How to Manage Your Domain with the EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Domain names are such an important part of business web hosting that web hosting is often called domain hosting or domain web hosting.

We’ve previously posted about the best domain names for SEO, branding and online success, how to choose a domain name, step by step, and why you should buy multiple version of your domain name.

Today we’ll cover how you can manage your domain in the EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center.

To get started, go to our Web Hosting Control Center at control.earthlink.net and sign in with your domain name, user name and password. Then click Manage Domain from the top navigation. Depending on the status of your domain, you’ll see six to nine icons representing all your domain name management options.

DNS Records
Change Domain Password
Manage Nameservers
Manage Domain Contacts
Lock/Unlock Domains
Domain Monitor Settings
Domain Guard Settings
Domain Redirect
Add Subdomain

DNS Records: First, the warning: you probably shouldn’t change DNS settings unless you really know what you’re doing. If you make a mistake, your entire domain could be inaccessible for up to 72 hours. Ouch! If you’re not scared off, the DNS manager makes it easy to make changes to your zone file, which allows you to set up domain redirects, add subdomains, and add email servers to your domain. Add or delete MX Records, A Records and CNAME Records.

Change Domain Password: This one’s very simple: click this icon to change the password for your domain. The Transfer Authorization Code of your domain will be set to match your domain password.

Manage Nameservers: Click this icon to manage all the nameservers on your domain. If your domain is locked, you’ll need to unlock it first before you can change any of your nameservers. Luckily that Lock/Unlock Domains tool is in the same Manage Domain section of the Control Center.

Manage Domain Contacts: This tool lets you make changes to the contact information associated with your website. Click the checkbox above the contacts form if you want to use the same person as your Registrant, Administrative, and Technical contact; otherwise enter unique contact information for each type.

Lock/Unlock Domains: To prevent your domain name from being hijacked, you may want to click here and lock your domain. If it’s already locked, click here to unlock if you need to change your nameservers or transfer to another domain registrar.

Domain Monitor Settings: Domain Monitor is a complete, unmetered domain status monitoring tool. It lets you monitor the daily status of any domain and get daily email updates when one or more of your domain names changes status.

Domain Guard Settings: Domain Guard lets you know each time a new domain is registered that is similar to yours. This can help you protect your trademarks, copyrights, and brand.

Domain Redirect: This tool makes it simple to redirect pages or directories on your website to other locations. You choose whether you want them to be 301 redirects (permanent redirect that’s best for SEO) or a 302 temporary redirect. You can also specify Global Redirection of your domain to one version (www.YourDomain.com or YourDomain.com), which is also beneficial for SEO.

Add Subdomain: Create a new subsection of your website that replaces the www domain prefix in your URL instead of appearing after the domain.

For example, the EarthLink.net domain has several subdomains (support, webmail, myaccount, control, etc.):

http://support.earthlink.net
http://webmail.earthlink.net
http://myaccount.earthlink.net
http://control.earthlink.net

Simply enter any keyword you want to use as a subdomain and click the Add Sub-Domain button.

That’s all there is to it.

And remember, you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can add an assistant to your web hosting account to help you manage your domain.

Help! How to Add an Assistant to Your Web Hosting Account

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Just because you created your website and it’s your name on the web hosting account, doesn’t mean you have to do all the maintenance, monitoring, and updates yourself.

You can simply add one or more assistants to your EarthLink Web Hosting account. Here’s how easy it is:

Sign in to your Web Hosting Control Panel at https://control.earthlink.net.
Click the Account tab.
Click the Assistants Manager icon.
Click the create new assistant link.
Enter the Full Name, Email Address, Username, and Password for your assistant.
Designate the assistant as a Site Administrator if you want he/she to have full access to the Control Panel, including the ability to add or delete other users (don’t worry, no user can delete the Primary Administrator).
If you don’t designate the assistant as a Site Administrator, you can choose individual privileges you’d like him/her to have.
Select the domain or domains (if you have more than one) that you’d like the assistant to be assigned to.
Click the green Save button.

That’s all there is to adding an assistant to your EarthLink Web Hosting account.

If you ever want to change an assistant’s information (email address, password, etc.) or privileges, or delete the assistant, simply follow the first three steps above and then click either Edit or Delete next to the assistant’s name. Make your changes and click Save.

How to Create Mailing Lists with Your Web Hosting Account

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Whether you use EarthLink Web Hosting for regular web hosting or ecommerce web hosting, the included domain email features are a big added benefit.

We’ve provided an overview of managing your domain email in a previous post but this week will dive into one of those features: mailing lists.

With a Mailing List you designate a mailing list email address and add a subscriber list, and then any email sent to that list address is forwarded to everyone on the subscriber list.

Mailing Lists are a simple and efficient way to share information with customers or other groups of people via email. You can also create a mailing list to use as an email discussion group.

Here’s how to create a mailing list with your EarthLink Web Hosting account:

Sign into your Web Hosting Control Center at https://control.earthlink.net with your EarthLink Web Hosting domain name, username, and password.
Click the Email tab.
Click the Add Mailing List icon.
Enter a new email address to use for the mailing list.
Enter a Subject. This will be a label [in brackets] applied to all mailing list emails in front of the individual subject lines.
Enter your subscriber list in the Recipients field. You can add up to 300. Separate the addresses by commas or put one per line.
Important: Make sure you include an email address that your emails will come from in your recipients list (you can’t use the mailing list address itself)
Click the Save button and you should get a confirmation that your list was created properly.

SEO Basics: How to Use EasySiteOptimizer for SEO

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

A couple of weeks ago we posted SEO Basics: How to Use Keywords for Website SEO to you get started with SEO.

This week’s web hosting post is a follow-up to show our web hosting and ecommerce hosting customers how to use EasySiteOptimizer Pro (free for EarthLink customers) to implement the keyword suggestions we offered.

Here’s how easy it is to get started with SEO:

Sign into your Web Hosting Control Center at with your EarthLink Web Hosting domain name, username, and password.
On the Build tab, click the EasySiteOptimizer button (shown above); a new window will open.
Click the Manage Keywords link.
Click the arrow next to the page you want to add keyword keywords to; it’s best to start at the homepage, which will often be listed under Choose pages as index.html or index.htm. Then click the Continue to Keyword Selection button.
If you don’t yet have any keywords yet, an alert message will pop up to let you know that. Simply click OK.
Enter the Title you want for this webpage (remember, anything over 70 characters won’t be displayed in search results). See our previous SEO Basics post about Title tags for additional guidance.
Enter the Description you want for this webpage. The description isn’t used for SEO rankings, but it is important. It’s the text that is typically shown in Google search results for your site (keep it under 155 characters, including spaces).
Under Active Keywords List, click the + Add Keyword link.
Add keywords one at a time for your webpage. When you’ve finished, click the Apply button to save your Title, Description, and Keyword changes to your website.
If you are just working on one page of your website, that’s all you need to do. If you want to optimize other pages, simply repeat the process, selecting a different page as you did above in step 4.

Remember to check our SEO Basics post about keywords if you need help choosing the best keywords for your website.