Everything, written down.

Quickstart

Order, pick a region, add your SSH key, and you have a server. A Linux instance is usually ready in under a minute; Windows takes five to ten because the image is larger.

1. Choose a plan and region. BOM-1 for Mumbai, the west and the south; DEL-1 for the north. If you are unsure, the locations page has typical latency from each major city.
2. Pick an image. Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Windows Server, or one of the 60-odd one-click application images.
3. Paste your SSH public key at order time. Do this rather than taking a root password by email — it disables password login from the first boot, which is the configuration you want on anything reachable from the internet.
4. Connect. The panel shows the IP as soon as provisioning finishes.

# your key, if you do not already have one
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@yourcompany.in"
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

# then, once the panel shows the IP
ssh root@203.0.113.10

Available images

Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 / 24.04, Debian 11 / 12 / 13, AlmaLinux 8 / 9 / 10, and Windows Server 2019 / 2022. Custom ISOs can be attached on request.

Servers

A server is one KVM virtual machine with dedicated CPU and memory. It owns its disk, its IP address and its firewall rules, and it is billed by the hour from creation until you destroy it.

• Hourly billing — charged per hour, capped at the monthly price. A server you run for six days costs six days.
• Destroying stops the meter — nothing is refunded, because nothing was prepaid. The usage record closes at the destroy timestamp and the month stops accruing. How the billing ledger works.
• Suspension — an unpaid account is suspended rather than deleted. Data on a terminated service is kept for 7 days and then permanently deleted, as set out in the terms of service.

Control panel

Every service is managed from one web panel: cPanel and WHM for hosting accounts, and a unified instance view for cloud, VPS, VDS and dedicated servers. There is no separate tool to install.

What the instance view does

• Live metrics — CPU, memory and disk on every instance, updating while you watch rather than on a five-minute poll.
• Power actions — start, graceful shutdown, hard stop and reboot.
• Resize — change plan, or grow the disk. CPU and memory apply on the next boot; disk grows online. See how an online resize works.
• Snapshots — take, browse and restore, with the restore point verified on write. See how incremental snapshots work.
• Rebuild — reinstall from any image, including the 60-odd one-click application images.
• Console — out-of-band access, so a firewall mistake or a broken fstab does not lock you out of your own server.
• Firewall — inbound rules per instance, edited without SSH.
• Reverse DNS — set a PTR for any IP you hold, provided the forward record already resolves to it.

Access and two-factor

Turn on two-factor authentication in the client area, and again in cPanel, which keeps its own setting. An account that can destroy servers should not be protected by a password alone.

Additional users can be invited with their own credentials rather than sharing one login, which also means access is revoked by removing a user rather than by changing a password everybody knows.

Snapshots & backups

Snapshots are manual, point-in-time copies of a disk that you take and delete yourself. Backups are automatic and run on a schedule set by your plan.

Take one from the instance view before anything risky — a kernel upgrade, a schema migration, a plugin you have not used before. It costs seconds and turns "I hope this works" into "I can undo this".

Snapshots are billed at ₹4 per GB per month for the space they occupy. Daily automated backups are included on all cPanel, WordPress, cloud and reseller plans.

Networking & firewall

Every server gets one public IPv4 address and a private interface within its region. Private traffic between your own servers in the same region is free and never leaves the internal network.

Bigdomainhost firewall allow web-01 --port 443 --proto tcp
Bigdomainhost firewall allow web-01 --port 22 --from 203.0.113.0/24
Bigdomainhost firewall ls web-01

The default policy is deny-inbound except for SSH on port 22. Outbound is unrestricted apart from SMTP on port 25, which is blocked by default and opened on request once an account has a payment history.

Reverse DNS

Set a PTR record for any IP you hold from the instance view. The forward record must already resolve to that IP first, or the request is rejected — that ordering catches people out when setting up a mail server.

Resizing & limits

Plans change in either direction. CPU and memory take effect on the next boot; disk can grow online but cannot shrink, because shrinking a filesystem safely is not something to do to a live server.

Both are done from the instance view. A plan change reboots once; a disk expansion does not.

• Servers per account: 10 by default. Support raises it on request, usually the same day.
• Bulk provisioning: 10 servers per call, placed on one host with a capacity check first.
• Disk growth: up to 2 TB per server.
• Snapshot retention: unlimited in count, billed by size.

If you consistently need more than these, you probably want dedicated capacity rather than a bigger shared plan. Support will size it with you.

DNS records

Every domain registered with us gets full DNS management at no charge. Records are edited in the client area, or over the API.

Mail records that must be right

# SPF — who may send as this domain
yourdomain.com.  TXT  "v=spf1 include:_spf.bigdomainhost.com ~all"

# DMARC — what to do when SPF or DKIM fails
_dmarc.yourdomain.com.  TXT  "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com"

DKIM keys are generated per domain and shown in the panel after a mailbox exists. All three are configured for you on business email hosting.

Nameservers

Point your domain at:

ns1.bigdomainhost.com
ns2.bigdomainhost.com

Propagation is governed by the TTL at your registrar and usually completes within a few hours. Until it does, some visitors resolve to the old host and some to the new one — both should be serving, which is why you never switch before the new one is tested.

Private nameservers

On reseller plans you can run ns1.yourbrand.com instead. Register glue records at your registrar pointing at the IPs we give you, then set them as the default in WHM so every account you create inherits them. There is no charge for this.

cPanel

Shared, WordPress, cloud and reseller plans are managed through cPanel; reseller and VPS plans add WHM for creating accounts. A plain-language tour of what each icon does is in what is cPanel.

• Document root — public_html. Anything above it is not web-accessible, which is where backups and configuration belong.
• PHP version — selectable per domain, 5.6 through 8.4, with extensions as checkboxes.
• Databases — MySQL and MariaDB, managed through phpMyAdmin. Remote access is off by default and enabled per IP.
• Cron — see the cron job guide; always use absolute paths.
• Terminal — SSH access is available on request on cPanel plans, and always on a VPS.

Plan limits

These are the numbers behind the fair-use clause in the terms of service. We contact you before acting on any of them.

Email

Mailboxes are included on cPanel plans and sold separately as business email hosting, which runs on mail-only IPs for better deliverability.

# Incoming
Server    mail.yourdomain.com
IMAP      993   SSL/TLS
POP3      995   SSL/TLS

# Outgoing
Server    mail.yourdomain.com
SMTP      587   STARTTLS   (465 also works)
Username  the FULL email address
Auth      required

Outbound port 25 is blocked by default — see why — and every port is explained in the email port reference.

SSL certificates

Let's Encrypt is issued automatically for every domain and subdomain on a hosting account, and renews without any action from you. Check status under cPanel → SSL/TLS Status.

• Automatic issue requires the domain to resolve to the server. A certificate cannot be issued before DNS points here.
• Renewal happens 30 days before expiry. If one fails, it retries daily and we are alerted.
• Paid certificates — DV, OV, EV and wildcard — are available if you need a warranty or organisation validation.
• A CAA record that omits your issuer will block issuance. If a certificate will not issue, check CAA first.

Migrations

Migration is free on every plan and done by us. The sequence is deliberately non-destructive:

1. Send the cPanel login, or server credentials, of your current host.
2. We copy files, databases, mailboxes, cron jobs and DNS records to the new account.
3. You test on a preview URL or a hosts-file entry. Nothing has changed publicly yet.
4. You drop the TTL, we switch DNS at a time you choose, and both hosts serve during propagation.
5. Keep the old host for a week. It is the only rollback that exists.

Typical cutover downtime is under five minutes. The full checklist, including what people forget, is in the migration guide.

Getting help

Phone is the fast path: +91 75994 50220, answered 24×7 from Agra in IST. Email support@Bigdomainhost.com for anything that needs a written trail, with a first reply inside an hour.

If something in these docs is wrong or missing, say so. They are part of the product and we would rather fix them than have you work around them.