Adding Extra Contacts and Users to Your Account Print

Two different things, and the difference matters

Your account can involve more people than just you, in two distinct ways, and picking the right one saves confusion later:

• Users can log in to the client portal. Each has their own login, and you control what they are allowed to see and do, managing services, viewing invoices, opening tickets, updating contact details, and so on.
• Contacts cannot log in at all. They simply receive copies of the emails you choose to send them, invoices, product notifications, support correspondence, domain notices, or any combination.

The question to ask is straightforward: does this person need to do something in the portal, or just be kept informed? Someone who needs to act is a user. Someone who only needs the paperwork is a contact, and a contact is the safer choice because it grants no access to anything.

What this looks like in practice

A real example from our own client base. A business here in South Africa holds the account, but its payments are handled by a division in Canada, and its technical notifications need to reach a division in the UK. So the account carries three sets of eyes: the client themselves receives all communications, the Canadian division is set up as a contact receiving invoices, and the UK division is a contact receiving product and service notifications. Nobody receives paperwork they do not need, nobody has to forward anything by hand, and none of the extra parties can log in or change a thing.

The everyday version of this is simpler and just as useful: your bookkeeper or accounts department receives every invoice automatically, without you giving them access to your hosting account or having to remember to forward each one.

Choosing what each contact receives

Each contact can be set to receive any combination of:

• Invoice and billing emails, for whoever pays the bills.
• Product and service notifications, the technical messages about your hosting.
• Support ticket correspondence, for whoever handles technical issues.
• Domain notifications, including the renewal reminders described in our article on how our billing works.

Set these deliberately. A contact who receives everything will eventually stop reading any of it, which defeats the point.

Adding and managing them

Both are managed from your client portal under your account or profile settings, where you will find the section for contacts and sub-accounts. Add the person's details, choose whether they should be able to log in, and tick the email types they should receive. Changes take effect immediately, and anyone can be removed just as easily when they leave or their role changes.

A word on who you add

Contacts see your invoices, your service details, and potentially your support correspondence, which is real information about your business. Users can go further and act on your account. So add people deliberately, review the list when someone leaves the business, and remember that removing a former employee's access is exactly as important as granting it in the first place. As our article on understanding your logins puts it, hand out each key on purpose.

Good to know

This structure also solves a problem we see often: an account registered years ago to an email address nobody reads anymore, usually a former employee's or a previous web person's. If that describes your account, fix it now rather than at the moment you need a password reset, because as our article on why we ask a security question explains, your registered email address is the foundation everything else rests on. Adding the right contacts today means the right people see the right things tomorrow, without anything having to route through one increasingly busy inbox.