FAQ - Windows Web Hosting Packages

General

Please note that these notes apply to our Windows 2003 server. Some older sites on Windows 2000 may have a different setup but we are gradually phasing out Windows 2000 and transferring domains to Windows 2003.

Control panel

To adminster various aspects of your site, such as creating additional mailboxes, you can use a control panel by going to:
http://cp.yourdomain.co.uk
Various aspects of your domain, such as email configuration, setting up of MySQL database and access to web stats are available on your control panel. There are help files available on the control panel itself - just click 'Help' in the top right hand corner.

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.

Please note that files that are to be accessible to the web should be in the /www folder.
You are also provided with a /private folder for files that should not be web accessible (eg Access databases).

Files

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

ASP and ASP.NET

You can use ASP and .NET files so long as they have the extension .asp or .aspx.

Some of the components installed on the server include:

• JMail version 4 - use for sending email from scripts please see http://tech.dimac.net for further details.
• CDONTS - also for sending mail from scripts please see http://www.powerasp.com/content/hintstips/asp-email.asp for details of how to use CDONTS to send mail from scripts.

If you need to connect to an Access database it is best to use a DSN-less connection. An example of doing this with ADO for a database contained in the _database directory would be as follows:

strconn = "DRIVER=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);DBQ=" & Server.MapPath("_database/database.mdb")
set conn = server.createobject("adodb.connection")
set rs = server.createobject("adodb.recordset")
conn.open strconn

If you need a DSN to be set up for your application, this can be done but an administration charge will be payable.

CGI

ActiveState Perl 5 is installed on the server.

You will find a directory called /cgi-bin in your web space from which CGI files can be run.

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

On the Windows server you do not need to set permissions for files. Any CGI file in your cgi-bin will should automatically have thecorrect permissions set.

To send mail via CGI you will either need to use the built-in features of ActiveState Perl or Blat.

For example to send mail via the Net::SMTP module of ActiveState Perl:

        use Net::SMTP;

        $smtp = Net::SMTP->new('mail.yourdomain.co.uk'); # connect to an SMTP server
        $smtp->mail( 'user@here.com' );     # use the sender's address here
        $smtp->to('user@there.com');        # recipient's address
        $smtp->data();                      # Start the mail

        # Send the header.
        $smtp->datasend("To: user@there.com\n");
        $smtp->datasend("From: user@here.com\n");
        $smtp->datasend("\n");

        # Send the body.
        $smtp->datasend("Hello, World!\n");
        $smtp->dataend();                   # Finish sending the mail
        $smtp->quit;                        # Close the SMTP connection

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
.stm

Files with a .asp extension (eg myfile.asp) can use include SSIs, for example:

<!--#include virtual="/ssi/myinclude.inc"--> will work.

However #exec and #echo includes cannot be used so the following will not work:

<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/myscript.cgi" -->
<!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED"-->

Webalizer web stats

Webalizer is installed on our Windows 2003 servers.

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

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