When you create a new domain on DreamHost, you can chose to make a ‘new’ user to ‘own’ the site, or use an existing one. There are pros and cons to both, but for anyone who comes from the cPanel world (where separate accounts are de rigueur), it’s pretty normal to expect your separate site to have a separate login name and password.
Explaining how all this works on DreamHost is a little different, because we have users and then we have users and … well let me explain.
There’s more than one kind of user
The first type of ‘user’ you have at DreamHost is your panel user. This user is the one you make when you sign up, and it’s usually your email. Don’t share this password with anyone, okay?
Next we have your ‘users’ which you can find in your panel. Those users are the ones who have access to things like ‘shell’ and ‘sftp’ and so on.
Then there are also those ‘other’ users you think of, like the login accounts on your blog, or your email, or maybe even the billing account for DreamHost.
When I talk about separate users, I’m only talking about the ones who have access to shell and stuff.
Users own sites
Those user accounts own sites. That means I have a specific user who ‘owns’ the folder on the server where all my web code lives. And you can see it’s that user because there it is, in the path: /home/USERID/domain.com/
Only one user can own, and access, a domain. However a user can own multiple domains.
So here’s what this looks likes. One user owning multiple domains:
And only one user can access the domain, user two cannot:
This is cool because if there’s a domain under User 2, and it gets hacked, there’s no way for User 1 to get hacked, even if both users are you!(Unless there’s a server wide security flaw, which yes, can happen, but we spend a lot of time trying to prevent that.)
Logical User/Domain Groups
If you own 50 domains (and I’ve seen users with 200!), having them all owned by one user sure seems easier, but it means if that user gets hacked, they’re all vulnerable, and you’ll probably end up having to de-hack 50 domains at the same time. Instead, it’s wiser to group your domains ‘logically.’ For example, my elftest.net domains have subdomains, all of which are owned by the same user. However my other top-level domains are each owned by their own user. But that doesn’t work for everyone.
Recently I was helping a customer with a hacked site, and he complained that the sites he hosted for his clients were being hacked, and his clients were pissed off. I took a look and saw that all his client sites were under one user ID. I asked him if the clients had more than one domain, or if they all had their own, and he replied that each client had 4 or 5 of the domains. After cleaning up the hack, together we made new user accounts, one for each client, and moved the domains to those accounts. If possible, I always clean before moving, but in one case the customer had 75+ hacked sites, so we moved and then cleaned each one, prioritizing the accounts on the way. It took a very long time.
The extra benefit to this is the clients can now have FTP access to their domains and do wild and crazy stuff! But we don’t want them to have FTP.
Moving The Domain
Obviously first you need to setup users. When I set up a new user, the first thing I do is make it secure. That means I turn off FTP, forcing SFTP only, and if needed, give them Shell access. Personally? I love shell access, so I always leave it available. If you’re using DreamPress, we have Shell turned off by default, but you can activate it.
There is a downside, which is that the WebFTP app won’t work. Personally? I find 99.999% of WebFTP apps to be total drek. They’re messy, kludgy, and there are some great free apps like Cyberduck which even let you connect with DreamObjects!
Now that you have the user, we want to move the domain. This is so easy, anyone can do it. Go into Panel, click on domains, click on edit for the domain. Go to “Users, Files, and Paths” and change the user in “Run this domain under the user:”
Really, it is that simple.