I've uploaded my site but I'm still getting your holding page when I go to my domain. Why?
Some possible reasons:
1) You need to replace our holding page with your own home page, or remove our holding page
if your home page is not named index.html. By default, we place a page called index.html in
your public_html directory. You should either replace this with your own index.html page, or
delete it if you are using a different name for your home page (such as index.htm, default.htm,
main.html, home.html etc).
2) You published your files to the wrong place or don't have a home page file with an
appropriate name. You must upload all your content to your public_html directory and
sub directories thereof. You home page (the initial page displayed on your site) must
be called one of the following:
index.html index.htm default.html default.htm main.html main.htm home.html home.htm index.cgi index.php index.jsp
3) Your ISP's proxy server may be caching our holding page and not displaying the latest
version of your site. This can happen if you have only just uploaded your site for the
first time and your ISP's proxy server is malfunctioning. Try clicking CTRL-REFRESH in
your browser (hold down the CTRL key and click Refresh). This forces a reload of the
page and may purge the proxy server of its old contents.
Why email support?
We do not provide a telephone support service for several good reasons:
- Your Internet Service Provider must provide telephone support in order to communicate with
you on the occasions that you may have difficulty connecting to the Internet but in our
case support issues do not relate to connectivity. You should always be able to e-mail us
or use our online support system without trouble.
- E-mail is a much more efficient means of support - everything is in writing and available
for reference, it is monitored and recorded (no arguments about when things were dealt with
and who dealt with them) and can be added to a pool of knowledge. More importantly, the e-mail
can easily be forwarded to exactly the person who needs to deal with it without having to
transcribe the phone conversation. All e-mails are read by our whole team and assigned to the
most suitable person. Support e-mail is read by management and a feel for our clients' needs
and problems is propagated throughout the company.
- With telephone support you can spend much of your time waiting on hold to be told that
you'll be got back to. With Positive, we PROMISE you that your e-mail will receive a reply
(from a human, not a machine!) within three working hours. We believe this will be far more
important to you than if you can have the 'privilege' of dialling a national-rate number to
speak to some out-sourced frontline support droid!
- We believe that the costs and complexity involved in providing you with a telephone support
service are better put back into the quality of the server and service we provide.
Of course, we do have a contact phone number for accounts, sales and general information about
our services and company, but we do not usually provide technical support on this number.
Why don't you support ASP?
We do support ApacheASP which uses the same objects as Microsoft ASP but doesn't
support programming in Visual Basic. Since most commonly available ASP applications
are programmed in Visual Basic it does mean they aren't supported by our service.
The reason we don't support Microsoft's ASP is that it requires Microsoft NT or
Windows 2000 hosting. All our hosting solutions are Unix (Linux) based because
of the distinct and well-documented advantages this offers over NT / Windows 2000
in terms of performance, reliability, stability and most importantly (and ever
increasingly) security. We offer powerful alternatives to ASP, many of which
are superior in terms of robustness, performance and security - for example, the widely acclaimed
PHP and Java Servlets / JSP.
How secure is my site?
If you are using our shared web hosting service then your site is as secure as we
can possibly make it within a shared environment. This may sound glib, but no shared web hosting account can
ever be 100% secure. However, we take all possible steps to ensure the maximum
security. These include use of the Unix (Linux) operating system, widely renowned
in the industry to be significantly more secure than Windows NT or 2000 as a hosting
platform, plus application of the latest firewall and security measures. We always
apply the latest security patches to all our servers as soon as they are released
and we constantly monitor for any suspicious activity. Additionally we run the
SuExec system for CGI scripts running on our servers, which sandboxes scripts and
ensures they can only be run by the owner, not by anyone with access to the server,
as is the case with some other hosting services. We also provide SSL secure server
facilities with industrial strength encryption for customers who wish to
transmit sensitive data to and from their web site.
As with any security setup, any shared server is ultimately only as secure as the
weakest password on the system. So, we always set passwords for our customers
which are very hard to hack, and we ask that customers only change these passwords
to something equally secure if they feel they must change them.
Ultimately, if security is of paramount importance on your web site we would
recommend getting a dedicated server solution as this offers the maximum
protection it is possible to give. If you would like further information,
see here for
details of our dedicated server range.
What connection methods can I use with my Positive account?
For publishing your site we provide full access via FTP. This means you can
use any FTP client of your choice to upload your files
(see here for our FTP guide) or any web editor / publishing
software that supports FTP (such as Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Homesite etc.
We also fully support Secure FTP (sFTP) for data transfer to and from our systems.
As well as FTP access, we also provide full Unix Shell access via SSH
(secure telnet). Please see our SSH FAQ for further
information on SSH.
Can I take credit card details securely on my web site?
Yes certainly. If you purchase our SSL secure server account upgrade, you
will get a secure part of your web site which you can use to collect credit
card details and handle any other transactions which need at least 128-bit
encrypted security. Please see here for further
information.
How can I view the status of a support ticket I have submitted to Positive Support?
We have a web-based support tracking system which allows you to view any support
tickets you have submitted to us via support@positive-internet.com and see the
current status of any oustanding enquiries. This tracking system is accessed via
the following URL, using your main account username and password to access:
http://login.positive-internet.com
Does your 'no fixed limits' bandwidth policy mean you offer unlimited bandwidth?
Our bandwidth policy is that we do not impose fixed data transfer limits. This doesn't
mean we have an unlimited data transfer policy - no provider can feasibly offer this
within a shared web hosting environment.
Our data transfer limits are designed to be flexible, to allow for fluctuations in
site traffic, for example as a result of publicity, marketing or advertising etc.
What cannot be accommodated within a shared web hosting environment is a consistently
high data data transfer from month to month. As a rule of thumb, once your data
transfer gets into double figures of Gigaybytes per month of transfer, then it is
likely to be a problem within a shared hosting environment.
It is not just an issue of data transfer - we find that a site consuming consistently
large amounts of bandwidth usually also has a high number of hits and therefore will
be using up a large number of server connections at any given moment in time. Since
simultaneous server connections on any server is a finite number, sites using a
disproporionate number of connections will have a detrimental impact on other
customers on the same box and this is something which cannot be sustained within a
shared hosting environment.
When bandwidth consumption gets to these sorts of levels we will usually want to
discuss a higher level of service with you, such as one of our dedicated server options.
All our dedicated servers come with a large and very generous bandwidth allowance
and have significantly higher resource and connection limits.
We will always endevour to keep your site up and running whilst we are discussing options and we would never land you with an unexpected bandwidth bill out of the blue!
|
