Hosting FAQ

Virtual Hosting

Email problems

Understanding Your Mail Server

Cpanel Help

SSL

SSI

CGI

CHMOD & File Permissions

Transfers

Virtual Hosting

What is Virtual Hosting?
Do you have Front-Page extensions?
What is Bandwidth?
I want to change my account plan. How do I upgrade / downgrade my account?
What domain names do you support?
Can we add services as we grow and need them?
What is SSH?

What is Virtual Hosting?
Virtual Hosting is where multiple web sites (www.anyname.com) are served off the same physical server. This saves each customer from purchasing their own expensive server, performing the setup and providing the appropriate environment. This is the most common method of hosting sites of small to medium size with light to moderate traffic.

Do you have Front-Page extensions?
Front Page extensions can be installed for your account. They are not installed automatically during the initial setup. Send us a support request and they will be installed within 24 hours.

What is Bandwidth?
Bandwidth is the amount of data moved between your site and the browsers of the customer's accessing your site. It is typically measured in Gigabits.

I want to change my account plan. How do I upgrade / downgrade my account?
To upgrade or downgrade your account, go to our customer support page and complete a customer support request. Just specify what plan you want to change from or other services you'd like changed and submit your request.

What domain names do you support?
We support all domains, including foreign domains.

Can we add services as we grow and need them?
You may grow at whatever pace you like. All options can be added or removed at any time.

What is SSH?
SSH is similar to telnet, but it's more secure. It uses high level encryption and compression to make sure nobody can takeover or eavesdrop on your telnet session.

Email problems

Can't send mail.
Your default root email account.
Problems resolving your mailhost.
Any Username And Password Error.

Can't send mail:
Our SMTP servers are configured as secure relays. This means that you cannot simply reference "mail.yourdomain.com" as an Outgoing mailserver unless you successfully log in via one of your pop3 accounts at "mail.yourdomain.com' before you try to send. This is a mandatory setting to prevent spammers from using our mailservers as havens for unsolicited email. If you are getting a "relaying prohibited" or "disconnected by administrator" error, it means that you haven't logged into the pop3 server at your domain before you tried to send through the smtp server at your domain. To log in, you need to check for mail first.

In addition to this, you might not be able to send regardless of if you check mail successfully. Some ISPs have it set so that their users cannot use an outbound SMTP server to relay messages. If you are still experiencing problems sending through your domain, and are certain that you have logged in via pop3 to an account at your domain, you might want to contact your local ISP to see if they do allow their users to use outbound smtp servers.

Your default root email account:
Every account starts out with a default "catch-all" account for its domain. This email box will grab all mail heading to ANYNAME@yourdomain.com. The login for this box is simply the same main account login you received after signing up. Thus, if your root account is "test@homepage.net" (login of "homepage" - first 8 letters of your domain), there is no need to request an alias to your root account, because all names under your domain already are filtered into this account.

Problems resolving your mailhost
If you find that you can't get "mail.yourdomain.com" to resolve as a valid SMTP or POP3 server, please be sure that your domain is registered to our nameservers. Also, try clearing out your cache and cookies and then restarting your computer. in some cases your registration was not completed by the registrar.

Any Username And Password Error:
The main cause for this is trying to access the e-mail account with the wrong user / password. If this is NOT your primary e-mail account remember to use the full email address (user@domain.com) as your user name for logging in. If all else fails, simply remove, and then recreate the account with your mail control panel.

If none of this helps, then most likely the pop3 box in question has a received a corrupted message. Contact support and tell them to clear that box out. Usually this results in most or all of that particular mailbox's contents being erased.

Understanding Your Mail Server

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When I post to the mail list the mail is held for administrative approval because of "implicit destination"

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Remember to always use "mail.yourdomain.com" as the incoming (pop3) and outgoing (smtp) server in your local email client, such as Outlook Express.

#2
In the Cpanel mail control center, the forwarding function provides forwarding to outer address, and can be used to alias one account to another. Thus, if you want mike@homepage.net to head to a pop3 account of slim@aol.com, use a forward to make this happen.

#3
All POP email boxes EXCEPT the default account use the full email address (user@domain.com) as the user name for logging in.

#4
Your "default address" is the root catch-all mailbox. It receives messages heading to all addresses which aren't setup as unique pop accounts within your domain. Keep in mind that the default address account does NOT use the full email address format, like other pop accounts. The login for your default address is the same as the main FTP login for your account.

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If it seems that you cannot lock a pop3 account to retrieve messages for any reason, the quickest way to solve this for yourself is to delete and recreate the account with your /controlpanel. This saves time as it bypasses asking our support staff for assistance. Yes, the changes you make to your email items with your /controlpanel are done in real time.

#6
The mailing list feature is very simple, please keep that in mind. If you require a more powerful listserv program, you should probably look elsewhere. We cannot utilize a robust listserv on our webhosting machines without causing the server's overall performance to suffer.

When I post to the mail list the mail is held for administrative approval because of "implicit destination"
In the web-based list administration interface, go to 'Privacy options' and 'Spam-specific posting filters' (mid-page). In the text box for "Alias names (regexps) which qualify as explicit to or cc destination names for this list", enter the email address of the list.

Cpanel Help

General Info
FTP Accounts
CGI
Java
Web Page Protection
E-MAIL
Access Stats
Password
File Manager
Java Chat
Handlers / Types
Error Editor

General Info
All accounts come with our control account cpanel. You can access your control panel at:
http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel/ or you may use, http://your ip adderss/cpanel/
If using http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel/
(This will not be active until your domain has been transferred to our nameservers.) You will be asked to enter your user / pass to gain access to your configuration. The control panel is pretty much self explanatory however a little information on the usage of each section is included below if you get confused along the way:

FTP Accounts
Accounts Used for managing access accounts to your web space. The creation of an FTP account will allow users to log into a sub directory from your main account without gaining access to your main accounts. Sessions show any users that are currently logged into your domain.

Settings allow you to modify access to your anonymous FTP site. More info on anonymous FTP usage.

CGI
We have numerous customizable cgi scripts that have been pre-installed on the server for you to use with your own account. The only thing you'll need to do is select the script you are interested in using, select the colors, style etc., and click the
"Make HTML" button. You can then paste the HTML output into any of your HTML files to use that system cgi program.

Java
System Java works the exact same was as cgi see above for usage.

Web Page Protection
Web page protection is used to limit access to any directory to users who enter a user/pass combo. To protect a directory within your account:
1.) Click on that dir.
2.) Enter a user / pass for access
3.) Click add. You can add as many users as you wish to this file. This protection is for resources accessed via the WEB only, this will not create an FTP user.
Do not use this if you are also using FrontPage. It is not compatible. Instead, use the security controls within FrontPage itself.

E-MAIL
E-mail control panel allows instant creation of e-mail POP3, forwards, and aliases.

A POP3 account is a stand alone incoming e-mail account. if you create u: john p: doe it all mail sent to john@domain.com will be routed to the joe e-mail account. The user joe can then check this mail by login into mail.domain.com using his user name and password. REMEMBER: all user names automatically have a determined amount of letters of the domain name appended to the beginning of the user name. So if john was a another domain user the user would use mail.somedomain.net as his incoming e-mail server and use powerjohn as his log in name to retrieve mail sent to
john@homepage.net An alias sends mail sent to one address to another POP3 account within your domain. For example if our recently created john account was going to
receive all mail sent to sales@anyname.net we would setup sales as an alias to john. Note: by default all names not configured to the root account. So if you sent a message to testl@domain.com it would be sent to your main root account unless you had set it up as an alias, forward or POP3. A forward account sends mail sent to user@domain.com to an address completely out of
your domain. For example if john had an AOl account and wanted to check all his mail there you could setup john to forward to john3435@aol.com.

Access Stats
Provides access to many different programs that will analyze your access logs and show you more information about your web sites traffic.

Password
Allows you to change your main accounts password. A good suggestion is to change this password at least once a month.

File Manager
Allows you to modify the files in your web site in real-time via a web based interface. You can perform many commands such as chmod as well as actually edit the file and save it directly to the web server.

Java Chat
Allows you to access your personal java chat server and supplies the code for you to use the product on your own site.

Handlers / Types
You will probably never need to use this portion of your control panel. A MIME type is basically what tells the web server that a .html document is a web page, and that a .gif doc is a gif image etc. If you would like to configure a custom MIME type such as making .pictures a gif image file you would enter it here.

Error Editor
This section lets you customize the errors that your users will see instead of the generic server errors. You could setup a 404 page to redirect users to your main web site instead of
the default dead document.

SSL

What is SSL?
How dose SSL work?
How do I add this feature?

How dose SSL work?
In order for this process to work without many warning messages from IE and Netscape about possible security hazards a certificate must be obtained from a trusted source. A certificate is only good for one domain name. Our certificates has been purchased from Thawte for usage with a variety of certificates at the "bluepixel.gr" domain.

How do I add this feature?
If you would like to enable SSL on your account contact Bluepixel and ask to take advantage of this feature. If you would like to have your own certificate installed so that customers can navigate your site via https://www.yourdomain.com you will have to purchase your own certificate and have us generate a key request and install it on the server. We recommend using Thawte for this purpose. Once you have the key from thawte, BluePixel will install it for you.
(Plese note there is a $50.00 one time fee to install your Personal SSL Certificate.)

SSI

What is SSI?
Reasons for Using SSI

What is SSI?
Server Side Includes

When using a UNIX system it is sometimes necessary to enable certain HTML files executable for the purpose of using SSI. Server Side Includes are often used to run a cgi script. An include is called with an example such as this: After you insert your include, you must mark the HTML file as executable so the server will parse the file. This is done using one of two options.

1.) Renaming the file to .shtml: On our server any file name .shtml will be parsed. So instead of having an index.html file, you would name it index.shtml. This is the easiest way of enabling includes.

2.) CHMODing the file to 777: With CHMOD 777 you can also mark a file as executable. It is important to only make the files which you want parsed executable. This poses certain security issues, as well as a strain on our resources, as the processor has to work harder to
parse a file.

Reasons for Using SSI
SSI is often used to include something into an HTML page. You can insert the contents of one HTML page into another page. An example of a practical usage for this would be to include your e-mail address at the bottom of each page. If you do this as an include, then when your e-mail address changes, you will only have to update it on one page and not your entire web site. Another usage is to call cgi scripts into action. Many counters, clocks, and other scripts are called using SSI. The command used will most likely be provided in the documentation of
your cgi script.

CGI

What is CGI?
Do you allow CGI to run on your servers?
Whats the correct path to perl?
What is the path to send mail?
What is the exact physical path to your root directory on the webserver?
Why doesn't my CGI work?

( For instance: http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/ )
or ( http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/ )

Do you allow CGI to run on your servers?
We do allow running of cgi scripts on the servers, however they must conform to our acceptable server resource usage policy. If we deem that a script is using an excessive amount of server resources, it will be disabled.

Whats the correct path to perl?
Before a cgi script will work certain modifications must be made to them. Certain paths must be specified in some scripts. After the "#" in the first line of the perl script, the path to perl must be specified. /usr/bin/perl should suffice for this path. Below is a printout of a "whereis perl" from our system.

perl: /usr/bin/perl

What is the path to send mail?
Another program that needs to be specified in many scripts is sendmail. This is located at /usr/lib/sendmail

What is the exact physical path to your root directory on the webserver?
The path to your root directory is:
/home/username/

Obviously, substitute "username" with the login you were assigned when you first received your account details. Also, keep in mind that when you configure your CGI, that your /public_html is included in your path. For instance, if you have a guestbook.pl script in your /cgi-bin, the exact physical path to that file is:
/home/username/public_html/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl

Why doesn't my CGI work?
Make sure when you upload the CGI file DO NOT upload in binary mode, instead use ASCII mode. Uploading in binary will cause the server not to recognize the scripts as executables. Most FTP clients will upload .pl or .cgi files in binary mode by default so you will need to change this. You will need to upload the scripts into your cgi-bin directory for security reasons, however they will execute from anywhere within your account.

The last step is to set the file permissions. This is otherwise known as chmoding and can be done from most FTP clients. For specifics on chmoding you can refer to our "chmoding files" help section.

CHMOD & File Permissions

General Info
Reasons for CHMODING
List of CHMOD's and what they mean

Certain FTP clients such as Cute FTP and WS/FTP Pro allow for a chmoding directly within FTP. To do this you would highlight the file that you want to use, and select from the command menu "change file permissions." There is on option for "manual." This is where you will enter the desired CHMOD. Many other FTP clients will support CHMODing as well, we recommend checking the documentation.

Reasons for CHMODING
CHMODing files can be done for a variety of reasons. You can CHMOD files to do things such as: mark them executable, give them write permission, restrict access to them, and a variety of other reasons. It is important to note that chmoding is nearly impossible to avoid. If you are trying to run a certain cgi script it could require execute permissions on the script itself, write permissions on a directory, and read on an informational page. Your cgi scripts should contain the proper documentation to inform you of the proper CHMOD's.

List of CHMOD's and what they mean
chmod 777 filename The file is available for Read, Write, and Execute for the owner, group, and world.

chmod 755 filename The file is available for Read, Write, and Execute for the owner; and Read and Execute only for the group and world.

chmod 644 filename The file is available for Read and Write for the owner, and Read only for the group and world.

chmod 666 filename The file is available for Read and Write for the owner, group, and world. I wonder if the 666 number is just a coincidence. Anybody can create havoc with your files with this wide-open permission mask.

FTP Programs

What Program can I use to FTP to my account?
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What Program can I use to FTP to my account?
We have put together a list of popular FTP software: (Keep in mind that new versions of FTP software are continuously being released- you might want to stop by www.download.com and search for the client of your choice to see if an updated version is available.) Also www.,tucows.com is recomended for windows apps.

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WS_FTP 4.5- a standard FTP client for Windows Sockets. The graphical interface was designed with the novice FTP user in mind. This version features a reengineered FTP server detection and decoding process. Requirements: Windows 3.x or higher.

#2
Cute FTP- CuteFTP is a Windows-based Internet application that lets beginners use ftp without having to know many details about the protocol itself. It simplifies ftp by offering a user-friendly, graphical interface instead of a command-line prompt. Requirements: Windows 95.

#3
WinTelnet and FTP Pro 32-bit 1.0 Release 2- WinTelnet and FTP Pro is a set of Telnet and FTP clients. The application hides the complexities of Unix with an easy-to-use Windows interface, and it offers features such as auto-login profiles and automatic FTP login. Requirements: Windows 95.

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FTP Icon Connection 2.5- Anawave's FTP Icon Connection is a true 32-bit, drag and drop FTP client. Transfer files to and from a remote site with an easy-to-use interface and automated program settings. New features include shortcuts to 40 top FTP sites, file sorting, and firewall support. Requirements: Windows 95.

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Free AutoFTP 1.1a-Free AutoFTP is client software for transferring files over the Internet. It lets you schedule automatic transfers for a future date or time. Other AutoFTP features include automatic dial and connect, a Windows Explorer like user interface, pop-up menus, drag and drop, activity log, Icon Tray installation, multiple simultaneous transfers, repeated autotransfer scheduling, and more. Requirements: Windows 95/NT.

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eFTP Explorer 1.10- To keep file transfers as hassle-free as possible, eFTP presents FTP sites in a familiar Explorer-like interface. It has a tree view on the justify, changeable file view on the right, and Internet Explorer/Office 97 "buttonless buttons." It also has features like file synchronization and scheduled downloads. Requirements: Windows 95/NT.

Transfers