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Getting Started with Your 4UHosting Account

Firstly, welcome to 4UHosting, and thank you for choosing us.

If you’ve just signed up for one of our hosting plans, this guide will help you get everything up and running. We’ll cover the important bits: finding your account details, accessing cPanel, getting your domain pointed to us, creating email addresses and putting your website online.

Don’t worry if you’re new to hosting. You don’t need to do everything at once, and if you get stuck we’re here to help.

Your Hosting Account Details email

Once your hosting account has been created, we’ll send you an email entitled Hosting Account Details.

Keep this email somewhere safe. It contains important information about your hosting account, including your cPanel login details and the information you’ll need if your domain is registered with another provider.

If you haven’t received it yet, your hosting account may still be waiting to be set up. Accounts ordered outside our normal working hours may not be provisioned until the following morning.

You can also check the Email History inside your 4UHosting customer account. Copies of important emails we’ve sent you are stored there for future reference.

If you think your account should have been created but you haven’t received the details within 24 hours, open a support ticket and we’ll take a look.

Your 4UHosting account and cPanel are different things

This catches quite a few people out when they first start.

You have two separate logins.

Your 4UHosting customer account is where you manage things such as your services, invoices, domains and support tickets. You sign into this using your email address and customer account password.

Your cPanel account is the control panel for your actual hosting. This is where you manage your website files, email accounts, databases, backups, domains and other hosting features.

The username and password for cPanel are included in your Hosting Account Details email.

If one password doesn’t work in the other login, this is usually why.

Is your domain pointing to your new hosting account?

Before your website or email can work from your new hosting account, your domain needs to point to the correct servers.

If you registered a new domain through 4UHosting at the same time as ordering your hosting, we’ll normally take care of this for you.

If your domain is registered somewhere else, you’ll need to update its nameservers to the ones shown in your Hosting Account Details email.

Your current domain registrar should provide an option for changing nameservers in its control panel. If you’re not sure how to do this, see our guide to changing your domain’s nameservers, or contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Remember that DNS changes aren’t always instant, so a domain that has just been updated may take a little while before everyone on the internet sees the new hosting account.

Transferring your domain to 4UHosting?

You don’t have to transfer your domain to us in order to use our hosting.

You can leave the domain with its existing registrar and simply change its nameservers.

If you do want to transfer the domain to 4UHosting as well, we’d normally suggest getting the nameservers changed first. This means the website can start using the new hosting without having to wait for the domain transfer itself to complete.

The transfer process varies depending on the type of domain, so see our Transferring a Domain to 4UHosting guide for the current instructions.

Logging in to cPanel

Once your hosting account is ready, cPanel is where you’ll manage most of it.

You can normally access it by visiting:

https://www.example.test/cpanel

Replace example.test with your own domain name.

Enter the cPanel username and password from your Hosting Account Details email.

Once logged in, you’ll see the various tools available for your account, grouped into sections for things such as email, files, databases, domains, security and software.

If this is your first time using cPanel, don’t feel you need to understand every icon on the screen. Most customers only use a handful of them regularly.

Our cPanel Knowledgebase contains individual guides for the different cPanel features whenever you need them.

Creating your email addresses

If your hosting plan includes email, you’ll probably want to create addresses such as:

hello@example.test

info@example.test

yourname@example.test

You create these from Email Accounts inside cPanel.

You choose the part before the @, set a secure password, and cPanel creates the mailbox for you.

See How to Create an Email Account in cPanel for the full step-by-step instructions.

Once you’ve created a mailbox, you can use it with an email application on your computer, phone or tablet, or access it through webmail.

Using webmail

Webmail lets you send and receive email through a web browser without configuring any email software.

Visit:

https://www.example.test/webmail

Log in using your full email address and the password you chose when you created that mailbox.

For example:

hello@example.test

Your email login is separate from both your 4UHosting customer account login and your main cPanel login.

Yes, that’s three different types of login.

We didn’t invent the internet. We just host bits of it.

Putting your website online

There are several ways your website might get onto your hosting account.

You may be:

  • uploading a website you’ve already built;
  • moving an existing website from another host;
  • installing WordPress;
  • working with a web designer or developer who will upload the site for you.

Uploading an existing website

We no longer provide FTP access for uploading website files.

For most websites, we find cPanel’s File Manager considerably simpler.

Rather than uploading hundreds or thousands of individual files one at a time, ZIP the website files on your computer first.

Then:

  1. Log in to cPanel.
  2. Open File Manager.
  3. Open the public_html folder.
  4. Upload your ZIP file.
  5. Once the upload has finished, right-click the ZIP file.
  6. Choose Extract.
  7. Check that the website files have been extracted directly into public_html.
  8. Remove the ZIP file when you’re happy everything is in place.

That’s it.

Your main website files normally belong inside public_html.

One common mistake is to ZIP the folder containing the website rather than the contents of the website itself. When that archive is extracted you can end up with something like:

public_html/mywebsite/index.html

instead of:

public_html/index.html

If that happens, your website won’t appear where you expect it to.

We’ve created a separate guide called How to Upload Your Website Using cPanel File Manager which goes through the process in more detail.

Using WordPress

If you’re starting a new WordPress website, there’s usually no reason to upload WordPress manually.

You can install and manage WordPress using the tools available within your hosting account.

See our WordPress section for installation, security, backups and other WordPress guides.

If you’re moving an existing WordPress website to 4UHosting, contact us before starting. Depending on your hosting plan and the existing setup, we may be able to make the migration considerably easier for you.

Using more than one website

If your hosting plan allows multiple websites, don’t simply place another website inside the public_html directory and hope for the best.

Additional domains should first be added through the appropriate Domains feature in cPanel. cPanel will then associate the domain with the correct document root so that its files are kept separate from your main website.

Our Adding Another Domain to Your Hosting Account guide explains how this works.

Three things most new customers want to do

If you’re wondering where to start, concentrate on these:

  1. Make sure your domain is pointing to the hosting account.
  2. Create any email addresses you need.
  3. Install or upload your website.

Everything else can wait until you need it.

You don’t need to learn the whole of cPanel on your first day.

Need some help?

If something doesn’t make sense, ask us.

We deliberately put aside extra time for new customers because we know there can be a lot to take in when setting up a hosting account for the first time.

There are no bonus points for struggling with something for three hours because you think it’s probably a silly question.

Open a support ticket, tell us what you’re trying to do, and we’ll help you get there.

Welcome to 4UHosting.