1) To ensure that you only start paying for your new account once you intend to use it - we will start your invoicing period from the date of account activation.

2) For your security. By validating your postal address we are able to ensure that only legitimate customers are able to open accounts on our service, as anyone with ill intent will normally be reluctant to give out their postal address. We do realise that this activation code system can slow down your getting up and running by a day or so, but in our experience most of our customers are happy to take this in their stride for the extra security for all that this helps ensure.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to upload files to your site. You will need either some FTP software (see our downloads page for a freeFTP client) or a web publishing tool that supports FTP transfer, such as Dreamweaver.

SSH: Secure Shell (SSH) is used to connect to the Unix shell (command line) so that you can issue certain commands, such as for changing file permissions or accessing your MySQL database via direct SQL commandline. Many customers never feel the need to use SSH, but it's there if you wish to use it.

When connecting via SSH, FTP or a web publishing tool you will normally need to enter the following information:

Hostname: www.yourdomain.com (replace with your own domain name, and always include the www part)

Username: your account username as detailed in your welcome mail

Password: your account password as detailed in your welcome mail

Host Directory / Remote Folder: public_html

Note: using your domain as the hostname will only be possible once your domain name is active or transferred to our service. In the meantime you should use the name of the server you are hosted on, as detailed in our welcome mail. For example muon.positive-internet.com or boson.positive-internet.com etc.

If you are using Microsoft Frontpage to publish your site, please read our separate Frontpage section.

The front 'home' page of your site must be named a certain way and placed directly in your public_html directory in order that your can be domain is accessible via the format www.mydomain.com (i.e. without specifying any file name). The choices for naming your home page are:

index.html index.htm default.html default.htm main.html main.htm home.html home.htm index.cgi index.php index.jsp

Note: other variations are possible but might need special configuration - please contact our support team for advice.

When uploading via FTP, you should normally upload most files in binary transfer mode (usually the default mode for most FTP clients). There is one very important exception. All CGI scripts MUST be uploaded in ASCII transfer mode. This will normally be files named with either a .cgi or .pl file extension.