Spiral Hosting

These are instructions on how to setup an Email Account hosted with Spiral Hosting on Microsoft Outlook 2007.

Advisory Note: We think Microsoft Outlook is pants. We receive a much higher number of support requests from clients using Microsoft Outlook than all other email clients put together. We strongly recommend another email client like Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s free, easy to use and considerably less error-prone!

Setup Instructions

1) Open Microsoft Outlook.

For this step only, you must follow either the First Time or Normal installation instructions:

• First Time Installation: If Outlook is being set up for the first time a window will open and it will immediately ask you “Would you like to configure an Email account?”. Choose Yes.
• OR
• Normal Installation: If Outlook is already set up and you are adding an additional account go to the Tools menu > Account Settings…. Click on the Email tab and click on the New… button.
  On the next screen, choose Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP  or HTTP and click Next.

2) On the next screen, simply check the box at the bottom ‘Manually configure server settings or additional server types‘ and click Next.

3) On the next screen, choose Internet Email and click Next.

4) On the next screen it will ask for your email account details.

• Your Name – your full name that will appear on emails you send
• Email Address – full email address e.g. r.robinson@otherdomain.net
• Choose an account type (POP3 or IMAP). The main difference between POP3 and IMAP is that by default POP3 will download all emails to your computer whereas IMAP will leave a copy on the server (a bit like webmail). Note: We will expand on the differences between POP3 and IMAP in more detail in a future article.
• Incoming Mail Server – mail.YOURDOMAIN.com – e.g. mail.otherdomain.net
• Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) – mail.YOURDOMAIN.com – e.g. mail.otherdomain.net
• User Name – your full email address
• Password.

5) Click Test Settings. If the test reports any errors you should double check your account details. If the tests runs fine then click Next.

6) All done. This is Microsoft Outlook setup!

Article last updated: 18 June 2010

Redirects allow you to make a specific web page redirect to another page and display the contents of that page. These can very easily be setup using cPanel.

In this example we will make http://spiralhosting.eu/ redirect to http://www.spiralhosting.eu/

Instructions

1) Login to your cPanel control panel

2) Go to the ‘Redirects’ page

3) Choose Permenant (301) if you want visitors to use the new URL in future, or Temporary (302) if you want visitors to return to the original URL next time.

4) Choose the domain from the dropdown and enter the URL you want to redirect to.

5) In this example we are redirecting the non-www URL to the www URL, so we must choose “do not redirect www” so that only the non-www URL will be redirected.

6) Click ‘Add’ and that’s it!

Article last updated: 13 March 2010

Akismet is a fantastic WordPress plugin which will reduce and often eliminate spam comments from your blog posts.

Akismet is already included with WordPress so you don’t have to download it. You just need to activate it.

Activation Instructions

1) Login to your WordPress admin area (the dashboard)

2) Go to the Plugins page in the left menu

3) Find Akismet and click ‘Activate’

4) Akismet may be activated, but it won’t start working until you enter an API code.

If you have ever registered with WordPress.com, they will provide you with an API code in their login area.

Alternatively you can visit http://akismet.com/get/ and they’ll email you an API code.

5) To enter your API code, go to Plugins > Akismet Configuration in your left menu of the WordPress admin area.

That’s it!

Akismet will start catching your spam. If one does happen to get through, simply mark it as “spam” on the moderation screen and Akismet will learn from the mistakes.

Article last updated: 3 March 2010

The DNS client on your computer will typically cache domain name resolutions for 24 hours. This speeds up web browsing on the site’s you visit frequently.

Sometimes this can cause problems when a website moves server or changes IP address and the old DNS entries are still cached on your computer. You can either ‘flush’ your DNS cache or wait 24 hours for it to automatically refresh.

To flush the DNS cache in Windows, simply open Start > Accessories > Command Prompt and use the command: ipconfig /flushdns

To flush the DNS cache in Linux, simply restart the nscd daemon with the command: /etc/init.d/nscd restart

To flush the DNS cache in Mac OS X Leopard, simply open a terminal and use the command: dscacheutil -flushcache
(in OS X versions 10.5.1 or earlier use the command: lookupd -flushcache)

Article last updated: 28 April 2010

In some cases our Support Team will schedule a Remote Assistance session with customers. This allows our technicians to connect remotely to your Windows PC and troubleshoot any problems relating to our service.

If we have requested you do so, please send us an invite to help you using Remote Assistance. You can send it by saving your request as a file and attaching it to your support ticket or an email.

1) Click on the Start menu then click Help and Support

2) On Windows XP, click Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance or on Windows Vista click Use Windows Remote Assistance to get help from a friend. This is located under the Ask for assistance heading.

3) Click Invite someone to help you, and then select Save Invitation as a file.

4) Type in a password and any other details, and then click Save Invitation. The Save File dialog box appears. Save the file to your Desktop or somewhere easy to find.

5) You now need to send us the file by attaching it to your support ticket either by going to the ticket in our Client Area or replying to our support ticket email and attaching it to the reply. If you don’t already have a support ticket, please create one and attach the file.

6) Please also let us know the password that you created for the invite file or we won’t be able to help you. For security reasons, we have to recommend that you submit this separately to your support ticket.

Once we receive the invite file, we will accept your invitation and start helping you.

Article last updated: 26 November 2009

You may need to increase the PHP Memory Limit on your website if a PHP script is giving you an error like: “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes)“

This error occurs when the memory limit on your web hosting account is not sufficient for the script to finish running. This is common on some software like Drupal, vBulletin, phpBB, Gallery 2 which use a large amount of memory to run some scripts.

Installation Instructions

The most convenient method of changing your PHP memory limit is to create a file called .htaccess in your public_html directory with the following line in it:

php_value memory_limit 16M

An .htaccess file may already exist on your website. Please check for an existing one first to avoid over-writing any other configurations. If it does already exist, simply add that line to the end of it.

The file can be created in any text editor like NotePad or TextPad and uploaded to your web space using FTP or the cPanel File Manager.

Possible Problems

If the PHP script continues to give an error message, compare the ‘allowed memory size’ in the new error message  with the one in the original error message. This will tell you if the .htaccess file made a difference.

For example, if you set the memory limit to 16 Megabits in your .htaccess file then the new error on your website should say the allowed memory size is now 2 097 152 bytes (since that’s 16 Mb in bytes).

a) The allow memory increased, but it’s not enough.
If it’s still too low, you can increase the memory_limit to 18M, 20M, 22M etc. until it works.

b) The allow memory is the same. Check the file name.
Many people aren’t familiar with .htaccess files and name them incorrectly. It must be saved as just .htaccess and not .htaccess.txt or any other extension at the end!

Article last updated: 26 November 2009

These are instructions on how to add a POP3 Email Account hosted with Spiral Hosting to your iPhone.

1) If this is the first email account on your iPhone, touch the Mail icon on your iPhone’s Home screen.
If you already have existing email accounts on your iPhone, on the Home screen touch Settings > Mail > Accounts > Add Account

2) Select ‘Other’ from the list
3) Select ‘POP3 Mail’ and enter the following settings:

• Name – your full name that will appear on emails you send
• Email Address – full email address e.g. robert.robinson@otherdomain.net
• Description – work email, home email?
• Incoming Mail Server Host Name – e.g. mail.otherdomain.net
• User Name – full email address
• Password
• Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) Host Name – e.g. mail.otherdomain.net
• User Name – full email address
• Password

4) Select ‘Save’ and the iPhone should test the connection to your email server and report any errors.

Article last updated: 2 November 2009

There may be some instances when it is necessary to block either a robot or a human visitor from accessing your website. This can be done by adding their IP address to an .htaccess file deny list.

Once their IP address is on the list they will see:

Installation Instructions

An .htaccess file may already exist on your website. Please check for an existing one first to avoid over-writing any other configurations.

Here are examples of text you can include in an .htaccess file:

1) Refuse all requests from the IP address 127.0.0.1

order allow,deny
deny from 127.0.0.1
allow from all

2) Refuse all requests from multiple IP addresses

order allow,deny
deny from 127.0.0.1
deny from 127.0.0.2
deny from 127.0.0.3
allow from all

3) Refuse access to an entire IP range

deny from 127.0.0.0

This will block the IP range 127.0.0.0 to 127.0.0.255.

4) Refuse access to an entire Internet Service Provider

deny from ispname.com

Please note that blocking an entire IP range or ISP is not advisable as it will block a large number of people from visiting your website. Please use with caution!

Article last updated: 14 October 2009