As Southern California recovers from a relatively minor 5.4 earthquake, it brings to mind a point: datacenters should be prepared.

Datacenters, after all, are where the servers that house your website live. Nearly all major datacenters are prepared for all sorts of events: earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and power outages, just to name a few. As a Pickaweb customer, you can be assured that your site is safe, and our London-based datacenter is prepared for power outages, as well as Internet outages. Several carriers are used, so if one goes down, your website is protected.

So, relax. Your website will be able to stand up to a variety of disasters or difficulties. It’s all part of the service we provide you, our valued customer.

There’s a lot to consider when you’re running your own website. As you can see in the posts below, part of the process is handling your domain name, and ensuring it’s configured properly at your registrar, and on your server.

But now you need to control your server, or account. Sure, you can do it on the command line if you have shell access, but that requires a lot of technical knowledge, and time. The answer, then, is easy. A control panel!

Perhaps the most popular one is Cpanel, and its companion, WHM (for reseller, semi-dedicated, or dedicated accounts). Here at Pickaweb, we offer Cpanel, and with it, you can perform a variety of functions with a click of a button…or two:

• Set up or delete e-mail accounts
• Set up and administer FTP accounts
• Perform security functions, such as securing directories and enabling spam protection
• Install numerous applications, such as blogs, forums, and photo galleries with a few simple clicks.

As you can see, using a control panel certainly takes the hassle and headache out of running a website, and leaves you more time to post on, or update your blog or website. And we here at Pickaweb stand ready to assist you in the process.

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. However, the majority of CGI scripts are written in Perl. Having CGI will enable you to create forms, guest books… giving your website some interactivity.

WHOIS Privacy is a service provided by Pickaweb.

Once a WHOIS Privacy is authorized by the Admin Contact, Pickaweb will update the public WHOIS Database information with generic information. Communication to the domain’s contacts can be made via www.contactprivacy.com.

If you are transferring from BulkRegister, here are some tips to help assure your transfer is successful

1) After you approve our confirmation email you will also receive a confirmation email from BulkRegister.
2) BulkRegister will send their confirmation email to “AdminContactVariable”.
3) You will have 72 hours to approve the email that BulkRegister sends you.
4) For .biz, .info or .org domains you must contact Alldomains to obtain your “Authcode” for the domain (needed for transfer).
url:http://www2.bulkregister.com/5-4ContactUs.shtml

As a Pickaweb Reseller you will be assigned your own custom nameservers in the following format:

ns.yourchosendns.com

ns2.yourchosendns.com

This allows the reseller to position themselves as the hosting company & to reinforce their brand to their customers. When the Reseller has set up the hosting account they just need to ask their clients to update their nameservers to their custom nameservers.

If the domain has been registered with Pickaweb the name servers can be updated at http://www.pickaweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/manage.cgi
This tutorial explains how to change the DNS http://www.pickaweb.co.uk/movies1/managedomain.htm

By using Custom Nameservers there is no mention of Pickaweb in the hosting control panel so the Reseller is able to reinforce their brand to their customers.

As a Pickaweb Reseller there are a number of advantages over standard shared hosting services. Many people will use a Reseller plan as a way of creating an additional and valuable recurring revenue stream. A good example would be a web designer who wants to generate a longer term relationship with his design customers. The reseller can purchase a bulk amount of diskspace and bandwidth and allocate this as they want to across their customers. They can create different levels of package (bronze, silver, gold, etc..) and charge each customer according to their needs.

Another great benefit of the Pickaweb Reseller Plan is that as long as the Reseller is within the disk space and bandwidth parameters they are free to utilise the resources however they wish. For example, they can create as many MySQL databases as they require. Other exmaples are domain parking, emails accounts, etc..

For more information on the Pickaweb Reseller service please go to http://www.pickaweb.co.uk/reseller-hosting.htm

Yes. Once you’ve ordered the hosting package of your choice we will send you your full web hosting instructions. We will also send you the Nameserver (DNS) settings that you need to apply to your domain name. All you need to do is to login to your domain name & make these changes.

If your domain name is registered through Pickaweb then you can manage your domain name at https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/manage.cgi - if you do not have your details please use the forgotten password feature & your domain name login details will be sent immediately to you.

If your domain name is not registered through Pickaweb you will need to contact your domain name registrar & ask them for advice. Usually you will have a domain name management area similar to Pickaweb´s but if not, just contact your domain registrar´s support team & they will be able to assist you.

When you have have made your Nameserver changes you can verify this at https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi - these changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate fully across the internet. During this time, if you are currently using a hosting service for your domain it is likely that you will experience some anomolous behaviour, particularly related to email. For this reason we strongly recommend making thess changes during the evening, or ideally over the weekend or during quiet periods when you do not anticipate high volumes of visitors and/or emails.

Yes you can. You will need to change the name servers of your domain name to point to the required hosting company. You can do this via the Pickaweb domain name management area at: https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/manage.cgi

Yes, You can just register the domain name and get a hosting service at a later stage.

When you wish to add the hosting or email & web forwarding service to your domain you can do so at the following link: https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/billing/order/orderwiz.php
 
Because you already have a domain name that you wish to use, please select the option: “I already have a domain name which I wish to use for the service. I will change the name servers”.
 
Please also register as an existing customer using your login details which were sent to you when you placed your order initially. If you do not have these details then you can use the forgotten password feature at the following link & they will be emailed to you: https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/billing