Delegate Access vs. Account Administrators

Customers can no longer create Account Administrator relationships. (These were also known as Account Executives at one point.) However, account owners can still give access to other people using our Delegate Access feature.

How does Delegate Access compare to Account Administrators?

Giving users access to your account without giving them your password is an important security feature, especially when so many of our customers work with short-term contracted Web developers. We've accomplished this previously through the Account Administrators tool, but moved to a tool called Delegate Access.

The table below explains the differences between Delegate Access and Account Administrator access:

Feature	Delegate Access	Account Administrators
Product Access	All accounts for supported products (more info)	Specific domains, hosting, and Website Builder accounts
Task Control	Broad access levels (more info)	Specific features
Purchasing	Supported	Not supported
Setup	Simple (as few as 2 steps)	Complicated (as few as 5 steps)

Another Way to Explain the Differences

Naturally, both of these tools are more than the features they provide: there's also the experience you have with it as the user.

Delegate Access lets account owners give their delegates access to all of their supported products (more info). We limit some features to eliminate potentially malicious use (like modifying the account owner's information), but delegates can use most products just like the account owner can. Delegates who are granted purchasing access can also purchase HostingDude.com products for the owner using the owner's payment method.

Account Administrators gave users piecemeal access to a small groups of products. This access was further limited to a pre-defined set of actions within the applications that had to be configured correctly to make sure the administrator could get the work done that the account owner needed.

We learned that the Account Administrators system frustrated a lot of users with its granular controls. Most account owners just wanted to give their Web professional access to their entire account, so we designed Delegate Access to do just that.

For more information about Delegate Access and its features, see What is Delegate Access?.