Before creating your website in OpenPanel, it is necessary to add a new domain. OpenPanel allows you to manage your domains easily. In this article, you will learn how to create a domain, delete it, and suspend a domain when you need to perform maintenance actions on your website.
Prerequisites
This article assumes that you have already created a user to manage your websites. If you haven’t yet created a user for OpenPanel, you can follow the following article: Create a new user in OpenPanel.
Create a new domain
Domain with SSL certificate
OpenPanel will attempt to apply an SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt during the domain creation process. For the certificate to be applied successfully, there must be an A-type DNS record with the domain name pointing to the IP of the OpenPanel server. If you need more information on how to configure DNS records for your domain, you can refer to the following article: Configuring DNS zones for our server
To create a domain, access OpenPanel with your user (non-admin) and in the left panel click on "Domains Add New Domain":
Enter the domain name in Domain and in Document Root enter the path where the files with the website content will be stored. Click on "Add Domain" to create the domain with the provided information.
Once the domain creation is complete, click on "Back to Domains" to return to the main domain manager.
Delete a domain
To delete a previously created domain, in the left panel click on "Domain Names" to view the list of domains. Then, hover the mouse pointer over the three dots in the Actions column of the server you want to delete. A menu of available actions for that server will open; click on the "Delete" action:
OpenPanel will ask you to confirm the deletion of the domain. It is important to note that, although OpenPanel will delete all data associated with the domain, it will not delete the web content files. This can be useful to keep in mind if you later need to relocate the web content to another domain or server.
Confirm the deletion of the domain by clicking "Delete Domain".
Suspend a domain
A very common action before performing a major update or modification to your website content is to activate maintenance mode to inform your clients that your website is temporarily unavailable.
OpenPanel allows you to perform this action automatically and easily from the panel itself by simply suspending the domain.
In the left panel, click on "Suspend a Domain", select the domain you want to suspend, and confirm by clicking the "Confirm Suspend" button:
Reactivate a suspended domain
Once you have made the changes to your website, you can reactivate the domain from OpenPanel so that your clients can visit your website again.
In the left panel, click on "Unsuspend a Domain", select the domain you want to reactivate, and confirm by clicking the "Confirm Unsuspend" button:
We hope this tutorial has been helpful 🙂. Remember, if you have any questions about this or any other issue related to your servers at Clouding, feel free to write to soporte@clouding.io We’re here for whatever you need!