FAQ - Unix Web Hosting Packages

Control panel

To adminster various aspects of your site, such as creating additional mailboxes, you can use a control panel by going to either:
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/siteadmin/
or:
http://cp.yourdomain.co.uk
(Please see your setup email - configuration of control panel will depend on which server your site is hosted and which package you have.)

Telnet/shell access

Telnet and shell access is not available to the server.

Uploading files

You can use an FTP program to upload your files at any time using the username and password that we will supply to you.

Files

Your home page (index) should be called one of the following:
index.html
index.htm
index.shtml

Please bear in mind that filenames on Unix servers are case-sensitive. So index.html is not the same as Iindex.html

403 Access Denied error message

If you receive a 403 "Access denied" error message it probably means that you don't have a valid index file in the directory that you are trying to access. To avoid this create an index file with one of the file names above (eg index.html). Remember that file names on Unix are case-sensitive, so if your index file is called Index.html you will need to rename it to index.html.

CGI

Perl is installed on the server.

Depending on your server and package you may find a directory called /cgi-bin in your web space where CGI files should be put. On most sites installed after July 2005 you will also have the option to install pre-configured CGI scripts from your control panel. If you do not have a cgi-bin in your web space it will probably mean that CGI scripts can be run from anywhere in your web space.

CGI files must have the extension:
.cgi or
.pl

In order to work on the Unix server CGI files must be set to the correct permissions. For details of how to set file permissions in an FTP program please see our FTP help file.

The location of Perl is at:
/usr/lib/perl

Sendmail is available at:
/usr/sbin/sendmail

Server Side Includes

To use SSI your files need to have certain extensions so that the server will parse the files and process the SSIs. The extensions you can use are:
.shtml

PHP

PHP4 is installed on the server and you can use PHP files so long as they have the extension
.php

Sending mail from a PHP script on the Unix server is very easy. The following code snippet is an example of a mail script:

<?
	$today = date( "l j F Y");
	$time = date( "g.i a" );
	$sendto = "you@youremail.com";
	$subject = "Contact Form";
	$message = "The following details were submitted on $today at $time:

	Name:     $firstname $lastname
	Email:    $email
	Address:  $address1
	          $address2
	          $address3
	          $address4
	Tel:      $tel
	Comments: $comments";

	mail($sendto, $subject, $message,
	"From: $name <$email>");
?>

MySQL

A MySQL database can be installed for you if required. On most sites installed since July 2005 there is an option for installing MySQL in the control panel - there is no cost for installing or running MySQL databases on these sites. On older packages we need to install the database for you and there is a setup charge for this - please contact us for details.

In either case administration of MySQL databases is provided via a web based control panel.

Webalizer web stats

Webalizer is installed on our Unix servers.

For details please see:
http://www.webalizer.org

For an online demo of Webalizer please see:
http://www.webalizer.org/sample/index.html