Getting Started with Faaaster: A Tour of the Hosting Dashboard

In the previous step we saw how to sign up for Faaaster (and claim a free month). Now it’s time to actually get your hands on it. The nice thing about this host is that everything was designed to be intuitive! Let’s explore it together.

The Faaaster dashboard

Once you’re logged in to Faaaster, you land on the host’s dashboard, which shows you straight away the list of your installed WordPress websites.

1. Dashboard access: shows the list of your WordPress sites (called Projects)
2. Search for one of your WordPress sites in particular
3. The list of domains you’ve bought or transferred through Faaaster (with DNS zone management and various settings)
4. Create a new WordPress website
5. Manage your Faaaster account
6. The list of your WordPress sites
7. Tools to sort your sites if you have several: tags (keywords you manually associate with certain projects), sorting (by: date, disk space, number of pending updates, response time, uptime, or PHP version), and keyword search
8. Access to all Faaaster settings for this site
9. A preview of your site on the temporary URL Faaaster provides
10. Number of pending updates (themes and plugins)
11. Loading speed of the homepage
12. Uptime percentage, i.e. the percentage of time your site has been reachable since it was created
13. Customer support available right there: during business hours, a technician will reply within minutes via this chat; overnight and on public holidays it can vary, but a reply often comes through on weekends too, all the more so if your request is urgent

When you hover your mouse over a project, two new options appear. 8. Access to all Faaaster settings for this site 9. A preview of your site on the temporary URL Faaaster provides 16. Access to your WordPress dashboard: this logs you into your WordPress admin automatically, without having to sign in with a username and password the classic way 17. Access to all Faaaster settings for this site Now let’s step into your site’s Settings, reachable via either 8 or 17.

The Faaaster settings for each of your WordPress sites

When you open your WordPress site’s Settings, you land by default on the Overview section. You’ll see two main horizontal menus that follow you wherever you go in your site’s settings:

1. Menu 1, which lets you interact directly with your site, to notably:
   1. Make your site private or public (requires one of Faaaster’s paid plans)
   2. Clear the cache, including the ones Faaaster creates to boost your site’s performance
   3. Restart PHP/Nginx or the whole server, useful for instance if you’ve changed a PHP-related setting
   4. Connect to your site’s WordPress database, or simply look up its credentials
   5. Access your site’s files straight from Faaaster, or learn more about the SFTP / SSH credentials Faaaster gives you
   6. Log into your site’s admin without having to sign in with your usual admin credentials
2. Menu 2, which gives you access to everything Faaaster offers for your site:
   1. Overview: the page you land on by default when you open your site’s settings from the previous screen; it gives you a summary of your WordPress’s key information (hosting plan, domain name & HTTPS, uptime, security and performance, your backups, etc.)
   2. Configuration: where you can change the general environment of your hosting, enable caching to improve your site’s performance, or look up certain credentials to connect to your site’s files or database; we’ll come back to this page later, there’s nothing complicated here
   3. Tools: fairly similar to Menu 1, this page gives you extra features, such as the ability to Clone your site to create a new WordPress site from your current one, or to archive your site if you want to shut it down
   4. Backups: where you’ll find all the automatic backups Faaaster runs daily, as well as the manual backups you can trigger whenever you like; it can indeed be handy to run one manually before doing something riskier, like a major WordPress update or updating an important plugin
   5. Plugins: here you’ll find the plugins installed on your site along with a feature to update them if needed; this screen is very useful for spotting whether some plugins are calling out to be updated for security reasons, for example
   6. Logs: a feature every developer will love, this page lists in real time the errors detected at the PHP level, making it easier to analyze errors that might appear or slowdowns caused by bugs in the WordPress code, the theme, or a plugin
   7. Team: because Faaaster also lets you collaborate on the same WordPress site while keeping everyone’s private credentials separate; you can add users who’ll get whatever WordPress role you choose
   8. Events: a really useful page that keeps a history of every action taken on your site for you; it can be a big help if you want to understand where a malfunction came from

Faaaster’s configuration options are vast, and we’ve only scratched the surface here. Don’t hesitate to explore these different options whenever you like, and even to test them, since you can run backups whenever you want and restore one without stress if you’ve made a mess of something 😁

Well done, you’ve just discovered your Faaaster dashboard.

Ready to keep going on the adventure of building your website?

A Tour of the WordPress Dashboard