[General] Control Panel Access

The end of the year is fast approaching and I would like to get some things done before the end of the year. I have a couple of items planned for the next couple of weeks, but then I should be in a better position to work on my to-do list. I hope to have a more comprehensive post within the next few days.

One thing that I am wanting to accomplish before the end of the year and something that is probably the easiest to do is to work on the control panel accessing issues. We have had a few users write in with complaints, especially with Internet Explorer, involving the self-signed certificate when you try to access your control panel or webmail.

The issue has to do with the nature of self-signed certificates. Self-signed certificates are free to create and use, the caveat being that a browser will never recognize a self-signed certificate as authoritative. A self-signed certificate is alright in a situation where you already trust the party that you are dealing with and you just want that connection encrypted. Control panel and webmail access is a perfect example of this. End users should already trust us (you are purchasing hosting from us) and you are not being asked to give any type of credit card or payment information. Yet, you also want your connection with between you and the control panel to be secure.

It seems that the new version of Internet Explorer throws a big fit when it comes across a self-signed certificate. I consider this to be more of a lack of understanding from Microsoft’s point of view regarding self-signed certificates. They are correct in that self-signed certificates should be given an extra set of scrutiny by the end user, but I’m not sure a full warning page is really necessary. This can scare off some users and its really not that much of an issue. Now if you were just starting a business relationship with a company (purchasing something from a company for the first time) you certainly wouldn’t want that company to use a self-signed certificate for their order form. But in a place where a relationship already exists between an individual and a company, a self-signed certificate will serve to encrypt the connection.

At any rate, we have made the decision to switch over the certificates on the control panels and webmail access to real, authoritative certificates. We don’t have authoritative certificates for all of our servers, but we do have them for most of our servers. We hope to be setting up the servers with authoritative certificates sometime this week.

What does this mean for you?

This means that if you have trouble accessing your control panel or accessing webmail then you may be accessing it incorrectly. In order to access your control panel you need to use a link of:

http://yourdomain.com/cpanel

To access webmail you need to be using a link of:

http://yourdomain.com/webmail

Obviously you should change yourdomain.com to reflect your real domain name. If you have trouble accessing your control panel or webmail, please try using the links as described above.

If you continue to have problems accessing your control panel or webmail after you try using these links, please submit a support request so that our staff can look into your issue.