What are the different types of DreamHost users?

DreamHost offers the ability to create many different types of users, each of which are necessary for different tasks within the panel as well as interacting with your site. For example:

This article lists the different types and how they are used.

View the following article if you ever need to reset the password for any of these types of users.

• Passwords overview

A website user is the username assigned to your domain name on the server. This is the username you use to log into your server using an FTP client to upload/download files. View the following article for instructions on how to add a website user to the server.

• Adding a user to a server

Email users are only used for reading and sending email, and cannot log in to the web server via FTP. These users also have no Shell access to the web or mail servers. At DreamHost, mailboxes are all currently named in the format m######## although they can also be accessed using the entire associated primary email address. Each mailbox has one primary email address associated with it, but can also have unlimited other email addresses that also deliver to it. You can set this up from the Manage Email page.

MySQL Users are used to connect to your database server.

MySQL has its own complex permissions system, and each time you need to access a MySQL database, you must log in with a username and password it recognizes. Every time you create a new MySQL database with DreamHost, you'll need to specify a unique username you wish to create to allow access to it. MySQL users are created on the MySQL Databases page.

When you create a user, it's given MySQL access only and must be unique across all other MySQL accounts at DreamHost. MySQL also checks where you are connecting from and only allows access from IP addresses or hosts that are authorized.

By default, this is set up so you can access it from any DreamHost server; but if you'd like to access your MySQL database directly from your home computer or from another server, you can add more allowable hosts (IP Addresses or hostnames) from the MySQL area of the panel.

Stats users are users that you can create for the sole purpose of viewing website statistics.

• You can view these stats through a URL such as https://example.com/stats/.
• They are maintained in an .htpasswd file that you manage from the Site Statistics page.
• For more information about this, see Accessing Stats.

A Dedicated Server Admin user is a special user only available on these hosting plans.

• These users can provide sudo access to areas of the Dedicated Server configuration settings normally managed by DreamHost via the DreamHost panel. You can add a Dedicated User on the Admin Users page.

• An Admin user can be very useful for installing custom scripts or making advanced PHP or Apache configuration changes.

Many web applications (CMS systems, blogging systems, and so on) have the ability to create their own users to manage and provide limited access to the features, files, and content for an application. These are not managed by DreamHost, but by the applications themselves.

Remixer is DreamHost's 'custom-built' one-click site builder. The account owner is the 'user' that controls each Remixer site, and at this time it's not possible to add additional users to a Remixer site. View the 'Getting started with Remixer' article for further details.

Account control panel users are used to log in to the DreamHost account control panel. This can be the primary owner of the account, or another user the owner has provided with credentials to log in to the panel.

You can create a user with account access privileges on the Account Privileges page.

To change the name of the account user, navigate to the Manage Account page. At the top you see your account number and name. Under this, click the rename account link. Here you can change the name.

Known affectionately as your Web ID, this user is the only one that doesn't give you access to any physical DreamHost server. Instead, Web IDs are only used for logging into the DreamHost Control Panel and managing your account. Web IDs are intended to logically represent one actual human being, so a Web ID can own multiple billing accounts, with multiple domains, users (FTP/Shell/Mail), MySQL databases, and so on. You can share access to any of your account's features as well by adding Account Privileges.

Because of this, there is no reason to have more than a single WebID. WebIDs are also permanent and cannot be renamed or changed.