• uk.com
• uk.net
• gb.com
• gb.net
• eu.com

We are authorised resellers of CentralNic domains, which means in all cases we will effectively be the registrar for your domain. This means there is only the domain owner, the domain registration agent (Ecological Hosting) and the domain registry (Nominet), no confusing myriad of providers, resellers and other middle layers.

CentralNic Domain Transfer In Procedure

If you have a transfer code for your domain, please let us know before we initiate the transfer as this can help automate the process. Your current provider should be able to help with this.

Once you authorise us to start the transfer process one of the following will happen:

• No transfer code available:
  The registry (CentralNic) will email the current billing contact for the domain and ask for authorisation. If the current billing contact approves the transfer, then the transfer will happen automatically, and we will receive notification by e-mail. If the current billing handle rejects the transfer, we have to submit written authorisation from the domain owner to the registry requesting the transfer.

• Transfer code available up front:
  If you have the transfer code for your domain name then the transfer will be automatically approved after five days, if the registry do not hear from the current billing contact.

Because of the inherent delays in this process, if possible it is recommended that when your site has been pre-loaded onto our servers and your email configured; that you change the name servers associated with your domain before, or at the same time as proceeding with the domain transfer process and this will make you live on our servers. Our name servers are:

ns1.athnic.net
ns2.athnic.net

• co.uk
• ltd.uk
• me.uk
• net.uk
• org.uk
• plc.uk

There are also specialist domains for the NHS, schools, government and the military.

We are full members of Nominet, the .uk Registry and we are also tag holders, which means in almost all cases we will be the registrar for your domain. This means there is only the domain owner, the registrar (us) and the registry (Nominet), no confusing myriad of providers, resellers and other middle layers.

.uk Domain Transfer In Procedure

To transfer your .uk domain name:

.uk domains should be very easy and quick to transfer. All you need to do is request that your current agent or registrar transfers the Nominet IPS tag to ours, which is:

ATHNIC

Once the transfer completes (which is normally a matter of seconds from when they send the request), we just update the domain with our name servers and a few other details and you’re live on our servers.

There is no charge on transfer for .uk domains and your registration period does not change on transfer (unlike .com’s for example).

.uk Domain Transfer Away Procedure

To transfer your domain away to a new provider:

Please contact us via email with full details of the transfer. Your request will then be verified to ensure we are receiving instructions from the domain owner / hosting account owner by using the details we have on record.

We will also check with the owner that they fully understand the impact this will have on their hosting services at Ecological Hosting as there are a number of scams regarding domain transfers that can catch people out occasionally.

Please ask your new registrar to ready their name servers for the transfer and let us have details of the new name servers so we can switch them for you.

We will also need the Nominet IPS tag you would like the domain transferring to.

Once we are happy that all is well, we will then change the name servers on the domain to those you have provided and also change the Nominet IPS tag to the one you have provided. When this has been done the domain transfer is final and complete. If you changed your mind, you would have to get the recipient tag holder to push it back to us.

Change Owner

To change the legal owner on a .uk domain, you will need to work through the Nominet change of ownership process. More details regarding this can be found here:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/uk-domain-names/manage-your-domain/transfer

• com
• org
• net
• biz
• info
• pro
• name

Please note: We use the Tucows OpenSRS system to register and manage these types of domains on behalf of our clients. As such, mention of Tucows as the registrar in the public whois record is entirely correct. In most cases our details (Athenaeum Ltd / Ecological Hosting) will also be shown as the registration service provider in the full whois record.

gTLD Domain Transfer In Procedure

To transfer your gTLD domain name:

1. You need to:
1. request that the domain is unlocked
2. obtain a transfer code
3. make sure the Admin contact email address is valid and under your control
4. let us know when this has been done

You can normally check the Admin contact email address by looking at the whois record. If you need to update this, you will need to contact your current domain registrar or the agent in charge of your domain renewals.

2. When all of the above has been done, we can then initiate the transfer process and further instructions will be sent the Admin contact email address for action. Please note: We cannot change the email address the instructions are sent to, hence step 1c above.
3. Once you (or the Admin contact email owner) have approved the transfer it then takes around 9 days to complete.

Because of this inherent delay, if possible it is recommended that when your site has been pre-loaded onto our servers and your email configured; that you change the name servers associated with your domain before, or at the same time as proceeding with step 1 above and this will make you live on our servers. Our name servers are:

ns1.athnic.net
ns2.athnic.net

Please note: All gTLD domain transfers will cause the registry to extend your registration by another year and we will invoice for this additional year of registration. Your next renewal date will then be set accordingly.

To transfer your domain name and change the domain owner:

The process is the same as above, but please advice us of the full details of the new owner so we can set these as part of the transfer process we initiate at step 2 above.

To change the domain owner (if the registrar remains as Athenaeum Ltd / Ecological Hosting / Tucows):

Please contact us via email with full details of the ownership change and we will update the details on the domain for you.

gTLD Domain Transfer Away Procedure

To transfer your domain away to a new provider:

Please contact us via email with full details of the transfer. Your request will then be verified to ensure we are receiving instructions from the domain owner / hosting account owner by using the details we have on record.

We will also check with the owner that they fully understand the impact this will have on their hosting services at Ecological Hosting as there are a number of scams regarding domain transfers that can catch people out occasionally.

Please ask your new registrar to ready their name servers for the transfer and let us have details of the new name servers so we can switch them for you.

Once we are happy that all is well, we will then change the name servers on the domain to those you have provided and ready the domain for transfer.

To ready the domain for transfer we will change all contacts to be the same as the current domain owner, unlock the domain and provide an auth code. After this point, it is then up to your new registrar to initiate the transfer process.

There are variations on the transfer process and each individual case is handled with the same care as incoming transfers to the requirements of the domain owner.

To transfer your domain name:

1. Request an authorisation code from your current registrar. To verify your registrar, look up your domain name in the WHOIS database. Your registrar’s name will be listed in the “Registrar” section of the query result.
   Please note: .eu domains registered via Ecological Hosting will show “Tucows.com Co” as the registrar and this is correct.
2. Send the authorisation code you receive to us here at Ecological Hosting and we will process the transfer of your domain name.

To transfer your domain name and change the domain owner:

The process is the same as above, except the code must be sent to the new domain owner who will then ask us or a new registrar of their choice to process the transfer for them.

To change the domain owner (if the registrar remains as Ecological Hosting / Tucows.com Co):

Please contact us with full details of the ownership change and we will update the details on the domain for you.

The information below is taken from the awStats documentation and helps describe many of the statistics presented by the package.

Unique Visitor:

A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host made several visits during this period, it is counted only once.

The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month.

Visits:

The number of visits made by all visitors.

Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the “pages” are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests).

Pages:

The number of “pages” logged.

Usually pages are reserved for HTML files or CGI files, not images nor other files requested as a result
of loading a "Page" (like js, css… files).

Hits:

Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages").

A single web page can be made up of many elements (images, style sheets, text, etc), each individual element loaded will generate a hit.

Bandwidth:

Total number of bytes downloaded.

Entry Page:

The first page viewed by a visitor during their visit.

Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.

Exit Page:

The last page viewed by a visitor during their visit.

Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.

Session Duration:

The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.

Some Visit durations are ‘unknown’ because they can’t always be calculated. Major reasons for this are:

• The Visit was not finished when the last stats update occured.
• Visit started the last hour (after 23:00) of the last day of a month (a technical reason prevents AWStats from calculating the duration of such sessions).

Grabber:

A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site. These include for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier".

Add To Favourites:

This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated value of the number
of times a visitor has added your web site into their favourite bookmarks.

The technical rules for this are the following formula:
Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)

where:

• x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code
• y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code
• r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)

As you can see in formula, only Internet Explorer (IE) is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favourites" for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage compared to ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE does a hit on favicon.ico ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites. The other browsers make hits on this file also for other reasons so we can’t count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason.

AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in deeper directory of path.

HTTP Status Codes:

HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of a request. Codes 200 and 304 are used to tell the browser the page can be viewed. All other codes generates hits and traffic ‘not seen’ by the visitor. For example a return code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser will do another hit and should finaly receive the page with a return code 200 or 304.

All codes that are ‘unseen’ traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP Status report chart. The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1 draft specification outlined in IETF rfc 2068.

They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies the class of the status code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition within the response class.

They are classified in 5 categories:

• 1xx – informational
• 2xx – successful
• 3xx – redirection
• 4xx – client error 
• 5xx – server error 

SMTP Status Codes:

SMTP status codes are returned by mail servers to indicate the status of sending/receiving mail. The status code depends on mail server and preprocessor used to analyze log file.

Here are values reported for most mail servers:

SMTP Errors are classified in 3 categories:

• 2xx/3xx – successful
• 4xx – failure, asking sender to try later
• 5xx – permanent failure

Our web hosting servers offer a local sendmail service so you can send email out from your web site.

Very important – you are responsible for:

1. your own programming
2. your own security which should include proper validation
3. the security and integrity of any code on your website
4. understanding the impact on your hosting/website if any of the above are not properly carried out

Your website and our system reputation on the Internet is at risk if you do not code securely and keep your site up to date at all times. The reputation risk is especially acute for email activity where the server IP can get blacklisted as opposed to just individual website URLs.

As such, should we become aware through our continuous server monitoring of any dubious behaviour, badly written insecure code, or the use of this service for bulk unsolicited email sending, we reserve the right to suspend your account and charge for our time to handle the situation at our published level 2 support rates until such time as you resolve any issues. This is for the benefit of our wider community of users sharing the same system.

Please ensure you also read the Important Notes section at the bottom of this page.

Methods

When using PHP scripts, there are two main methods to send email from a specially coded page on your web site:

1. Using the PHP mail() command
2. Using PEAR SMTP Auth to connect to an external SMTP service

Option 1 – PHP mail()

If you use the PHP mail() command, please be certain to use the following format:

mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers, ‘-f ‘.$envelopeFrom)

Variable formats:

$to:
My Name <my.name@myemail.com>

$subject:
Message subject text (one line)

$message:
Message body text (can be multiple lines)

$headers:
Use this to set the from address that email programs will display.
From: Sender Name <sender.name@senderemail.com>\n

$envelopeFrom:
The email address to use as the envelope sender. If the server fails to deliver the message, this is where the failure notice will go (obviously, if this is the same as the To: address, then it’s not going to help, so try and set something different, even if they’re both you.
bounce.address@myotheremail.com

It is vitally important that you validate form input to try and ensure your page cannot be used to break in to your site or send spam.

For example; only allow specific characters as appropriate to a given form entry field (e.g. only + space 0-9 and . in a telephone number field), set appropriate maximum and minimum lengths for acceptable entries, use the stripslashes() and trim() functions to cleanup input data.

Example of a possible function to validate email address format (you must understand what this is doing, how to use it in a suite of validations and check it works for your situation – use at your own risk):
function isEmail($val) {
 if (preg_match("/(@.*@)|(\.\.)|(@\.)|(\.@)|(^\.)/", $val)) return false;
 return preg_match("/^.+\@(\[?)[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.([a-zA-Z0-9]+)(\]?)$/", $val);
}

Option 2 – PHP PEAR SMTP Auth

This option enables you to connect to an SMTP server and authorise to enable you to send via that server. Usually, this means you have a mailbox on that system.

This option can be used to connect to our main email service and send using the login credentials you have created for a mailbox you have configured on there.

It is also possible to send via Google’s Gmail SMTP service if you have a Google mailbox, either regular Gmail or via our Google Apps for Business offering.

Please refer to the PEAR Mail documentation for usage details:
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail/docs

Important Notes:

The mail service on our web servers is outbound only, these systems will not accept any incoming mail and the service is there as a convenience to our customers.

Because they are outbound only, it’s very important that you code correctly to ensure any bounces are properly handled – see envelope sender information above if using the PHP mail() command. Double bounces will be deleted. If we notice multiple double-bounces from your user, you will be contacted and asked to correct your code and/or risk service suspension.

Do not abuse this service by sending unsolicited messages, and please note; they are still considered unsolicited even if you purchased a mailing list from some place, this service is really intended for email going to the site owner or a one off reply to thank someone for submitting a form (e.g. an order form).

In the case of the latter, take steps to ensure that not just any email address will be accepted and that only pre-formatted responses are sent – do not under any circumstances allow data entered by the website visitor to go out in the email, otherwise it can be abuse by spammers.

Consider the use of reCaptcha or similar security measures as appropriate.

Ensure that you fully validate all input on a form to make sure you are only receiving valid data. Forms can otherwise be abuse by spammers and hackers to break in to your website and/or send junk mail or deliver virus code to unsuspecting visitors.

Please be very careful if sending to an address that someone enters on your website, as this could easily be abused by spammers and could get the server blacklisted, which is bad for you, us and all other clients sharing that system.

Publish to: FTP Server
Site name: yourdomain.ext
Contact email: your@email.address

Server address: ftp.yourdomain.ext
User name: your-ftp-username
Password: your-ftp-password
Directory/Path:
Protocol: FTP Port: 21

Website URL: http://www.yourdomain.ext

You will end up with an extraneous index.html file below the web document root folder, but this doesn’t matter from the visitors point of view and you don’t end up with a site URL like (http://www.yourdomain.ext/yourdomain.ext/Welcome.html).

Earlier versions of iWeb:

If you do not have the latest version of iWeb with FTP publishing built in, then you will need to publish to disk first and use an FTP client (such as Fetch, FileZilla or similar) to upload the site from the version published to your hard drive.

Important notes for the future:

Apple have silently discontinued iWeb. We have been unable to find any kind of official confirmation of this; what we have found though is that there is no iWeb (or iDVD) on new Macs, it is not available to download from the App Store and iLife 11 is no longer available to purchase on DVD from the Apple store, all of which effectively means if you don’t currently have iWeb, you can not get it. Also, if you go to the Apple website and search for iWeb, the product information link simply redirects you to the current iLife page that does not include iWeb. We can only guess that this is Apple’s way of saying this product is no more.

Two alternative solutions that are repeatedly suggesting in various online forums and posts are:

RapidWeaver:
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/overview/

WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/

We do not have a copy  of RapidWeaver to be able to comment on this, but we do know that WordPress is brilliant, though they are two very different things.

If you would like a professional developer specialising in WordPress to help with the initial setup, create a personalised theme and more for a WordPress site running on our systems, please click here to view our Design page for more information and contact details of our support / development partner SKYEWEBSITES.

First, make sure you have enabled IMAP in your Gmail settings.

Please refer to the following Google Gmail help page for details on how to do this:
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77695

When done, open your Thunderbird email client and proceed with the instructions below:

1. Click on Tools -> Account Settings

2. Click the Account Actions dropdown (bottom left) and select Add Mail Account

3. Fill in your basic details:

• Your name: this is how your name will appear to people who receive your emails
• Email address: this is your full Google Apps for Business user name / login email address including your full Google Apps domain.
• Password: this is your Google App for Business Gmail password.

For this example we will be using the following:

• Your name: T r a c e   E l l i o t
• Email address: t r a c e @ g r e e n s t r a t a . c o m
• Password: * * * * * * * * * * * * *

4. Thunderbird will now try and automatically detect your settings and fail like so:

5. Change these to the following (substitute your user name for trace@greenstrata.com):

6. Click Re-Test Configuration and it should now be accepted.

7. Click on Tools -> Account Settings again.

8. In the left hand pane scroll if necessary right to the bottom and find Outgoing Server (SMTP) and click on this once.

9. In the right hand pane, select the smtp.gmail.com server that you have just created and click on Edit.

10. Change the User Name to your full Gmail login name again like we did just above:

11. Click OK and that’s it, all done!

1 – Login to your database:

Start here: https://support.ecologicalhosting.com/dbadmin/

Use the database username and password details provided in your Welcome email.

Click Go to login to the database server.

2 – Click on your database (e.g. ab001 in this sample case as highlighted in red below):

3 – Click on Export from the menu tabs at the top of the phpMyAdmin screen:

Finally, click on Go and a copy of the database schema and data in the form of an SQL file should download to your computer.

All done!

2. Click on the Email Admin Url

3. Click on the “Click here to login to an individual mailbox and to configure auto-responders” link

4. Enter your mailbox username and password

5. Click on the “Change Password” option

6. Enter your new password twice

7. That’s it!