Archive for the ‘Web Hosting’ Category

So you have your website files on your computer and you wish to get them live on the Internet. There are two ways of achieving this. The easiest is to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), or you can use the File Manager tool found in your control panel.

To upload using FTP you will require an FTP program. There are many free FTP programs available on the Internet. Once you have an FTP program you need to login to your hosting space, We can provide you with the details you will need to login.

FTP server address (Host address)
Username
Password

If you do not know your password or if you just wish to update your password, please use these easy to follow steps:

- Firstly, login to your control panel
- Great! Now that you are logged in, click on ‘Domain Names’ found in the left menu.
- In the middle of the screen there will be a list of your domains, please click on your domain name.
- On the left menu select the option ‘FTP’
- On the next page click on the Site Admin username.
- Set a new password for your FTP in the boxes ‘New password’ and ‘Confirm password’.
- Ensure FTP is enabled by selecting ‘Yes’ for the option ‘FTP enabled?’
- Finally, once you are happy with your changes please clicks ‘Save’ at the bottom of the page.

Now that you are logged in with your chosen FTP program simply drag and drop your website files into the ‘web’ directory on the server.

If you would prefer to use our File Manager tool in your Online Control Panel, please follow the easy steps I have provided below.

- Firstly, login to your control panel
- Great! Now that you are logged in, click on ‘Domain Names’ found in the left menu.
- In the middle of the screen there will be a list of your domains, please click on your domain name.
- On the left menu select the option ‘File Manager’
- Click on the ‘web’ directory
- Use the symbol represented by an ‘up arrow’ to upload individual files.

Got a website and paying too much for your hosting account? This is normally because hosting accounts aren’t setup for individuals and they probably give you more that you need or will ever want.

We always want to raise awareness of our website business services including the web hosting services we provide. To put it frankly, we will beat all of the other hosting providers on service and price, if you can find one cheaper than us we will match the price. We are currently doing a promotional offer of £45 for a years hosting, email accounts and setup that includes a very generous disk space allocation and and unlimited bandwidth. We use UK based servers and an award winning hosting company to be assured of 99.9% website uptime.

We can afford to be so keenly priced as we have huge purchasing power and host hundreds of websites, we are not a start-up business that has to charge huge hosting costs just to keep our head above water, as always we are looking to increase our customer base for website design and website hosting, we do not sacrifice quality of servers or our setup and support service at any time.

Take a look at our very reasonable Website Charges that cover everything from website transfers to ftp access, hosting, website and SEO updates, its important to remember that even simple website transfers can invoke charges if work is required that is out of our control. . When moving to a different server there can be compatibility issues which may require work to resolve them, sometimes these issues can be caused by something as simple as an apache configuration variable.

Sometimes we receive a website for transfer to us that isn’t correct (visually or functionally) a lot of the time this is due to  flash navigation  If this is the case we make a small / modest charge for our time in doing changes to ensure the site looks and works as it did before the trasnfer, these changes are required, to enable to website to look and work correctly.

Sometimes you may need to take a career break or you may not want your site to be not bring in the calls and emails as you are not able to take any more business. Normally the first response it to take down the website and / or stop the hosting, this is nearly always the wrong thing to do, in situations that you cant take any more work we suggest putting a message on the site to indicate this and you can even disable your contact form and remove your phone number as you will not benefit from domain aging and ‘trust’ from the search engines, if you take your site up and down regularly to suit your circumstances.

This recent exchange with a website owner demonstrates this

[Website Owner] Over the last 6 months I have been re-designing all of my website Ideas. I have also been doing market research and general business research for my ecommerce website as this is the main and biggest project and needs the most investment. As I am still working full time, this is taking longer than I would like, however I am getting there. Until I have finished all my design and research work, I would like my websites to be switched off please. I am not using them, nor advertising them at the moment, and therefore I think they should be closed.

The reason I wished to switch the websites off is because I didn’t want to rake up a large hosting bill. I haven’t really used the websites properly yet and I didn’t want to payout loads for something I am not using.

[Delicious Webdesign] In General The last thing you should do to a website, if you have any plans to use it in the future, is turn it off (or put it offline) This is because you have started to build up a bit of trust with Google / Bing and Yahoo and they now know about your site and have now indexed you. You can remove it but the search engines will remove you from their index you and put you ‘trust’ back a bit. As your website aren’t major ones ones and are barely getting any visitors currently I would say its better for you just to leave them online, perhaps putting a message up saying something like ‘Not taking on new projects until further notice’

Hosting is paid if they are on or off, they still need to be on a server, your domains are paid up until the end of September and after that we charge £45 per domain per year for hosting / email / support. Its MUCH more advantageous to keep them hosted and live if you have any intentions of using them in the future than taking them down just to save a relatively small amount of money. Additionally if we stop hosting them and the domain name could be bought by someone else.

FTP access to websites can be given to clients but in general we dont give this as standard as there is a real danger in accidentally changing / deleting your website code if you access your files on the remote server and do not understand the relationship between the files. If you require FTP access to your files we can grant this access (subject to our other website fees). We sometimes need access to your files via FTP if you are transferring a domain to us and recently were shocked to not be granted to these files (or the original file) by a company that were hosting a client’s website. Their reply to our request demonstrate the fact that you should be sure your website design company grants yourself ‘ownership’ to your full website once you pay for it. The result of the following conversations were that the website transfer wasn’t transferred until the new website was redesigned.

[Delicious to Previous Website Design Company] Probably been informed by your client that they want the website transferred, they asked me today if I have received the files from the site. If you can send them to us either via ftp / email or post on cd / dvd / memory card that would be fine.

[Previous Website Design Company] I have discussed this transfer with my head office and they have strict policy about not allowing external FTP access to their sites so unfortunately that is not an option. As for the website most of the content was written in flash (as requested by the client) so I have zipped up the source files and any images used for you to rebuild and put on your sites. You will obviously need to re-code any source flash files as there will be path/folder references in their pointing to XML files that will differ on your servers. Hopefully everything is here and this will allow you to rebuild the customers site as requested by them. Any other HTML / TEXT content is available through the source code within the browser.

[Delicious to Previous Website Design Company] Any news from yesterday’s convo, basically the full website code is needed to work on a new server and then once we have that we need to do the site transfer, initiated by yourself by updating the IPS code.

[Previous Website Design Company] I have been discussing this with my head office, unfortunately they are unable to give you anything on top of what I have already provided you. Our CMS system is an in house developed system and as a Franchise organisation they are not willing to open this up (for reasons unknown to me), and the hidden content of the website design to any 3^rd party.  I do not understand the exact technical reasons behind this so I can’t tell you anymore than that. I am afraid you will have to contact them directly if you wish to discuss this further. They have clearly stated that any website built using their system will not run on any other hosted system.

I appreciate this wasn’t what you and your clients wanted to hear, but this is out of my control unfortunately. They are a global company with thousands of websites and franchisees and are not prepared to leave their systems open to risk or to be compromised in any way.  All I can do is help my end by providing all of the original source code / images / files that was initially put together to build the website as per the website client’s requirements.

Hopefully you have everything needed to build the same site on your servers however I understand that this will take a little time, and will no doubt need to be charged back to the client in some way.

Often get asked about what happens once we begin a website redesign project when the website needs to be transferred from a previous website design company / hosting company, the following demonstrates what is typical information we give out

A very big part of the website design project manager’s responsibility is ensuring that website transfers are done quickly and efficiently, unfortunately it can be viewed as quite complicated by other website design companies and website owners. We often speak with other website design companies that clearly do not understand the principles of website ownership, transfers and hosting and find ourselves educating them to ensure the transfer goes smoothly for our clients, the following exchange demonstrates that we go the extra mile to help website owners.

website owner Can you please explain to me what this hosting information is for as you are no longer hosting our website, actually what is hosting, as we are not sure?

delicious Your domain is very much registered and hosted with us, there is three parts to it:
Name Server, A Records and MX Records, you have chosen to change your A Records (IP Address) to another Essex Website Design company but you have our Name Server and MX Records so hosting fees are applicable I am afraid. We were last contacted by another website design company, on your behalf, to change your A records and done that instantly for you.

Happy for you to transfer away or stay with us, if you transfer away there is a small transfer charge to pay (see our website additional charges ) and if you stay with us then we are also happy to oblige.

We look at sites as if they were our own and can say that your site has been neglected in terms of SEO and can see some very amateurish SEO mistakes on it, which if you want to take our SEO program we will be glad to fix. Additionally we have now got more SEO successful projects that we can report on to give you confidence that we can deliver SEO success in terms of visitor numbers and search engine rankings. The first part of our SEO project involved benchmarking and reporting on the current status so we can use that as a reference for you and to show the improvements made over the coming weeks and months.

If you want to talk about your options in terms of hosting and SEO, happy to chat about this if you have any questions or doubts about our company’s abilities and how that they can improve your business.

website owner I wish to transfer away, i need a guarantee that you are able to transfer all the history away to another address

delicious We can transfer the domain to another host but as you have a .co.uk domain will need their IPS tag and the fee to complete this. In terms of history you mean your existing emails? If so if you use an email client for your email then your emails will be stored for you locally and you will retain your emails.

website owner ok great thanks for this info, you have restored my confidence in Essex Website Designers, please renew my hosting for two years and send me the invoice via email.

In general we encourage clients just to have one website, we think its generally a waste of money to buy the .com the .co.uk the .org.uk and the .net versions of your website name. We believe one website that is correctly built and promoted will be adequate for most websites. We do have clients requesting that we buy the hyphenated and un-hyphenated versions of their website name also and again we state this is generally a waste of money apart from major brands who get a lot of directly typed in URLS where typos can occur. A standard business brochure site that is UK based and wants to sell only to the UK should always try to obtain the .co.uk domain of their choice.

Additionally there is a word of caution here for the unwary.

One of our clients recently told us that they ‘found out’ that they were losing email inquires to the non-hyphenated URL of their website name (example info@deliciouswebdesign.com instead of info@delicious-webdesign.com). They claimed to be worried and to have had no idea  whether one or a load of enquiries went through to the non-hyphenated version of their website. They were approached via email from a company that ‘claimed he was getting the companies email and was ‘reluctant’ to sell the domain name, initially,  the company went on to tell me that they bought the domain and said they were very happy as it has now been resolved as they bought the domain name for £100.

Unfortunately this is a scam (unless you really have given out your email address incorrectly or made a mistake on the website with the email name (which we hadn’t), so we  had to tell the company that it looked like they have fallen to a well worked scam. We know this as the email address wasn’t given out incorrectly nor was it incorrect on the website or in any directories and we often get offered similar domain names for £100 and are told that they are getting our email inquiries that should be  destined to our websites. This ‘reluctant selling company’ often simply buy the site for £3 and sell it for £100, which is clearly a very nice profit. I had to tell the company that  nowhere on their site was there mention of the non-hyphenated version of their email address so what the ‘reluctant seller was’ claiming was definitely not correct. We added the caveat that it is possible they had added their email address incorrectly on a directory or another listing.

As with any ‘out of the blue’ or ‘too good to be true offer’ If the company had asked us first we would have taken time to look into it before giving our recommendation. In this instance the company fell for a well worked scam that made someone a huge percentage profit for writing an email.

Once we begin a website project a website name is chosen and we purchase it on behalf of our client immediately, this is allow the client to see the development of the website as the project progresses and to avoid someone else buying the domain. This is an industry normal process. The hosting period of that website begins from the moment the website / domain is purchased and the first years hosting is included in every website package we provide.

The second and subsequent anniversaries of the domain purchase date will be used for invoicing purposes to charge for website hosting, current costs of which can be found on our website charges page

If you want to transfer a .com domain from one hosting company to another it can take longer than .co.uk domains, the steps to follow are

1, Unlock the Domain in the control panel of the existing host

2, This will give you the EPP code, this initiates an email to be sent to you or it will show the code on screen. The message in the email will be similar to this

You will need the following authorization code (also called an “auth-code”) to transfer your domain away from [your old hosting company].

For more information on doing so, please visit our tutorial on the website

The auth-code for [website to be transferred] is: aefal?dS

3, Register the Domains with the new hosting company

4, The registration process will require you to enter the EPP code

5, A confirmation email is sent to the owner of the domain with an approve / disapprove command, the information is similar to this

Welcome to the Fast2host Limited Domain Name Transfer/Renewal Interface.
This  is intended for the use of domain name contacts in approving or rejecting a domain name renewal/transfer (ICANN registrar) requests.

Transfer  Information

Attention: [domain owner]
Re: Transfer of [website to be transferred] on 8/16/2010 1:51:24 PM for us to become the new registrar of record.

You have received this message because you are listed as the Registered Name Holder or Administrative contact for this domain name in the WHOIS database.

You must respond to this message via the following choices, if you do not reply by 8/23/2010 2:02:15 PM, [website to be transferred] will not be transferred to us.).

Approval  Information
I Approve – Please renew/transfer [domain name]. (Your computer’s IP will be recorded as part of your response.)
I Reject – (Your computer’s IP will be recorded as part of your response.)

6, Once the confirmation is approved you will get a message similar to this

Welcome to the Fast2host Limited Domain Name Transfer/Renewal Interface.
This interface is intended for domain name owners to  approve or reject a domain name transfer (ICANN registrar)

7, you may then get a subsequent Transfer Away Confirmation with an approve / reject option request from the existing hosting company that you will need to approve, receiving a final message of:

Thank you. Your domain will be transferred to [the hosting company you are going to] You may be asked to complete their confirmation processes before the domain is actually transferred away

then it can take 4-9 days for the transfer to complete and in your control panel you will see the transfer as ‘in progress’

This is a pretty rare occurrence as if a website designer / hosting company stops trading they should have sold their company including their clients to another company that agrees to continue the hosting arrangement with existing clients. If you have a .co.uk domain you will be glad to know there is a simple solution out of your predicament. Here are the standard details we sent to new clients if they contact us after their website designer has disappeared or gone out of business.

To begin the transfer process, you will need to do two things:

1, phone / email Nominet to explain that your website designer has gone out of business and you want to transfer to us (they charge £10 for this service)
You will need to tell them to update your IPS tag to ENOM
This will enable us to transfer your site / email

to contact Nominet by their website >> http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrants/contactme
or via Telephone: +44(0)1865 332244 (Lines open 8am – 6pm)
or Email: nominet@nominet.org.uk

2, pay the yearly hosting fee, if you want us to make changes on the website you can give us a full list and we will confirm the changes are viable and will give you a quote, we sometimes suggest other changes / improvements that you may not have spotted.

Website updates are performed on a hourly support cost basis and you will be glad to know we are quick and efficient at these. We have already got the source code of your website to enable us to start any work immediately.

Things to bear in mind
You will need to re-setup your email (if you use an email client like outlook / windows live mail / mail) full instructions will be given, normally this takes only a few minutes. If you access your mail via the web (webmail) you will be given a website address where you can access your email with your username (email address) and password which we supply.

The transfer may take a day or two to begin and your site maybe down for a few minutes during the swap over.

Once you have contacted Nominet and they have confirmed the transfer phone or email us to tell us this so we can continue the transfer process.