Written by Nicolas

We have always aimed to provide our users with quality support that is quick and relevant. If we want for it to remain the best it can possibly be, this communication needs to be optimized on both ends. That’s why we believe that the recent introduction of a small feature deserves its own blog article. This is also the perfect opportunity to recap some good practices (for those who just want to get acquainted with the new feature we’re introducing, scroll down to the last paragraph).

Profile and connection

When you sign up with alwaysdata, the first thing you provide is your email address, which will allow you to create a profile in our system. Ensure that you’ve entered all your information correctly; this can later prove useful, especially your telephone number (in case of emergency, we may have to send you a text message or even call you if you have dedicated servers). The most important piece of information is still your email address; make sure that you’ve provided an address that you check regularly, since it will be automatically used by our system (domain renewal alerts, important update information, billing notifications, etc.).

With this, you have the bare minimum to manage your alwaysdata space. Bonus: a good security practice is to activate two-factor authentication.

Users and permissions

When multiple people are involved with all you have on our platform (for example: hosting accounts, one or more dedicated servers), it is important to create separate permissions for each user. This is particularly helpful if you work as a team, but it’s also a very important security practice; if need be, it’s very easy to restrict access to a coworker who has left your team or, thanks to the history, trace who did what. Also, it may be especially useful depending on your operating mode (if you use a third party for website maintenance or even if you pay your bills through an accounting firm).

Our permissions system is fairly flexible and allows you to assign special permissions to multiple users:

• user access: account management (for example, creating a new account owned by you), billing contact;
• technical access (set by account or by server): 
  • technical contact: allows all technical contacts access to the account (or server) in question;
  • specific technical permissions: access to FTP, databases, domains, emails, etc.

Technical and billing contacts

The notion of technical or billing contacts is a very important one with this permissions system and it is for this reason that we’ve decided to release this article. As a matter of fact, including the contacts in question in your support ticket was recently made possible (depending on if the ticket relates to a profile or an account/server), simply by checking a box; so, if, for example, your account is infected and your developer is properly identified as a technical contact, they will automatically be alerted along with you, the owner of the account in question.

However, you need to have correctly set your permissions… and that’s up to you to play around with! ;)