What is Website Hosting?
We specialize in website hosting, meaning that you can place your web site on our state-of-the-art web servers and establish a presence on the Internet.- We even register your domain name for you. This will become your unique address on the World Wide Web (www.yourdomainname.com).
- However, we are not your web designer. Sometimes it is confusing for a customer to understand which questions are related to webhosting and which are website development questions/support issues.
In general, if your questions are concerned with your domain name; how to access your control panel; setup your email, or features we offer, then we can assist you with those questions.
- Questions about how to create/design/upload your site; use your html editors; and questions about design in general, are not hosting questions, but are web design questions that should be directed to your web designer.
- Or, if you are designing your site yourself, consider looking online for sources for web designing in general.
- Also, you can find lots of information in the “help” link for the software package you are using.
- You can also search online for error messages you might see, to help with trouble shooting a specific error message.
- If you are having a design – related problem and have tried to use the help guides with your software and still can’t resolve your problem, we’re happy to assist and help point you to information which should help, if we can.
- If you are in need of a web designer to help you create and maintain your site, we’re happy to offer some possible sources for consideration.
These are the most common questions we hear.
Click on a question to reveal the answer.
Following is the order of “priority” of pages. The first one of these that is found will become the “home” page. For example, if you have a default.htm and an index.htm, the default is the page that will be seen as your home page. You can still “call” the other pages when you have them as links, but they will not show up as the home page: default.html, default.htm, index.phtml, index.pht, index.cgi, index.shtml, index.html, welcome.cgi, welcome.html, index.htm, index.asp, homepage.html, homepage.htm and homepage.cgi
When you upload your index.html page, you will need to delete or overwrite our “under construction” page currently there. If you upload an index.htm page, you will not be able to see it automatically at your site until you delete the index.html page. Here is a list of “priorities” of pages. This means, for example, if you have an index.htm page as your home page, and there is also an index.html page, the index.html page will be what is “seen” when someone goes to your site. default.html, default.htm, index.phtml, index.php, index.cgi, index.shtml, index.html, welcome.cgi, welcome.html, index.htm, index.asp, homepage.html, homepage.htm and homepage.cgi
This problem is usually related to POP authentication procedure. When you attempt to send mail, the system requires that you authenticate to the server first. The way the server does this is that it first requires you to log into your pop account with the username and password you created when the pop account was set up through the mail manager. After you authenticate by logging in you have a period of 15 minutes to send mail. After this 15 minutes expires you will need to reauthenticate – if you don’t you get an error message.
This may sound more complicated than it actually is. For instance, when Outlook is opened it automatically presents you with a username and password box. After you type these in, Outlook does the rest. Usually you can just send and receive mail and Outlook will automatically resubmit your username and password combo. However, it does so only when you hit the send/receive button. If you only hit the send button your password is never resubmitted. Typically the password is only required when receiving (popping) mail. As you can see the process defaulted to by Outlook is backwards with respect to our authentication procedures. Outlook first sends mail and then receives mail. This is where the failure comes in. On our system you need to authenticate (receive) first and then send.
In order to avoid endless mail looping on our server, which can bog it down and ultimately may cause it to go down, you will be unable to forward mail as follows: box1–>box2–>outside address
This scenario will only send the mail to the server location for box2; it won’t send the mail to the outside address. If you want box 1 to go to the outside address, you’ll need to forward it there directly, instead of sending it to box2 first and from there having it go to the outside address.
For instructions on setting up your email application program to receive your mail, please take a look at Setting Up Email.For a very complete discussion of problems encountered with Microsoft Outlook, Go Here. Your pop server name is mail.yourdomainname.ext. So if your domain name is pleasehelpmenow.org, your pop server would be mail.pleasehelpmenow.org
If you were hosting elsewhere and your domain name is not yet resolving to our servers, you will be unable to retrieve your mail from our servers. If your domain name is still pointed to those other servers, that’s where your mail will be going until the transfer goes through.
Regardless of whether or not you develop your site, the hosting charges are due and payable, as our expenses for hosting your site begin the day of setup. For example, we incur a monthly charge for control panel software, whether or not you even use it. If you are not ready to being developing your site, we can simply register your domain name initially, but we need to know that is your desire in the beginning. If your web development is delayed, we are happy to setup a simple information page for your site, upon request. That way, your site has general information and contact information for visitors, and your development can commence at your convenience.
Check your paths to your images. If the file that you are using the images in exists in the same directory as your images, you won’t need to list the full path. Here is an example of the HTML that you would use if your images are in the same directory as the file that you are using them in: <img src=”yourimage.jpg
If your image is in another directory, like “images” you’ll need to reference the path, such as this: <img src=”images/yourimage.jpg
Also, remember that file names are case sensitive. For example, in your HTML document you have a link to ContactInfo.htm but you named the file contactinfo.htm, it will not work. The same thing goes with graphics and all other web documents. What you have in your HTML must match up with what you name your files. And speaking of naming files, do not have spaces in your file names! You can use upper and lower case if it makes it easier for you, or hyphens or underscores, but just don’t leave an empty space.
You will know that your domain name has been successfully transferred and your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has updated its DNS tables when you are able to FTP to your account using yourdomain.com as the hostname. Before the transfer is complete, when you try using yourdomain.com and the username/password we provided you with, it will not work. We have no control over how quickly your ISP updates its DNS tables. Other people may be able to see your page before you do, if their ISPs update more frequently.
Another way to test if it is transferred is to upload a test file to our servers and then see if you can access it with your domain name in the path. For example, if you upload a file called testing.html to our servers, if you can access it with the path http://www.yourdomainname.com/testing.html, you’ll know that you domain name has been transferred to our servers. (Make sure that you don’t have a file with the same name already uploaded on your former servers.)