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Soon after signing up for an account with Efficient Hosting, you should receive
a welcome e-mail from us which will include your User Name and Password.
You will need these to access various features of your account, the most
important of which are described below.
Where italics are used in the following sections, please substitute
your own User Name, Password or domain name, as appropriate. |
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New domains and transfers generally take 24 to 48 hours to be entered into the
nameserver database. Often a new domain is available for use the very next day
after registration, but it can take anything up to a week for the domain name
information to fully propagate across all Internet servers throughout the world.
If you chose to have a new domain name registered through Efficient Hosting when
you signed up for your account, then you need take no further action.
If you chose to register your own domain, or if you are "transferring" an existing
domain, then you will need to enter the following information at your registrar
in order to point your domain at your new account:
| Primary nameserver: |
NS.EFFICIENTDNS.COM |
| Primary nameserver IP address: |
63.247.129.130 |
| Secondary nameserver: |
NS2.EFFICIENTDNS.COM |
| Secondary nameserver IP address: |
63.247.129.131 |
The procedure for "transferring" a domain varies from registrar to registrar,
but basically involves updating the primary and secondary Domain Name Servers
(or DNS Servers) for your domain using the information given above. Your registrar
should be able to point you to the appropriate form for updating your domain's
DNS information.
If you are transferring a UK domain name (eg one ending in .co.uk or .org.uk)
then it is likely that you will need to move your domain to a new registrar before
you can get the DNS servers updated. Moving to a new registrar involves updating
the "IPS Tag" for your domain. If you would like us to arrange this for you, at
a charge of 15 pounds, you will need to ask your existing registrar to update
the IPS Tag for your domain to FIBRANET. Once this has been done, we can take
care of the rest of the transfer for you.
If you should run into any difficulties getting your domain name transferred,
feel free to contact
us and we will do our best to help.
You can access your site using an address of the form
http://www.efficientdns.com/~username/ (replacing username
with your own User Name) whilst you wait for your domain registration or
transfer to go through.
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Your Control Panel allows you to manage all aspects
of your account, using a simple "point-and-click" interface within your web
browser. Your online site statistics
are also available here. A full list of Control Panel options,
with short tutorials on their use, is available in the Online
Manual.
You can access your Control Panel by typing www.efficientdns.com/cpanel
in the address bar of your browser.
Once your domain registration or transfer has taken place, you may instead
access your Control Panel by typing www.yourdomain.co.uk/cpanel
(replacing yourdomain.co.uk with your own domain name).
Before gaining access to your Control Panel you will be prompted for your User
Name and Password, for security reasons.
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This section assumes that you will not be using Microsoft
FrontPage to design and publish your site. If you are planning to use
FrontPage, please skip to the next section.
The most common way of designing a web site is to first create and test it on
your local computer. There are a large number of software packages available
which are designed to make this process as easy as possible, for both
beginner
and expert
alike. Many of these programs are available free of charge and some of the best
are reviewed and rated at the Tucows
and WebAttack shareware
web sites.
Once you are ready to copy your site onto the Internet, you can upload it using
FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Nearly all web design
programs, with the exception of Microsoft Frontpage,
use FTP to upload your pages to the Internet. Some have their own built in FTP
program whilst others require you to use a separate, stand alone, FTP program
to upload your web pages.
We recommend using either WS_FTP
or Cute FTP when uploading your web pages, but any
other FTP program may be used if you prefer. Your site can be uploaded to our
servers immediately after receiving your Welcome E-mail,
which will contain the necessary information to set up
your FTP program correctly.
When you first connect to your account by FTP you will
see a folder listing similar to the following:
mail
public_ftp
public_html
tmp
www
Your web page files should be uploaded to the public_html folder, so be
sure to move down into this folder (by double clicking it in most FTP programs)
before uploading your web pages. You will need to replace the index.htm
file already in this folder with your own version of this file which should contain
the home page for your site. You can, of course, also upload web pages to subfolders
if you wish (any subfolders to be used for web pages should be created under the
public_html folder).
When using your FTP program, please do not delete any other preinstalled files
or folders. Many of these files are essential for the smooth running of your
account. Deleting or renaming them may cause corruption which can only be corrected
by completely resetting your account. You can learn more about these preinstalled
files by reading the The Folders In Your Account section
below and the Preinstalled Files and Folders section
of our FTP tutorial.
For more information on FTP, please refer to the FTP
section of our Online Manual.
Small numbers of pages may also be conveniently uploaded, and even edited live
online, using the File Manager which is
available in your Control Panel.
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If you plan to use Microsoft FrontPage, you will need the "FrontPage Extensions"
to be installed for your account before publishing your site. If you didn't opt
for the FrontPage Extensions to be preinstalled when you filled out our
Order Form then you
will need to contact
us and we will install them for you.
Please note that you will need to wait until your domain registration or
transfer is fully completed before publishing using FrontPage.
Once your domain name is fully functional, you may publish your site to:
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/
(replacing yourdomain.co.uk with your own domain name)
For more detailed help with using FrontPage, please see our
FrontPage tutorial.
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To access your e-mail account(s), you will need to configure your e-mail program
to use the following information:
| Incoming (POP3) Mail Server: |
yourdomain.co.uk |
| Outgoing (SMTP) Mail Server: |
Please use your ISP's outgoing mail server (eg smtp.freeserve.net) |
| User Name and Password: |
Please use your normal account User Name and Password to access your default mailbox |
For more help with e-mail, including step by step instructions on setting up the
most common e-mail programs and creating additional mailboxes, please refer to
the e-mail help section of our
Online Manual.
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When you connect to your account by FTP you will see a
number of preinstalled folders.
Some of the most important of these are listed below, together with a brief
description of their purpose.
mail
This is a system folder and should not be accessed directly. It contains
configuration information and data relating to your e-mail accounts.
public_ftp
This folder is where you should place files for your
anonymous FTP users to download.
It also contains a subfolder called incoming to which you may allow
anonymous FTP users to upload their own files.
public_html
This is the folder to which you should upload your web pages in order for
them to be visible on the web. See Creating And Uploading
Your Webpages above. You will find a subfolder called cgi-bin in
this folder. This is the subfolder to which we recommend you upload any CGI
scripts (see the next section).
tmp
This is a system folder and should not be accessed directly. It is used to
store various temporary files, including the reports produced by the
Web Statistics programs in your
Control Panel.
www
This is not a real folder in its own right but is instead a kind of link to
the public_html folder. Accessing this "folder" will take you to
exactly the same place as directly accessing the public_html folder.
See the Preinstalled Files and Folders section
of our FTP tutorial for more on preinstalled files.
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Your "cgi-bin" folder has the following absolute Unix path: /home/username/public_html/cgi-bin.
The URL to your "cgi-bin" folder is: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/cgi-bin.
We recommend that you place all your CGI scripts in this folder as it offers additional
security, but they may be installed in any other folder if you find this more
convenient.
Please make sure that you have the file permissions set to 755 in order for your
scripts to be executable.
For Perl scripts, the first line of your script needs to be: #/usr/local/bin/perl.
The URL to the global "cgi-bin" is http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/cgi-sys.
This folder contains a number of shared scripts which are made available to all
users eg FormMail.cgi.
For more on CGI scripts and useful paths, please
see our CGI tutorial.
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Please note that your password is case sensitive. For this reason you should always
make sure that your "Caps Lock" key is turned off when entering your password.
Filenames are case sensitive, so they must match exactly or you will get a file
not found error. It is, arguably, a good idea to use lower case exclusively when
naming files for the web, to eliminate any danger of using the wrong case when
accessing a file.
When your site is accessed on the web using just your domain name, without
specifying a particular web page, the server will attempt to find a default
file in the public_html folder to display as your home page.
If your home page is a normal web page (not a CGI script or PHP script) then we
recommend naming it either index.html or index.htm, but the server
will look for all of the following files in the order they are listed below:
index.wml, index.cgi, index.shtml, index.php4, index.php3, index.php, index.phtml, index.html, index.htm, default.htm, default.html, home.htm, home.html
Please note that all of these filenames consist entirely of lower case letters.
For example, a file named Index.html (rather than index.html) will not be
recognised as the home page of your site due to the upper case first character.
When you first access your account you will find a sample index.htm file
already uploaded to the public_html folder. If the program you are using
to create your site uses a name other than index.html or index.htm
for your home page, you will need to delete the preinstalled index.htm
file so that the correct home page will be recognised. Your home page will still
need to be given one of the names in the list above in order to be displayed by
default.
If the server is unable to find any of the listed filenames in the
public_html folder then it will display the error "Forbidden - You don't
have permission to access / on this server".
You should transfer HTML pages, Perl CGI scripts and text files as ASCII Text
file type.
You should transfer images and compiled CGI scripts as Image or Binary or Raw
file type.
Most FTP programs are intelligent enough to use the correct file type automatically
for the commonest file types (based on the file extension).
For more information on FTP and file types, please
refer to the FTP section of our Online Manual.
If your script doesn't work, make sure the permissions
are set right for both the scripts themselves, and any files or folders they need
to access. It is also worth double checking that the
paths are set correctly. Also, please ensure that
Perl CGI scripts are uploaded as ASCII Text whilst compiled CGI scripts (which are
much less common) are uploaded as Binary (see the previous section on "FTP And
File Types").
For more tips on avoiding problems with CGI scripts, please refer to
Troubleshooting CGI Scripts in the
CGI section of our Online Manual.
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Once you have mastered the basics of using your account, you will probably want
to learn about many of the more advanced features and functions available to you.
A good place to start is by getting to know your Control
Panel which has icons for administering most of the features of your account.
It is also well worth having a quick read through the other sections and tutorials
available in the Online Manual.
If you have any outstanding questions or require assistance at any time, please
feel free to contact us. We may be contacted either by e-mail
or by filling out the Enquiry Form on our
Contact Page. Please
state both the domain name and user name of your account when contacting us.
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Customer Support Centre : Manual : Getting Started
