Web Hosting Usage Notes

This document is intended for use by our hosting customers. If you're not one of our hosting customers, be warned that this information will probably not apply to you!

1. passwords
2. sending email
3. receiving email
4. webmail
5. serving webpages
6. website statistics

PASSWORDS

• Your hosting account password is stated at the top of the welcome email we sent to you when you purchased your account.
• Your hosting account password is used to access to the control panel, and to login with FTP.
• Each time you create a POP3 account, you must allocate an email account password for the new account.
• When you add a POP3 account to your email software, the password you enter in the "account details" section is the email account password you allocated when you created the email account in the control panel.
• Both the hosting account password, and the email account passwords, can be changed by using the control panel.
• If you change the hosting account password, this will affect your access to the control panel and to FTP, but will not affect your email accounts.
• If you change an email account password, this will not affect your hosting account password.
• If you have forgotten your hosting account password, please check your welcome email. If you cannot find the welcome email, please use the Hosting Account Password Request Form.

SENDING EMAIL

You can send mail using either your ISP's mailserver, or the SMTP server provided with your hosting service. If you elect to use your ISP's server, check their support pages for the correct setting. If you elect to use the SMTP server provided, the following notes apply:

1. The address of the SMTP server is the mailserver address given at the top of the welcome letter which was emailed to you when you opened your hosting account. Please contact us if you have mislaid this letter.
2. You must enable SMTP authentication to use the server.

If your account includes spam and virus protection, you should use the hosted SMTP server to send mail.

RECEIVING EMAIL

Note: the catch-all mailbox is permanently disabled, on all our hosting accounts. This means that until you create POP3 accounts, or configure forwarding, ALL mail for your domain will be returned to sender.

Use the control panel to create POP3 accounts and forwards (redirects). Mail addressed to accounts you create will go into a mailbox which can be accessed using POP3 client software such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora or Pegasus Mail.

The format of the username is "username-yourdomain-com", for example, to use the address info@yourdomain.com, create a mailbox called "info" using the control panel, then in your POP3 client software, enter "info-yourdomain-com" in the username box of the account settings.

In your account settings in your POP3 client, ensure to use the mailserver address given in section 1, "account summary" at the top of your welcome letter. Use the username and password you defined in the control panel when creating the POP3 account.

If your account includes spam and virus protection, please see our separate page: how to use the hosted email filtering service

Note: while using the control panel, if you click the "details" link next to a mailbox, you'll see that the mailserver address displayed is something similar to accountname.dns-systems.net, where accountname is your hosting account username. This mailserver address is different to the mailserver address given at the top of your welcome letter. This address also works, however we don't reccommend using it, because in the future, if you host your website with a different provider, and you're using the mailserver address accountname.dns-systems.net, you'll need to change your mailserver address to suit your new provider, for each account you have defined in your POP3 client. If, however you use the recommended address, which is something similar to mail.domainname.com, (where domainname.com is your domainname), you won't need to change any addresses if you migrate, as long as you create a "mail" subdomain at your new provider, a simple process which is often done automatically when your hosting account is created.

The mailserver also supports IMAP.

WEBMAIL

All accounts can access their mailbox via the web. Please see accessing your POP3 mailbox on the web for more information.

SERVING WEBPAGES

You can manage your webspace using either the online file management tool (accessed via your control panel), or using FTP. The FTP client you select is up to you, however we recommend Total Commander (Windows) and Fetch (Mac).

In your account settings in your FTP client, ensure to use the FTP server address, username and password given in section 1, "account summary" at the top of your welcome letter.

Note: while using the control panel, if you click the "Web Tools" link in the menu, you'll see that the FTP server address displayed is something similar to ftp2.dns-systems.net. This FTP server address is different to the FTP server address given at the top of your welcome letter. This address also works, however we don't reccommend using it, because in the future, if you host your website with a different provider, and you're using the FTP server address ftp2.dns-systems.net (or similar), you'll need to change your FTP server address to suit your new provider, for each account you have defined in your FTP client. If, however you use the recommended address, which is something similar to ftp.domainname.com, (where domainname.com is your domainname), you won't need to change any addresses if you migrate, as long as you create a "ftp" subdomain at your new provider, a simple process which is often done automatically when your hosting account is created.

Your webpages, images, etc should be stored in the /htdocs directory, or a subdirectory of the /htdocs directory.

The home page of your web site must be called index.html, index.htm, or index.php (all lower case). This index file is the first page people will see when they go to http://www.yourdomain.name/

Full PHP and PERL scripting is available.

Files that include Server Side Includes (SSI) must end in the .shtml extension.

To use HTTP streaming, simply upload your media files, and hyperlink to them. You need add no special code to your webpages (although you still need to use .RAM or .RPM files, or their equivalents). Note: If your RAM or RPM files contain a call to the PNM:// protocol, you must change this to HTTP://

The server runs unix, and is thus SeNsItIvE to upper and lower case. Bear this in mind when you are uploading files, particularly from case-insensitive systems such as Microsoft Windows.

WEBSITE STATISTICS

Full usage statistics are available for every domain. A raw logfile is also available. Please see locating website usage information (webstats) for more information.