yes, yes, yes – it’s been a while. The reason is simple though, I’ve just had a kid and suddenly loads of my time has been taken up – who knew!! That combined with sleepless nights has left me struggling to get onto posting more articles.
However I’m back now and have started work on a few new articles for you to look over including some new security articles, as well as some programming tutorials.
As ever if you’d like to get involved on the site contact me!
Any web designer out there has had problems in the past with emails seemingly vanishing or bounce back messages coming back with various warnings and not known where to begin to look to see where the problem lies. You can ask you’re web hosting company to investigate for you but there are ways you can help yourself and hence resolve the problem quicker and we’re put some of them below.
The first thing to say is that emails don’t simply vanish never to be seen again (or very very rarely). Usually an email problem is reported back to you so if it’s a customer of your’s you can start the tracking by asking some very simple questions:
Very simple questions but ones which 9 times out of 10 can solve the problem. You can immediately see if they mis-spelt the address (more common than you might thing!), if they sent an email at a time you were restarting something on the server.
If neither of the above find the solution then onto the next steps, what error messages were received? This is key to tracking things down so if your customer either can’t remember or doesn’t have it to hand get them to send it you as otherwise you’re in the dark.
Typically email errors come in 2 forms, a direct error from the email client like outlook or a bounceback email.
If the error comes from the email browser than usually the error is to do with either their connection to the server or local setup. Therefore a quick test is to simply setup the email account on your computer, test it and if all works the issue is on your customers computer and then thats a troubleshooting pc connection issues kind of thing. Issues like username / password / server address being incorrect are quite common.
The other type of warning an email has not gone through is from an email bounceback. Bouncebacks contain some great information if you know where to look. Typically the bounceback will come with a load of technical information in it but somewhere in it will be a key sentence like ‘recipient not found’ or ‘user doesn’t exist’. However some common bouncebacks are:
Mailbox does not exist
As the name suggests, the email address you are trying to send to doesn’t exist.
Mailbox Full
Again, as the name suggests the mailbox is full and can’t take any more emails
You have been greylisted
Greylisting isn’t as bad as you might think. Greylisting simply means that it’s the first time you have sent an email to that mailserver and they want to vet you’re a valid email sender. As such all you need do is send the email again and you’ll be allowed to send to the recipient.
You have been blacklisted / listed on a DNS blacklist
This isn’t so good – it means you have been listed on one of the many DNS blacklists for spamming. The first thing to do in this case is see if you are indeed blacklisted. An easy way to check blacklists is over at mx toolbox who provide a free dns blacklist checker for you to double check.
If you have been blacklisted then it means you’re server has been caught sending spam. If you are on a shared server then contact your web hosting company who should deal with this for you. If it’s your server then you need to identify and stop the source of the spam immediately. You should begin with looking at the email server logs and see if you can identify a email address which is sending out vast quantities of emails. It won’t be hard to spot as you need to spam a fair bit to get blacklisted. If you need help you can ask us or pop along to the guys at swordfish hosting for some free email security advice.
Once you have identified and stopped the cause (and only then) get in contact with the blacklist you are on and ask to be de-listed giving all the steps you have taken to stop the spamming.
Above we’ve looking at things to look for if you’re client can’t send or has missing sent emails but next we’ll look at how to track down missing inbound emails and the checks you can do.
We get asked all the time what monitoring we have in place for our customers server and the answer is always a combination of programs on different servers and even severs remote to our network ensuring that websites are monitoring 24*7. It’s taken us many years to get we we are at with our monitoring and not everyone has a number of spare servers at hand to monitor their website. So the question is As a website owner, how do i monitor my websites?
Thankfully there are number of great options out there for you to quick and easily check the status of your website. You may ask “why do I need to monitor my website when my host does it for me?” and it’s a good question so we’ve tried to explain why it’s always a good idea for you to monitor things for yourself:
Those are just a few reason why you might consider getting your own monitoring in place but don’t be put off by the technical aspect of it as thankfully there are some great companies out there which can help you and we’re going to look at a couple.
1. Pingdom
One of the first and possibly the best. They are relatively cheap and the great thing is if you are only monitoring one website it’s completely free! The control panel is incredibly easy to use and they can even send text messages to you to let you know if there is a problem. You even get the first 20 or so texts free to start off with!
2. Phone Applications
Having recently turned to the dark side and brought an iPhone I’ve found some great applications out there which allow server monitoring. Whilst there are a few I’ve found ‘portability’ to be the best. It is still in an semi early stage of developing but covers all your basics and lets you see very easily at-a-glance if your servers are only. It only costs about £1 and is well worth the investment
There are lots of other options out there and we’ll be adding to this post later on but for now do a google search for ’server monitoring’ and you’ll see all the possible results!!
Thanks to new online tools creating and hosting a website isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Now you can create a simple website with minimal knowledge of websites using some great free tools below. It’s important to note that whilst there are free tools to build your website there is no substitute to having a professional website design company create your online presence, especially if it is your business.
This article hope to demonstrate those system which specifically allow you to design, manage and host your website online without having to find a hosting provider and with a very limited knowledge of websites. There are plenty of open source systems out there which provide amazing features for free but we hope the below will help you setup if you don’t want to download and install software / find a hosting provider – just have a website in a few clicks. Some of these sites are online blogging websites which, whilst customizable, aren’t typical websites and so if you are looking to create a website for your business they are possibly worth giving a miss. Please bear in mind – whilst these are listed 1-10 they aren’t in any order as everyone is individual in their needs to it’s worth looking through all of them before deciding!
Type: Online Hosting Control Panel
Cost: Free with Plesk Hosting
Please site builder comes with a lot of hosting accounts and allows you to pick from a large range of templates and edit your website all through a easy to use interface. You can see a demo of it online here: http://sitebuilder4.win.demo.parallels.com/Wizard/
Web: http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/plesk/sitebuilder/
Type: online editor
Cost: Free
Wordpress is one of the most popular pieces of blogging software out there and with good reason – its fast, easy to use, full of features and completely free. It comes in 2 versions, one you download and install and with this one you simply sign up and it creates it all for you. The great thing about this is for a small charge you can add your own domain name and have email addresses with a few clicks. This highly recommended piece if kit is well worth looking at
Web: http://wordpress.com/
Type: online editor
Cost: Free
A few years back Google brought out this free blogging software and with good reason, it’s great! Very easy to use and is constantly being developed to improve on this – with Google behind the steering wheel now would you expect any less? Others would argue not but ultimately wordpress and blogger argue it out amongst themselves who has the best blogging software out there. One thing i would say is that once setup you can’t download this software and move it somewhere else – with wordpress it is portable. Either way 2 thumbs up from us!
Web: http://www.blogger.com
Type: online editor
Cost: Free
Blog.com is another popular blogging site where you can signup and start your website for free. As with all these blogging sites they let you create your website, choose a theme and start writing.
Web: http://www.blog.com
Type: online editor
Cost: Free
Yola is a popular choice to create a free website, is easy to use and best of all (unlike many website creators) doesn’t have advertising on your website so you can create a professional site. You can pick from a range of templates or have a professional design your website and still allow you to edit all the content.
Web: http://www.yola.com/
Type: Online Editor
Cost: Free
Wix allows you to create really nice looking flash websites for free. Its’ great as it gets you up and running in moments and looks really nice. It has it’s downfalls though in that you are tied into their templates and with it being flash google won’t read it quite as well as a html/ text website.
Web: http://www.wix.com/
Type: downloadable software
Cost: Free with adverts / Subscription without ads
Moonfruit has been providing free website design tools since 1998 and has a massive number of websites which use them. As a result their product is very well tuned and has had a lot of development time spent on it making it easy for you to use. There are 2 version of the software you download, a free one which places adverts on the website and a subscription one which removes them.
Web: http://www.moonfruit.com/
Type: Online Editor
Cost: Free with and upgrades option on a cost basis
Webs is an established online editing system that has been around a long time and looks after loads of websites. As with anything that has been around for a long time it’s nice and easy to use and free for all the basic options. On nice thing is they have loads of built in templates and features you can use but if you want to include extras like custom designs, shopping or forums you can buy the bolt on’s.
Web: http://www.webs.com/
Type: Online Editor
Cost: Free with and upgrades option on a cost basis
Weebly allows you to create a free website online in minutes and is well worth taking a look at. Having been named in Times 50 best website backin 2007 it’s grown in strength and allows lots of easy to use features for free. You get the usual options of templates or you can design your own. In addition You can pay to have you’re own www.domainname.com and still have it all hosted by them – great hey!
Web: http://www.weebly.com
Type: Online Editor
Cost: Free with and upgrades option on a cost basis
Jimdo is a great, relatively new, online website creator. It’s packed with great features like a blog, photo gallery, unlimited traffic and hop ups to get optional extras for a small fee.
Web: http://www.jimdo.com/
Type: Online Editor
Cost: Free with and upgrades option on a cost basis
Wet Paint is our free website creator and has built in just about any feature you might want whether it be images, video, bloggin or just plain text. This one comes with advertising on it’s free version although for a small fee you can have this removed
Web: http://www.wetpaint.com/
As you can see there are loads of great options to get you a website in a few clicks. All of the above require no installation, no costs and no effort really. So now there really is no excuses – you can put a website online about your family – start a blog about your favourite sport or even just put online all your holiday photos!
All the above being said, when deciding whether on the the above might fit your needs it is worth bearing in mind that they are all limited in one dimension or another and once you have set it up, gone to the time and effort to populate it then it’s difficult to transfer to another hosting company or alternatively get a professional web developer to do the work for you. As such, as with anything, if you are series about your website why not ask us for some help and support – we can put you in touch with some great developers and even better web hosting!
Previously we looked at backing up in your plesk 9 control panel – now we will see how to restore in it. It’s important to note at this stage that this and the previous entry is specifically to do with backing up and restoring in a plesk 9 control panel. We’ll be looking at other methods for backing up in a later post.
So you have a backup either made by plesk either on your desktop and now you want to test restoring it or you’re in trouble and need to restore it? Well fear not – plesk makes it very simple to restore your website which is why no website owner should be without a backup, it takes minutes to do and can save your bacon!
The first thing to do is to get your backup onto the server. If you only backed up your plesk server to the same server then you can skip this step however it is highly recommended that you keep a copy of your plesk backup on your own computer, off-server as if your host has a problem with their disk then your backup isn’t worth anything!
uploading your backup
Uploading is easy, just click this button:
And upload your backup. If it’s a really large backup it’s going to take some time so sit back and relax
Once your backup is uploaded
Once it’s uploaded you will see the backup in your list of backups available to use. The next steps follow the plesk restore wizard and it guides you through it but if your unsure about any of them just leave the default plesk restore options – they usually work well. That being said you usually want to do the following:
The next step is to click on the restore button. If you took the original backup on this server then it shouldn’t require any further details other than to sit and wait. If you are moving a backup from a different server to this one then it may require information about IP addresses and mappings. In this case usually it’s ok to leave the default plesk suggestions but if in doubt submit a comment below and we’ll try and help!
Next Time: Ways to backup in a non-plesk environment
Backing up your website is one of the most important things you can do. No matter whether your web hosting company backups for you or not you can never guarantee they will have the latest file or be able to retrieve it in a timely fashion. All our hosting accounts come with a Plesk 9 control panel which makes backing up your website really easy to do so there are no excuses!
To back your domain login to your control panel and select the domain in question. Once you’re editing it you’ll see a little area of the screen which looks like this:
As the name suggests select ‘backup manager’ and you’ll be presented with a screen listing all your backups. If you can’t see any backup’s here then shame on you!! 
I say that however I like a lot of other I.T. professionals who know haven’t backed up their personal machine in years – however do as I say and all that!!
To create a backup click on the backup button in the top left and you’ll be given a screen like this:
If this is your first time leave all the settings alone and simply click the backup button in the bottom right hand side and begin backing up. The backup might take some time so at this point go make yourself a cup of tea!
After your tea break…
you’ll see your new backup in the list of backups. Here’s the important part, whilst you now have a backup it is held on the server so what we want is to get a copy of it onto your own computer so you have an external backup. Again Plesk makes this very easy – just click on the little disk icon on the far right hand side to download it. Please Note: if your website is big this can take a while so guess what? take another tea break – as you can see this I.T. work isn’t all that hard, do a little, make tea, do some more, make tea – easy
Next Time: We’re talked backing up, next installment will be restoring and we’ll jump into some more technical aspects like how to schedule a backup and how to have that schedule FTP the backup somewhere else.
Welcome to our brand new website we hope you’ll find useful when trying to solve your hosting queries. We’re new to blogging on the support and want to make sure we open this site up to as many people as possible. With that in mind we’re looking for the following people to help us support everyone:
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