir host — a hosted account. You work in two places: the Aegir control panel (a web login where you point and click to create, clone, verify, and back up your sites) and your own limited shell (o1.ftp — an SSH/SFTP login into your account only, where Drush and the self-service tools live). Your login number may be o2, o3, and so on; the number is just your account.

You manage your sites; your host runs the server. You never need root, you never touch the box, and nothing here asks you for either. The files you can edit are the settings files inside your own account — everything underneath (the server, the firewall, the web server, the database engine, security patching, and BOA upgrades) is your host's job, not yours.

Everything is written from where you sit: "your site", "your account", "your shell". When a task genuinely needs the server operator — something only they can do, with access you don't have — we say so in one line and tell you to open a support request, instead of sending you somewhere you can't finish.

In this guide

• Welcome & your account — what you have, what you can do here, and what your host quietly handles for you. Start here.
• Connecting to your account — logging in over SSH and SFTP, adding your key, and what your limited shell lets you run.
• Managing sites & platforms — create, clone, verify, and manage your sites and codebases from the control panel.
• SSL for your sites — switch on free, auto-renewing HTTPS, or supply your own certificate.
• Tuning your site & platform — the per-site and per-platform INI settings you control, including your site's PHP version.
• Drush in your instance — running Drush against your own sites from your shell.
• Deploying your own code — the git workflow for getting your custom code onto a platform.
• Backing up & restoring — self-service backups and restores with mybackup, plus the backups the panel makes for you.
• Search, mail & access — Solr search, sending mail from your sites, and protecting your admin URLs.
• When something's wrong — un-sticking a task, fixing a broken site, and recovering a lost admin login.

Not sure where to start? Read Welcome & your account first, then Connecting to your account to get into your shell.