Small Packages: Frequently Asked Questions

Dealing With Referrer Spam

ShelaghG — 2005-03-04T11:40:49+00:00

In the last year referrer spam has been increasingly common. The target of the spammers are those people who publish their stats and/or referrers on their web sites, the spammers hope that by getting their links on those pages they will increase their visibility on search engines. Regardless of whether we do or don't publish our referrers we all get hit by referrer spam.

There is a way of combatting referrer spam using the .htaccess file. Basically what you need to do is create a list of referrers that are banned from your site. You can edit your .htaccess file using the File Manager in cPanel.

Managing Your E-Mail

ShelaghG — 2004-12-28T18:47:02+00:00

It's very important to keep on top of your e-mail. Many people don't seem to realise that the spaced used for mailboxes is part of their disk allocation. I've seen people use up their whole hosting account on e-mail! There are a few things to remember :
1. There is no ceiling on the size of your default mailbox. If you don't clear down your e-mail, either by downloading it or logging in via webmail and deleting it, your mailbox grows and grows until you run out of disk space. When you run out of disk space you don't get any more mail messages, instead they hang around on the server, slowing it down. In addition every time a message doesn't get delivered to you a return message is generated to the sender telling them your mailbox is full. If the message is from a legitimate address this isn't such a big problem but if you are getting a lot of spam the chances are the sender's address is spoofed meaing that the server is unable to deliver the reply. This also sits on the mail queue, slowing down the server even more. The server will try to deliver messages in the mail queue for about a week before it discards them.

2. Enable SpamAssassin via cPanel. It's very good at weeding out spam. Do bear in mind though that you need to clear down your spam folder (viewable via Horde or Neomail) otherwise it will grow and grow until it uses up all the space in your account, or your mailbox if you have set up a named mailbox with a finite space limit.

3. If you use webmail to send mail clear down your Sent Mail folders. This sits on the server using part of your space allocation until you delete it.

4. As well as using SpamAssassin you can dump a lot of spam by setting the default mail address, as outlined in this tutorial

Backups

ShelaghG — 2004-12-26T18:52:51+00:00

Backups are taken every night. We save a daily backup, a weekly backup and a monthly backup. These backups are NOT guaranteed, your data is YOUR responsibility. It is very important that you back up your own files, particularly if you use a MySQL database as you will not have an original copy of this on your own computer.

Refunds

ShelaghG — 2004-12-26T18:50:18+00:00

30 Day Money Back Guarantee/Refunds:
Should you become unsatisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your account activation, Small Packages will refund your hosting fee.

Cancellation Refunds:
We DO NOT refund partial annual/quarterly fees to accounts canceling after their 30 day initial account activation period.

Bandwidth

ShelaghG — 2004-12-26T18:49:16+00:00

Bandwidth is allocated on a ration of 20:1 (bandwidth:disk space). Overusage of bandwidth is billed at $1/Gb. Bandwidth is calculated on a monthly basis.

Billing

ShelaghG — 2004-12-26T18:48:37+00:00

We DO NOT send out invoices. All credit cards are billed automatically annually (or monthly if you take this option). It is the client's responsibility to ensure that they have sufficient credit to cover this transaction. In the event that a card is declined for any reason we will suspend the web site and send an e-mail with instructions for submitting a new credit card. If a new credit card is not submitted within 72 hours, the web site will be deleted without further warning.

Avoiding Spam By Setting The Default Mail Address

ShelaghG — 2004-12-24T12:18:39+00:00

Spam is an ever-increasing problem but there are some steps you can take to avoid it. When your hosting account is set up a mailbox is created with the address username@yourdomain.com*. Any mail addressed to your domain is automatically routed to this mailbox, so e-mails addressed to webmaster@yourdomain.com, anyone@yourdomain.com or ahgdgcjhg@yourdomain.com will all end up in this mailbox, this is your default mail address. 99.9% of this will be spam; spammers don't need to know your e-mail address, they just need to know your domain name. Of course you can enable SpamAssassin which is very good at weeding out the spam but this means that your spam folder gets full very quickly. Whilst this doesn't count against your mailbox space, it does count against your disk space. If you don't clear it out very regularly you can soon end up with a spam folder that's used up all your web space. It quickly gets tedious logging into your webspace every day and clearing hundreds of messages from your spam folder.

Logging In Using SSH

ShelaghG — 2004-12-23T21:19:36+00:00

If you like to work from the command line you can log into the server via SSH. There is an SSH utility within cPanel but I find it rather slow and unpleasant to use. Putty is a great little SSH client - just download the executable file, save it to your PC and you're set to go.

To use it open the file, enter your domain name and make sure the SSH option is clicked. At this point you can enter a name in Saved Sessions and click Save - this will make logging into the server quicker in the future, just double-click on the name you saved and away you go. This first time you will have to click Load.

This will connect to the server and you will get a warning message (click to enlarge)

Click Yes, then enter your username and password at the prompts (these are the same as your cPanel login). You only get the warning message the first time you use Putty to connect to a domain, it will not appear in future sessions.

Exporting A MySQL Database From The Command Line

ShelaghG — 2004-12-23T21:02:05+00:00

Log into the server via SSH, either through cPanel's SSH utility or a SSH client such as Putty. At the prompt type :
mysqldump -h server -u username -ppassword database > filename

server - your MySQL server name (usually localhost)
username - your database username
password - your database password (note there is no space between -p and the password)
database - your database name
filename - the name you want for the dump file

Download the file via FTP.

Exporting Your MySQL Database

ShelaghG — 2004-12-23T19:59:03+00:00

Although a full back up of your account is taken every night there may be occasions when you want to take an export of your database(s); before an MT upgrade is a good time to do one, if the upgrade goes wrong you may need to re-install MT.

Taking a backup of your MySQL database is easy, the only downside is it can take a while if you're on a dial-up connection and have a big database. In the past I've had trouble trying to back up databases using Internet Explorer, for some reason it resets the connection part way through unless the database is very small, however I've had no problems downloading backups of large databases using Firefox.

Changing File Permissions

ShelaghG — 2004-12-23T18:30:21+00:00

If you log into your account via SSH you can bring up a list of files using the ls command. To see more information about the files use ls -l. This will bring up a list of files in the following format:
-rw-r--r-- 1 username groupname 13987 May 5 22:58 filename

The first part, -rw-r--r-- tells you if it's a file or a directory and what permissions exist. The first character is usually "-"(meaning it's a file) or "d" (it's a directory). Occasionally you will see "l" or "s" which denotes a linked directory or a symbolic link. The next 9 characters indicate the permissions, r=read, w=write, x=executable. These permissions are assigned to user (the owner of the file), group (the group the user belongs to) and other (anybody else). Just to make things more confusing permissions also have numerical values assigned to them:
Read=r=4
Write=w=2
Executable=x=1