Author: sblogadmin

How do I delete an email address? (using qmailadmin)

Question:

How do I remove an email address?

Answer:

If you are using the default email configuration (aka “qmailadmin”), login to your control panel, select the “email” header at the top, followed by the “Configure your email accounts” link.

On the page that comes up, login as :

user: postmaster
password: your postmaster password
domain: the domain for the address you want to delete (no “www” in front)

After you login, choose the type of address (POP3, forward, etc.) under the

“Edit existing address”

section.

Next use the “Delete” link to remove the account.

Dedicated IP versus Shared IP – what’s the difference?

Question:

Can you explain the difference between a dedicated IP and a shared IP?

Answer:

A shared IP means that the IP address for your website is shared with other websites hosted on the same server. This is arrangment that ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers) who controls the allocation of IP addresses requires. IPv4 addresses are a limited resource so ARIN requires that all hosting providers use shared IP’s when possible.

A dedicated IP is an IP address that is used only by your website. Dedicated IP’s are allowed in several cases. SSL’s certificate (in most cases) require the use of a dedicated IP. Hosting without a domain name also require a dedicated IP.

All VPS servers are also dedicated IPs.

If you have a special case and need a dedicated IP let us know. The cost is $2 per month per IP.

As a side note, all IP’s at phpwebhosting.com (both shared and dedicated) are “static” IP addresses. Static means that they do not change (or at least not often – perhaps once every few years at the most). A static IP means that if you make use of the raw IP address, you can be sure that it does not change over time. The only time a static IP changes is in the rare case of a datacenter change that require the use of new IPs. This is rare and for most servers never happens.

Converting from mod_php to php-cgi : Steps to take for a seemless upgrade

Question:

I’d like to change from mod_php to php-cgi. What steps should I take to make sure the change is smooth?

Answer:

Most conversions are as simple as selecting the new version to use in the control panel. If a small amount of possible downtime on your site is acceptable you may want to just try the change and see. In the worst case, you’ll have to wait as long as 15 minutes to switch back to the old version.

The server looks for changes and reloads (if needed) your php configuration every 15 minutes. If you make the change and find you site has problems, you’ll need to “undo” the change by selecting the version you were running previously. You’ll then need to wait for the server to reload your config. Note: During this time your site still runs – there is no downtime – but it does not run the new php version.

If you want near-zero probability of problems (or if you tried the approach above and ran it problems), we recommend the following:

1. Make sure there are no files owned by the generic server user “nobody”. Do this:

find /home/your_user_name_here -user nobody -print

If it shows files owned by nobody, you’ll need to put in a support request for an admin to change the ownership back to your own username.

2. Use the php.ini file that your site was running under before :


mkdir /home/your_username_here/etc/
cp /usr/local/lib/php.ini /home/your_username_here/etc/

4. Make sure date.timezone is set in php.ini. A common problem ugprading to php5.3 is not having date.timezone set. It needs to be set either in your code or (easier) in php.ini

An example for EST timezone is :

date.timezone = 'America/New_York'

5. Check the php.net changelog documentation for any functions that have been removed or changed between the version you are currently running and the version you are upgrading to.

How does the switch over to a VPS from shared hosting take place?

Question:

I want to switch from my shared hosting to a VPS. How can this be done so that I have no downtime? What is the normal process?

Answer:

Normally we do this:

1. Set your DNS TTL to a short value. Normally 3 minutes.

2. Clone your site (files and databases) to the VPS.

3. Send you the raw IP of the VPS to check things out on. Depending on the way your site is coded this may not work perfect (ie. your code keeps trying to redirect you to the proper domain name).

4. If all is well, you contact us and tell us to switch it over

5. We do one final sync of your db and files (in case anything changed from the time we first cloned your site). This step is optional. Let us know if you want a final sync done. If you’ve made tweaks to the VPS copy of the site you will NOT want this done as it will overwrite your changes.

6. The site goes live. If anything is wrong, you let us know and we switch it back

We keep your DNS TTL to about 3 minutes so if something is wrong, your users will pretty quickly (in theory no longer than 3 minutes) start hitting the “old” server again.

Quick methods to move a website to a new host

Question:

How can I quickly clone my existing website to my new hosting account? I want to avoid copying all my files via ftp to my local computer and then re-uploading them – that would take a very long time on my slow internet connection.

Answer:

These command all require you to use the unix command shell but they are very fast ways to clone your website over. If you need help, send a message to support with the login information for your old host and we can do these commands for you.

To quickly pull your backup from your old host :

1. Make the backup on the old host

2. Move it somewhere in the public_html/www/”live” part of your site.

3. On your new server with us: wget http://server.oldhost.com/backup.tgz

4. remove the file from your old server. Don’t forget this step or you’ll have a copy of your site accessible to anyone who might happen to guess the name and location of it.

The second option is to use rsync to make a copy of your site and allow for updates without re-copying everything.

To clone with rsync, do the following: (again contact tech support if you need help!)

cd ~/
rsync -vaze ssh your_user@old_server.com:~/ .

this will copy all your files from the old host to your current directory.

The first run will copy everything over. When you run it over again, it will only copy over the changes. Useful if you want to move the site over, test it out and then do one final copy before going live (in case anything changed on the old server).

PHPMailer will not send out mail. I get an error with PHPMailer.

Question:

Using PHPMailer, I get errors when sending out mail. Any ideas?

Answer:

If you have code like :

$mail->IsSMTP();

and

$mail->Host = "localhost";

in your code. Change it to:

$mail->IsSendmail();

The IsSMTP() call tells PHPMailer to send via your local SMTP server. However in most cases this will not work with-out authenticating yourself. You can use PHPMailer to also do an auth but if you are sending to an SMTP server on the local server (ie. “localhost”) – it is much better to do this via sendmail directly. The call to :

$mail->IsSendmail();

tells PHPMailer to do this.

I have forgot my WordPress database password

Question:

I’ve forgot my WordPress database password. How can I get it back.

Answer:

WordPress stores your database password in wp-config.php. Open up this file and you should find it near the top.

Note that this is your database password and not your wordpress admin/username password. The password in wp-config.php is the password wordpress uses to connect to your database server.

Why does my website run an old version of php?

Change php version control panel screenshot

Question:

I noticed my website is not running the latest version of php. Why not?

Answer:

You can change your php version at any time by going to the php section of your control panel. Normally, we do not update your php version (other than for security patches) automatically in case your scripts rely a certain version being used. We do force minor revision upgrades that address security issues, etc.

In the past we kept all users up-to-date on the latest php versions but found that in many instances the major updates (from 4 to 5, 5.1 to 5.2 to 5.3, etc.) would break client sites. It was rare but happened enough for us to change our policy.

To summarize:

  • You can change your php version in the “php” section of the control panel
  • We perform security related upgrades automatically
  • Major version upgrades are not performed automatically. Instead, use the (one click) version update selector in the control panel

What do I enter for Host Directory in Dreamweaver?

Question:

I’m setting up Dreamweaver and am stumped on what to enter for Host Directory. Can you help?

Answer:

The host directory is the directory on your hosting account which contains your websites files (also known as the document root or docroot). By default this is “www”. If you have set up multiple domains, set Host Directory to whatever directory you used when you set the domain up. If you are not sure, check the “Domains” sections of your control panel and it will show you all your configured domain name mappings.

To conclude, use these values to configure Dreamweaver:

Host: your-domain.com (if testing a domain not transferred to us use: your_username.phpwebhosting.com)
Host Directory: www (usually – unless you’ve mapped the domain to someplace else)
Login: your username
password: your password