Passwords overview

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

Each user has its own unique password that is independent of other users. This article details how to change the passwords for each type of user in your DreamHost account.

It's sometimes necessary to log into a site in order to troubleshoot an issue. This could happen with CMS software sites such as WordPress, or a DreamCompute instance (which support does not have access to).

If it's absolutely necessary to share login credentials to troubleshoot an issue, make sure you follow these two steps.

1. If possible, create a test user and password to share with DreamHost support.
2. Once your support issue is resolved, immediately change your password.

There are several types of users you may use when managing your DreamHost website and data. Below is a list of those users along with instructions on how to update their type of password:

• Website users
• Mail users
• MySQL users
• Panel users
• Stats users
• Dedicated Server admin users
• Application users
• DreamCompute dashboard users
• Remixer users
• Google Workspace users
• WordPress users

There are a few things you should always consider when creating a password. These will help to protect your user from being compromised as well as protect other users in the case of an intrusion:

1. Never use your username as your password or even a portion of it.
2. Never use personal information such as your name, phone number, address, anniversary, birthday, pet's name, DOB, license plate, etc.
3. The longer the password, the better. It's recommended it should be at least 8 characters.
4. Never use the same password twice. Always change to something new.
5. Combine letters, numbers and special characters to make your password harder to guess.
6. Mix upper and lower case letters to increase security.
7. Do not use common words that can be guessed such as ‘guest’ or ‘password’ or any variations of those words.
8. Enable Multifactor Authentication when possible.

• You can also use an online website to help create a password. An example would be passwordgenerator.

The max password length is 31 characters.

You can add special characters. The only characters that are not allowed are single and double quotes.

It's possible that after resetting a password within your panel, you find it's not working, or the old password still functions. This is commonly due to two issues:

1. Not enough time has passed since changing the password. Allow up to 30 minutes for your password to update online.
2. Your old password is cached. You may need to clear your web browser’s cache if you find the old password for your user is still being cached upon logging in. If the new password does not work after 30 minutes of changing it, try clearing your web browser cache and then try again:
   • Clear cache
   • Flush DNS