Your account and first login

Welcome. You're a hosted BOA customer, which means the hard part — running the server — is already done for you. Your job is the fun part: creating and looking after your Drupal sites. This page shows you what you were given, how to log in for the first time, and the handful of things worth doing straight away.

Take it slowly. Nothing on this page can break anything. You literally can't reach the parts of the server that could.

What you were given

When your host set up your account, they created a private corner of a BOA server that's yours to run. It comes in two pieces, and you'll use both.

Your control panel — the Ægir Hostmaster web UI. This is where you'll spend most of your time: a web dashboard for creating sites, backing them up, cloning them, and watching tasks run. It's a normal website you log into with a username and password, just like any Drupal admin. Everything you do here happens by clicking, not by typing commands.

Your own shell — the oN.ftp account. Alongside the web UI you get a limited SSH/SFTP login. oN is your account name (for example o1, o2, and so on — your host will tell you which one is yours). You use this account to upload files, pull down backups, and run Drupal command-line tools like drush. It's a limited shell on purpose: it can only see and touch your own files, never anyone else's and never the server's.

You don't need the shell to get started — the web UI alone will take you a long way. It's there for when you want it.

What "no root" means for you

You'll sometimes hear that hosted customers "don't have root." Here's what that actually means, in plain terms, and why it's good news.

The server itself — the operating system, the web server, the database, the firewall, all the plumbing — is run by your host. They install it, tune it, patch it, and keep it secure. That's their whole job. You never touch any of it, and you never need to.

Your world starts one level up: your control panel and your own files. Inside that world you have all the freedom you need to build and run sites. Outside it, the door is simply locked — for everyone, including you.

That boundary is a feature, not a limitation:

You can't break the box. There's no command you can run, no file you can edit, that takes the whole server down. Worst case, you make a mess of one of your own sites, and you fix it (or your host helps you).
You're safe from your neighbours, too. Other customers on the same server are walled off from you exactly the way you're walled off from them.
You can experiment freely. Create a site, clone it, try things, delete it. It's your sandbox.

Every now and then a task genuinely needs server-level access you don't have — say a firewall change or a custom SSL certificate installed at the system level. When that happens, the answer is never to go hunting for a workaround. It's simply: open a support request with your host, and they'll do it. We'll point that out on the pages where it comes up.

Where your login details come from

You don't create your own account — your host does, and they send you everything you need in a welcome email. That email is the source of truth for your login details. Keep it somewhere safe. It contains:

Your Ægir Control Panel URL — the web address of your dashboard.
Your control panel login — the username and password for the web UI.
Your SSH/SFTP details — the oN.ftp account name and password (and where to send your SSH key, if you use one).
Often a link to Adminer, a web tool for looking at your site databases.

Your control panel lives at a web address shaped like https://oN.<your-host>/, where oN is your account name and <your-host> is the server's name. You don't have to work this out — the exact URL is in your welcome email. Just open it in your browser.

If you can't find the welcome email, or a password doesn't work, don't guess or retry endlessly — open a support request with your host. Re-sending your details is a routine thing for them.

Logging in for the first time

Open the Ægir Control Panel URL from your welcome email in your browser.
You'll see a normal Drupal login form. Enter the username and password from the email.
Click Log in.

That's it — you're in your dashboard. If the page doesn't load at all (rather than just rejecting your password), that's usually something on the server side; open a support request rather than trying to diagnose it yourself.

A quick tour of your dashboard

Your control panel is an Ægir Hostmaster instance. It looks like a Drupal admin site, and the pieces you care about are these:

Sites — your Drupal websites. Each one is an entry here: its domain, which Drupal version it runs, whether it's enabled, and its current status. Creating and managing sites happens from here, and it's covered in its own guide.
Platforms — the Drupal codebases your sites run on. A platform is a copy of Drupal (a specific version or distribution); each of your sites lives on one. Your account usually comes with platforms already set up, so at first you'll mostly just pick one when creating a site rather than building your own.
Tasks — the running log of everything the system is doing for you. When you create a site, back one up, or clone one, Ægir doesn't do it instantly in the page — it queues a task, then works through it in the background. The Tasks list is where you watch progress and, if something goes wrong, read what happened.
Clients — this is you (your account), and it's also where extra logins live if you ever want to give a colleague their own account into your control panel.

The rhythm to remember: you click something, Ægir creates a task, the task runs in the background, and you watch it under Tasks. Almost nothing happens the instant you click — a short wait while a task runs is completely normal, not a sign anything is stuck.

Set your own password

Your host gave you a starter password. Change it to one of your own straight away — the login you were emailed is meant to get you in the door, not to be your permanent password.

You change it the ordinary Drupal way:

In your control panel, open your own account (your user profile — the Clients area, or your username link at the top).
Click Edit.
Enter a new password (twice), and save.

Prefer a long passphrase, and if you have a password manager, store it there. This password protects your whole control panel, so give it a good one.

If you ever forget your control panel password, ask your host's support to reset it for you. The control panel can't send password-reset emails, so there's no self-service "request new password" link on the login page — a quick note to support is the way back in.

What to do first

Once you're in and your password is set, a good order to start in:

Look around Tasks and Sites so the layout feels familiar. Click into a couple of pages — you can't break anything by looking.
Create your first site. This is the main event, and it has its own step-by-step guide: managing your sites.
Get comfortable with backups early, before you have anything precious to lose. See backing up and restoring.
Try your shell when you're ready to upload files or run drush. Start with your shell and SFTP access.

Don't feel you need all of this on day one. Log in, set your password, poke around, and come back for the rest when you need it.

When you're stuck

A task shows an error — open it under Tasks and read the log; it usually says plainly what went wrong. There's a friendly walkthrough in recovering a failed task.
You can't log in at all, or a password won't work — open a support request with your host; re-sending or resetting your details is routine for them.
Something clearly needs the server itself changed — that's your host's job, not yours. One short support request and they'll handle it.

For the vocabulary you'll keep seeing — site, platform, task, client — see the glossary for hosted customers.