The File Manager is an integral part of ScalaHosting’s SPanel. You might think that its main advantage over a regular FTP client is the ability to manage files and directories through a browser window, but the fact of the matter is, it has a few other convenient features that can be extremely useful in some circumstances.

Uploading and extracting ZIP archives using SPanel’s File Manager

With SPanel’s File Manager, uploading and extracting an archive is a two-click process. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Log into SPanel’s User Interface and open the File Manager.
   The default login URL is https://yourdomain.com/spanel (don’t forget to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain. The File Manager is available under the Files section on SPanel’s homepage.

2. Navigate to the folder where you want to place the extracted files.
   Navigating through the folders on your hosting account is similar to navigating the files on your local computer.

3. Click Upload > Upload Zip.
   SPanel’s File Manager gives you two options: simply uploading the archive or uploading it and automatically extracting the data. If you choose the first option, you can alter unzip the archive by right-clicking on it and selecting Extract.

How to upload and extract a zip archive

Regardless of whether you heed the specialists’ advice, the aforementioned methods for remotely managing files aren’t available sometimes. Let’s imagine, for example, that you need to upload a file through someone else’s computer. Indeed, virtually all desktop operating systems can communicate with a server via an FTP connection, but they do it through a command-line interface. It’s far from user-friendly, and inexperienced website operators are very likely to get stuck.

FTP clients are a viable alternative, but in our scenario, you are using someone else’s computer, and an FTP client might not be installed on it. At this point, you might think that you’ve run out of options, but if you’re a ScalaHosting customer, you have one more way of uploading the data to the server.

Uploading a file through SPanel’s File Manager

Clients who pick one of our managed VPS hosting solutions can get SPanel – a proprietary control panel through which you can manage your hosting account. Integrated into it is the File Manager – an easy-to-use tool for uploading, downloading, managing remote files through your favorite browser.

Navigating through it is pretty similar to navigating through the files and folders on your desktop computer, so you should have no problems getting used to it. Here are the steps you need to follow to upload a file to your SPanel VPS:

1. Open the File Manager through the homepage of SPanel’s User Interface.

2. Navigate to the correct folder.

3. Click Upload > Upload File and select the file you need to upload.

For additional convenience, SPanel’s File Manager also supports multiple-file-upload. If a file by the same name and extension exists in the directory on the server, the system will ask you if you’d like to replace the remote file or keep it.

When the data is on the server, you can do pretty much everything you’d do using a regular FTP client, including:

• creating new directories,
• deleting,
• moving,
• copying files,
• changing permissions.

How to upload a file via the File Manager

A VPS is more expensive than a shared host, but you do get guaranteed resources. At the same time, it’s a lot cheaper than a dedicated server, and because of its flexibility, you don’t need to pay for CPU cores, RAM, or disk space you’re not going to use.

Having control over an entire virtual machine might scare some of the less experienced website owners, but they needn’t worry about anything. With our managed VPS solutions, you’ll get access to SPanel, an easy-to-use management platform that gives you full control over your VPS account. Through it, you can monitor your VPS’ health and restart individual services or the entire server, if needed. Crucially, you can also create and manage accounts in order to run multiple separate projects on the same VPS.

Terminating accounts in SPanel

When a project runs its course, you’ll want to remove it from your VPS in order to free up some space for the rest of your (or your customers’) websites. Here are the steps:

1. Log into SPanel’s Admin Interface.
   Information about your Admin Interface login URL and credentials is available in the Welcome Email.

2. Click the Actions drop-down next to the account you want to terminate and select Terminate Account.
   The Actions menu is where you manage your SPanel user accounts.

3. Confirm that you want to terminate the account.
   SPanel will warn you that terminating the account will result in irreversible loss of the data stored on it. By confirming that you want to purge it, you will complete the process.

How to Terminate an Account

Unfortunately, even with the best possible setup, problems can appear that could disrupt your website’s normal operation. If these problems do occur, you need to be aware of them before it’s too late.

In most cases, if you take timely actions, you can prevent your website from going down, and you can save yourself (and your end-users) a lot of frustration. You need to be warned about any potential problems, however, and this is where SPanel’s Contact Email comes in.

Why is it important to set a contact email in SPanel?

SPanel is ScalaHosting’s proprietary all-in-one hosting account management platform. It comes with all our managed VPS plans, and its goal is to ensure that you can manage your hosting service through a simple, easy-to-use interface without the need to pay hundreds of dollars in licensing fees.

As useful as it is, SPanel can’t resolve certain problems that are connected to the growth of your project and the dynamic online landscape. As your website becomes bigger and more popular, for example, it is bound to take up more space, and eventually, it can reach your account’s disk space limit. And no matter how big or popular it is, it can always fall in the hackers’ sights.

If your website is reaching the hosting account limits, users will start to get errors, and it could even go down completely. If it’s under attack, the consequences could be even more severe, especially if you don’t act quickly.

To ensure that you have the best possible chances of resolving these issues as quickly as possible, SPanel can notify you when they arise. It needs to know how to contact you, however, which is why it’s important to set a contact email.

Why isn’t the contact email preset by default?

You may be wondering why we don’t simply use the email address you give us during the signup process. The truth is, while some of you are probably managing your entire project on your own, plenty of website owners hire professionals who are responsible for keeping the hosting account going and are better equipped to deal with this sort of situation. Ideally, they will be the ones who get the notifications first and their email address should be set as a contact email.

There’s just one thing you need to bear in mind. Some problems might also affect your email service, which is why we don’t recommend setting an email situated on your hosting account as your contact email.

Setting a contact email through SPanel

Setting up a new contact email in SPanel takes no more than a few clicks. Here are the steps:

1. Log into SPanel’s User Interface.
   By default, the login URL is available at https://yourdomain.com/spanel, but you can also access it via the Admin Interface.

2. Click the Contact Email button.
   It’s available under the Settings section on the homepage.

3. Enter your new contact email and confirm it.
   After you enter your new contact email address, you need to click Change Email to save the changes.

How to Set a Contact Email

The more popular your online project, the greater the chance of someone sending an email to asmin@yourdomain.com instead of admin@yourdomain.com. Normally, the message would not be delivered, and the simple typo could lead to missed business opportunities. With ScalaHosting’s SPanel, however, you can set up an inbox that will collect all emails sent to invalid addresses associated with your domain.

Setting a catch-all email address in SPanel

In addition to messages coming from users who have mistyped the prefixes (that’s the part before the @) of email addresses associated with your domain, you could also receive a lot of spam in your catch-all inbox, which is why it’s best to have a dedicated account for receiving all the communication coming to invalid addresses. Here are the steps you need to take.

1. Log into SPanel’s User Interface and click Email Accounts.
   By default, SPanel’s User Interface is accessible via https://yourdomain.com/spanel, though you can also access it through the Admin Interface.

2. Pick a catch-all email address (e.g., catch-all@yourdomain.com) and set a password for it.
   When you’re ready, click Create Email to create the email account.

3. Go back to SPanel’s home page and click Default Address.
   This is the tool you’ll use to set up your catch-all email address.

4. Select the correct domain name from the drop-down menu, click the Forward to Email Address radio button, and enter the catch-all address in the field.
   With the Change Address button, you complete the process.

How to Set a Catch All Email Address

Every now and again, however, you might need to repurpose an account and use the data in it for another project. In such a scenario, you’ll likely want to change the main domain name, and SPanel gives you the chance to do just that.

Changing an account’s main domain

Changing an SPanel user account’s main domain requires no more than a few minutes and a few mouse clicks. Here are the steps:

1. Log into SPanel’s Admin Interface.
   The default login URL for SPanel’s Admin Interface is https://[your server’s IP address]/spanel.

2. Locate the account you want to modify and open the Actions drop-down menu.
   A list of all SPanel user accounts is available on the Admin Interface homepage. If there are too many accounts, you can use the Search functionality to find the one you need quickly.

3. Select Change Domain.
   After you chang the main domain, you can use the Actions menu to modify the account’s username and password as well.

4. Enter the new main domain and click Change.
   Adding the new domain name is a matter of entering it into the field and clicking Change.

Bear in mind that changing the main domain in SPanel won’t automatically point it to our servers. If it is to resolve properly, you need to make sure that the correct DNS settings have been applied. This is done at the domain’s registrar.

How to Modify the Main Domain of an Account

Every account has a main domain name associated with it, and users get their own SPanel tools for managing their websites. More or less everything they need to ensure that their projects run smoothly is available to them, but certain websites have special requirements.

SSH access is one of them, and those of you who have a project that needs it will be happy to learn that it is available on our managed VPS hosting solutions. The only thing you need to do is make sure that it’s enabled.

Enabling SSH access in your SPanel VPS

Your SPanel VPS lets you control who has SSH access to the server and who hasn’t. Here’s how to do it:

1. Log into SPanel’s Admin Interface.
   The default login URL is https://[your server name]/spanel/.

2. Go to Manage SSH Access.
   You’ll find the Manage SSH Access section in the navigation bar on the left.

3. Use the toggle switches to control individual accounts’ SSH access.
   You will see a list of all the accounts currently set up on your VPS. Next to each one, you have a toggle switch that enables and disables SSH access. Use them to configure who has the ability to set up a secure shell to your VPS.

Changes are saved automatically and come into effect immediately. A help box above the list of accounts reminds you that users who want to connect to ScalaHosting’s servers through SSH need to use port 6543 instead of the default port 22.

Why is SSH access disabled by default?

SSH has many uses. An extension of the protocol called SFTP (or SSH File Transfer Protocol), for example, is one of the few viable alternatives to the plain old FTP, and more and more people are starting to take advantage of the additional security it offers.

SSH access also gives users the ability to execute commands on the server, however, and this could present some problems. Because of this, by default, SSH access is disabled for all accounts, and we recommend enabling it only if you trust the person who’s going to use it.

How to Enable SSH Access

At ScalaHosting, we know that many of our clients also use WordPress, and we have optimized our servers to provide the best possible hosting environment for projects based on the world’s most popular content management system.

We also want to give users more control over their WordPress installations, however, which is why clients who go for our managed VPS hosting solutions can get access to SWordPress – a unique, in-house developed WordPress management platform.

With it, you can install WordPress in a couple of clicks and perform a variety of other tasks through an intuitive interface. Cloning an entire website is just one of the functionalities you get access to.

Cloning a WordPress website through SWordPress

While manually cloning an entire WordPress website may require hours of work, doing it with the SWordPress manager is quick and easy. Here are the steps:

1. Log into SPanel’s User Interface.
   The default login URL for SPanel’s User Interface is https://yourdomain.com/spanel.

2. Open the SWordPress manager and locate the WP installation you’d like to clone.
   The SWordPress manager is available under the Tools section on SPanel’s homepage. When you open it, at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of all WordPress installations currently hosted on your account.

3. Open the Actions drop-down menu and select Clone.
   Through the same menu, you can also remove the installation ot change its admin password.

4. Choose the URL for the clone installation and click Clone.
   From the drop-down on the popup that appears, you can choose one of the domains and subdomains currently added to your account, and if you need to situate the clone installation in a subfolder, you can use the Folder name field. After you click Clone SWordPress will automatically copy the files in your chosen destination and will also duplicate the installation’s database.

Why might you want to clone a WordPress website?

There are more than a few scenarios that might require a clone of an entire website. If, for example, it needs some development work, but you want to make sure that the updates work before you apply them to your live website, having a copy stored in a subfolder that acts as a test bed is your best bet. Even the installation of themes and plugins can cause problems, so testing them before they go live is always a good idea.

How to Clone a WordPress Website