Welcome & your account

You have a hosted account on a BOA/Ægir server — a login to the Ægir control panel and your own limited shell. Everything in this guide is something you can do yourself, from your account: no root, no server admin, nothing that touches the box itself. Whenever a task really does need the server operator, we say so in one line and point you to open a support request instead of sending you somewhere you can't act.

What you have

• The Ægir control panel — a web login where you create and manage your sites, clone them, run tasks, and turn features on and off by pointing and clicking.
• Your own shell (o1.ftp) — a limited SSH/SFTP login into your account only. This is the shell where Drush and the self-service tools work; it's yours to use and can't reach anyone else's files or the rest of the server. (Your login may be o2, o3, and so on — the number is just your account.)
• Self-service tools — commands you run in your shell, like mybackup for restoring a file from your off-site backups, without ever asking your host.

Your host takes care of everything underneath: the server, the firewall, the web server, the database engine, security patching, and BOA upgrades. You never manage those, and this guide never asks you to.

The two pages below get you settled in: what your host handed you and how to log in for the first time, then a plain-language glossary of the words you'll keep meeting.

The rest of this guide

Once you're oriented, these are the other topics — each one a job you do entirely from your own account:

• Connecting to your account — log in over SSH or SFTP, add a key, and see what your limited shell lets you do (Drush, mybackup, git, and more).
• Managing sites & platforms — create, clone, verify, back up, and migrate your sites from the control panel.
• SSL for your sites — switch on HTTPS with a free, auto-renewing certificate, or supply your own.
• Tuning your site & platform — the per-site and per-platform INI settings you're allowed to change yourself, plus picking a PHP version and managing modules.

New here? Read Your account and first login, then head to Connecting to your account to get into your shell.