Support
Please read this information first!
On these sites you can find some basic information.
if this doesn't help you, you can get more help through our support center.
Goto http://support.lanthost.com and create an account if you haven't done so already.
- Getting started
First priciples on getting your site up. - What is ... ?
Terms used in the website environment. - Using Email
Howto setup your mail client. - How to upload files
Howto upload files to your virtual site. - CGI / Perl / Sendmail / SSI
Info on using CGI and Perl scripts - MySQL databases
Some instructions on howto setup and use your mysql database
- Custom error documents
Instructions on how the custom error docs work. - Statistics
How the statistics/report options work.
Getting started
Username and password
The email you got when you signed up contains some important information, e.g. username and password you will need to access your control panel, FTP and so on. Of course you can change it. If you have lost the password please create a support ticket at http://support.lanthost.com.
Accessing your web site
It will take 24 to 72 hours until www.yourdomain.com will resolve to the IP-address assigned to your account. Until your domain is actually pointing to our servers you can't view your site. You can upload the html files though. Please use 213.160.207.130 as host in your ftp client.
Accessing IP less accounts
Our smaller packages are IP-less accounts. This means the IP is shared with several other domains, as opposed to being dedicated to "one." As stated above it will take 24 to 72 hours until your domain is reachable under www.yourdomain.com. Until then you will not be able to view your site. You can start uploading through ftp though. When your new domain has propagated across the world you will be able to access your site by calling it, www.yourdomain.com.
Uploading the files of your web site
Please refer to our support pages about FTP fur further information.
Accessing your control panel
To access your control panel where cou can manage your account, create email addresses and so on enter your control panel as mentioned in your welcome mail.
You can't see your main page, instead you see a directory? Or some pictures are ot displayed?
Never mind, this happens to many newcomers: you have uploaded all your files and directories and then
want to access it with your browser but forgot to create the welcoming page as index.html - and what
you will see is your entire file directory structure. It looks just like exploring your local hard disk!
There are two things you have to keep in mind: first, you will need a page named index.html or index.htm
in any directory you create (including the root one), because this is what the browser looks for.
Second, unlike a common Windows PC, on Unix which is used on most of the web servers the
files are case sensitive, so basically picture.JPG is not the same as picture.jpg!
What is .... ?
Hosting
Hosting simply means that we provide space on our servers located in a big network operation center (NOC) for your site.
Web server
A computer connected to the Internet 24 hours/7 days containing one or more web sites.
Web space
Simply some space on a web server where you can put your web pages on. 100 MB means all your web pages including text, pictures and emails can not exceed a total size of 100 megabytes.
Domains/URL
To find any web page on the Internet you usually type in a so called URL (e.g. www.lanthost.com). Generally, every computer on the Internet is uniquely identified by an IP-address so a computer can find any other computer.
But as it would be very annoying if we had to remember all those complicated numbers, domain names are used to find a specific website. When you enter www.lanthost.com, the computer uses a so called name server to translate this name into an IP-address to find the web server where this site is located.
Sub domains
A way of further dividing a domain name into several spaces, e.g. forums.lanthost.com.
Bandwidth
The total amount of data allowed to be transferred to and from your web site.
Electronic mail. The exchange of text messages and file attachments between computers.
POP3
Post Office Protocol 3. A protocol used so email programs can deliver emails to and from the server.
Autoresponder
When someone sends an email to the address, the server automatically replies with a message of your choice. E.g. "We are on holiday". Just like a phone answering machine.
Email forwarding
Used to automatically forward emails sent to a POP3 account to your home email or anywhere else.
You can set email forwarding for each email address separately.
FTP
File transfer protocol. A protocol used to exchange files between different computers. For instance: you will use a FTP program to transfer the files for your website from your local computer to the web server.
IP address
Internet protocol address. The standard way of identifying a computer that is connected to the Internet, much the way a telephone number identifies a telephone on a telephone network. An IP address is four numbers separated by periods, and each number is less than 256, for example, 192.168.1.130
Dedicated IP
Your site will always have the same IP address and your IP address will not be shared with other users or web sites.
Name server
Used to translate domain names into IP addresses.
MySQL
The standard database for web sites. A database is a file containing data organized into records which you can retrieve, sort and manipulate. This is done through SQL (Structured query language), a simple database query and programming language.
HTML
HyperText Markup Language. The standard markup language used for documents in the World Wide Web. The HTML language uses tags to indicate how Web browsers should display page elements such as text and graphics, and how Web browsers should respond to user actions such as hyperlink activation by means of a key press or mouse click.
PHP
PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. If you are completely new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, have a look at www.php.net.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface. CGI scripts are a small program written in a script language such as Perl that functions as a glue between HTML pages and other programs on the web server.
SSL
Secure sockets layer. A standard for establishing a secure communication channel to prevent the interception of critical information (such as credit card data). Used to enable secure electronic financial transactions.
SSH
SSH is a procedure to communicate with the server (on your account) like Telnet, but more secure.
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
Using Email
Configuring your email client
Use "yourdomain.com" as the incoming (pop3) server in your local email client, such as Outlook Express. As outgoing server (smtp) you can use your ISP's SMTP server or "youtdomain.com". For security reason we have activated "POP before SMTP relay", this means you have to login with your pop account first before you can use the smtp server. This is to prevent spam from our servers. If you don't have a password you can't use the SMTP server.
Configuring Outlook Express
Enter Tools/Accounts, inside the "Internet Accounts Windows" click Add -> Mail. Fill in your name, click on the next-button and on "I already have an e-mail address that I would like to use" and enter your email address. Click on Next and on "Email Servers Name" fill in the server information. Incoming mail server is a POP3 server named yourdomain.com. On outgoing mail (SMTP): your ISP's outgoing mailserver or "yourdomain.com. Then fill in your mailbox username in the account name field, and the password below. Click Finish.
Username/password errors
The main cause for this is trying to access the e-mail account with the wrong user / password. Please check them before contacting us.
Problems fetching emails with your mail client?
If you have a new account with us please keep in mind that it takes one to three days until changes
to domain names/name servers take effect.
If it seems that you cannot use a pop3 account to retrieve messages for any reason,
try to reset your password by login in to your control panel. You can find the address in your welcome mail.
If this doesn't work, contact us.
Default address/Catchall
None existing addressess will be bounced by default. You can forward all messages direct to a non-existing address in the control panel. Click the preference button, there you can change it.
Forgotten the password of a POP3 account?
If you have forgotten the login of one of your pop3 accounts, simply head over to the "mail" menu within your Control panel to find out exactly what the logins are. Passwords can also be resetted there.
Mailing lists
The mailing list feature is very simple, please keep that in mind. If you require a more powerful mailinglist program, you should probably look elsewhere. We cannot utilize a robust mailinglist on our webhosting machines without causing the server's overall performance to suffer.
Webmail
We also provide the option to use webmail. On our servers you can reach webmail by opening http://webmail.yourdomain.com/ in your browser.
FTP - how to upload files
In your FTP program enter your host address or name (e.g. yourdomain.com), set the host type to "automatic detect" and enter your user / password. Once you have established a connection successfully you can start transferring the files from your local computer to the web server. Don't forget to set the FTP type corresponding to the files you want to transfer: when uploading text or HTML files set it to ASCII, otherwise to BINARY.
Remember, if your domain is new or you transferred it to our server recently, it will take 24 to 72 hours until this changes are propagated throughout the world. Until then you will have to use the IP address.
Your html files and all files you want to make accessible to the World Wide Web must be uploaded to your account.
When you first FTP into your account, you'll be taken to the root directory. Don't confuse this with your "web directory."
This home directory is "not" accessible to the World Wide Web.
DO NOT delete files that have been created by the system in other directories then /httpdocs/ and /cgi-bin/,
otherwise your web site may stop working!
All files which should be visible to the Internet belong in the directory /httpdocs/.
CGI files should be uploaded in the /cgi-bin/ directory. You can access them
through http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ CGI scripts won't run outside this cgi directory.
If you want to use custom error pages, upload them in the /error_docs/ dir.
CGI / Perl / Sendmail / SSI
Where to place your CGI scripts
CGI scripts should be placed in the /cgi-bin/ directory. Outside this directory scripts will not run properly.
The path to Perl
One of the first things you have to do when configuring a script is to set the correct path to the Perl interpreter (the engine responsible for processing the script). The path to Perl on our servers is: #!/usr/bin/perl
The path to sendmail
Some programs such as the ones, which send email will need to know where the Sendmail program resides on the server. The script will typically have a setting like this: $mailprog = '/usr/sbin/sendmail'; and will want you to set it appropriately. Sendmail on our servers can be found here: /usr/sbin/sendmailSetting directories within your cgi scripts
There is no standard cgi directory. You an place cgi scripts anywhere you like. We suggest you create
a cgi-bin directory within your /web/ directory to store the scripts.
When you configure a CGI script, it may ask you to set variables such as the base, relative,
and CGI directory/url settings. Here's an example. Obviously, each script may vary,
but this should provide you with some basic idea:
$basedir = "/home/www,yourdomain.com/web/scriptlocation";
$baseurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/scriptlocation";
$cgi_url = "http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/scriptlocation.pl";
New to CGI?
Most scripts come with documentation on how to set them up. Please make sure you read and understand it before configuring the script. New to cgi? Here is a page with questions and answers to numerous questions evolving around the inns and outs of using CGI within your scripts: www.w3.org/Security/Faq/www-security-faq.html Another excellent site, which provides step by step chapters is: www.cgi101.com/class/
Using Server Side Includes (SSI)
SSI works in conjunction with a web page usually with the .shtml extension. The .shtml extension tells the server to do something different with the web page. When you append the .html or .htm extension, this tells the server to "read" the page only. The .shtml extension tells the server to "Execute" the page, in addition to just reading it.
So, why would you want to execute the page? There are various commands you can program into a web page, which the server will look for and parse when the file is called as .shtml. In many cases, this mode is used in conjunction with Server Side Include (SSI) tags, to call a CGI script. For example, you have a visitor counter script, and we'll call it count.cgi. Every time someone visits your website, you want the script to be called, so that it logs the visitor into a file.
To do this, you would place an SSI tag into your web page. The tag in this case, would look something like:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/count.cgi" -->
This small tag, which is hidden in the html coding of your page is telling the server to:
- Go to the cgi-bin
- Execute count.cgi
That's it! The information has been captured and processed by the count.cgi script. Of course,
that's the short version of what happens. The long version would no doubt, would take us far
beyond the scope of this document.
PLEASE do not use the .shtml extension on "all" of your web pages unless it's absolutely necessary.
With a busy web site, this means that every page must be executed, as opposed to just read.
This as you can appreciate, can add considerable memory and CPU load to the system. As always,
read the instructions that came with your script carefully.
They should provide specific instructions on how to configure the script, as well as the SSI tag.
Using the MySQL database
Each Lanthost Networks account 4 and up comes with a MySQL database which can be administered through an easy-to-use, phpMyAdmin database management interface. Outside of your Web Control Panel, you will need a programing language such as PHP or Perl to integrate the database into your website.
Creating Your Database
- Go to your Web Control Panel and click on the domain you wish to add a database for.
- Click on the "DATABASES" button.
- Insert a database name in the form field and then click "ADD."
- Insert a user name in the form field for access to the database and then click "ADD."
- Insert a password for the previous user for access to the database and then click "UPDATE."
- Now you may click on the "PHPMYADMIN" button to administer your database.
Your MySQL Password
If you change your Web Control Panel password, your MySQL password will not change. To change your MySQL password, you must:
- Log into your Web Control Panel and click on the domain your database is located under.
- Click on the "DATABASES" button.
- Click on the username listed that you wish to change the password for.
- Insert a new password for access to the database and then click "UPDATE."
Accessing Your Database
You may access your database from PHPMYADMIN which is built into your Web Control Panel by following these few steps:
- Log into your Web Control Panel and click on the domain your database is located under.
- Click on the "DATABASES" button.
- Click on the database name you want to administer.
- Now click on the "PHPMYADMIN" button to access your database.
Note: You should be familiar with and know how to use phpMyAdmin
Setting up your Customized Error Messages
Setting up your own Customized Error Messages are very simple. Follow the basic steps below and you will learn how to create personalized error messages.
- Log into your website via FTP client.
- You should notice a folder called error_docs.
- You can use the default pages as a base for your error page or create your own. To create your own simply use your favorite html editor.
- Replace the file in your "error_doc" folder that you made. (i.e. if you make a 404 File Not Found page, make the name of the file name not_found.html and upload it to your error_docs folder). Doing this will ask you to overwrite the existing file, click Yes and there you have it, your own Error message page.
Site Statistics Description
- Log into your Web Control Panel.
- Click on "REPORT."
- On this page you can see a broad view of your website statistics, but if you wish to view a detailed statistical page of your website click "WEBALIZER."
Hits - Number of individual hits your site has received
Files - Number of files viewed
Pages - Number of web pages viewed
KBytes - Number of transferred files in kilobytes