Searching the panel

There is a search box at the top of every screen. It is always there — on your phone as much as on your laptop — and nothing needs to be opened first. Type part of a domain name, a mail address, a database name or a customer name, and the panel shows you what it found.

You only ever search your own estate. A reseller finds their own customers and nothing belonging to another reseller; a customer finds their own websites, mailboxes and databases. That is not a filter you can switch off — it is how the search works.

Getting started

Click the box, or simply start typing. The panel searches from two characters; a single letter does nothing, because half your estate would match it. There is no button to press: results appear as you type.

What comes back is grouped by kind, each group with a heading:

• Accounts — your customers' hosting accounts (or your own)
• Websites — domain names and subdomains
• Mailboxes — mail addresses
• Databases
• DNS zones
• Servers
• Panel users — the logins in the panel
• Packages

The part you typed is highlighted in every result, so you can see at a glance why a row is in the list. Click a row and you are there: a website takes you to its account's websites, a mailbox to that account's mail screen, a DNS zone to the zone itself.

Finding a customer from a mail address

This is the case the search was really built for. A customer calls about accounts@example.com and you no longer remember which hosting account that belongs to.

Type accounts in the box. You get two things back:

• under Mailboxes, the address itself;
• under Accounts, the hosting account that mailbox belongs to, with the line via accounts@example.com underneath — so it is clear why that account is in the list.

A fragment is enough. counts@ works just as well as the whole address.

The order results come in

Results are not alphabetical, they are ordered by how well they match, and each row says which of the three it is:

1. exact — precisely what you typed;
2. starts with — the name begins with what you typed;
3. contains — what you typed appears somewhere in the name.

Search for example and the account actually called example comes above example2, which comes above old-example.

Seeing everything

The search box shows the best five results per group. When a heading says Show all (23), there are more. Click it and you land on the results screen with the whole group on it. At the bottom of the list there is also See all results, for every group at once.

That screen has an address of its own, so you can bookmark it or send it to a colleague:

https://panel.example.com/search?q=example
https://panel.example.com/search?q=example&kind=domains

At the top of that screen a menu narrows it to one kind, and its own search field lets you refine the query without going back up.

Searching from the keyboard

To keep your hands on the keyboard: Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) opens the command palette. It is the same search, with the same results, plus the panel's actions and navigation. Type, move with the arrow keys, press Enter. Escape closes it again.

The arrow keys work in the search box too: down through the list, Enter to open a result, Escape to clear the field.

When nothing is found

The panel says so, names the query you searched for, and offers a next step — a list of all your accounts. You never land on an empty screen with no way onward. When it happens, check the spelling, or search for a shorter fragment: part of a domain name usually works better than the full name with its extension.

DNS records are deliberately not searchable. Search for the zone name (the domain) and you land on the zone, where all of that domain's records sit together.

Related

• Signing in and switching — moving between customers and roles, and what each role sees
• What you can do yourself