Q   What back-ups do you make?

A   We make daily back-up copies of everything in your personal directory, excepting: logs, tmp and session files. We also make SQL back-ups of your MySQL or PostgreSQL data. These are kept off-site on another server in another data centre, where they can be used both for restoring data loss in the event of some disaster (eg, you accidentally uploaded an empty database over the top of your active one ... ) or for use in a "fail-over" event where we need to activate a back-up server until your main server comes back on-line.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q This "managed hosting" seems like a valuable service. Tell me more about it A   Essentially, we have taken the "managed server" principle and applied it to hosting, resulting in a high-quality high-integrity "managed hosting" service that would otherwise cost you several hundreds per month. We use specialised software packages to monitor your website every 5 minutes and take appropriate action if a particular service is unreachable. This action will normally be to attempt to restart the application. If this attempt fails, then a pager message will be sent to our support staff, who will immediately investigate the problem personally and do whatever is neccessary to fix it. Once fixed, either automatically or manually, emails will be sent to both our support staff and the site owner with information as to what happened and the time it took to get the service back on line again. Downtime should never be more than 5 minutes maximum, the monitoring interval. This applies to all software services supplied and maintained by us, but naturally not to any packages maintained by a client. For example, if your shop/catalogue becomes misconfigured in such a way that Interchange cannot run it (invariably this happens because the site owner has done something wrong with the shop), then this is obviously outside of our realm of responsibility. However, if Interchange is restarted and a particular shop/catalogue fails to start up and so remains off-line, our systems will detect this and send an email message (plus optionally an SMS/pager message) to the site owner so that he can remedy whatever faults he created which caused this problem. This in itself is a valuable service. We provide and manage these major hosting services (amongst others): Interchange Apache MySQL/PostgreSQL Postfix SMTP VM-pop3d POP3 FTP / SSH Our three nameservers are kept on three separate machines in three separate data centres.

Q I'm not familiar with the Interchange eCommerce package - can you describe it? A Interchange is a full-featured and mature eCommerce package which has been developed over a number of years, and now has a full web-based control panel which can administer your affiliates, databases, sales and everything involved in eCommerce. It is Open Source / Free Software and licensed under the GPL, so you may be sure that you will never be left out in the cold with a product which is restricted to proprietary support only. The original developer has now brought together a group of talented programmers and developers to form the 'IC Dev Group', being the core group which steers Interchange in the best direction and then develops for it. It is also very secure and is run in thousands of installations under the most rigorous conditions of heavy load and high-volume sales. It is fully internationalised in terms of both currency and languages, and is capable of being integrated with many different payment gateways in several currencies. It can be full customised to any extent you like - for example, compare the two demo sites here (Hard Goods and Soft Goods) to this site for Zolotek. Our own site looks very different and yet runs the same Interchange software. You may customise the site using the Control Panel, or if you prefer by ftp and ssh directly on the actual files. Building a new catalogue is as simple as running './makecat new_shop_name' and answering a few basic questions about the URL etc - and if you want it even simpler, then you can just use our Interchange module in our own Control Panel. Because it is actually an application server (not just a script), it requires a Perl daemon (server) to be running continually, meaning that many ISPs will not allow you to run it, and you will need to find a specialist hoster such as ourselves. As well as the daemon, it requires you to use a proper database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL to get the best performance, both of which we provide free of extra charge. (Though if you only have a few products you may use the built-in GDBM database instead.) Because it uses a proper database and a real server (not just a perl script) it can be scaled up to many thousands of products - in fact up to the limit of the databases we use which is well over a million records. Interchange is an excellent choice for a number of reasons:     it is backed and developed by the IC Dev Group     you have the full source code and can modify it as you like     it scales from a few to thousands of products, and so grows with your business     it is proven to be safe, secure, versatile, and very capable

Q How do I transfer a domain name to Zolotek? A You should always be the owner of the domain name (though you may write us in as the "technical contact" if you wish), and all that we will do is add your domain to our DNS zones. The transfer is enabled when you login to your registrar and change the DNS values there from the current ones to ours. Our values are:     ns1.zolotek.net - IP 207.44.228.221, Corenic handle COHO-57390     ns2.zolotek.net - IP 207.44.229.1, Corenic handle COHO-57391

Q How much spare hard disk space should I get? A   Keep these considerations in mind: 1) your logs are kept in your own space, and even though they are rotated and compressed at the end of each month, they will use a certain amount of space. If you think your site is going to be very popular, then allow say 50Mb for logs. 2) Your database. There may be times when you want to make radical changes to this, and so you will want to have enough room to make a temporary backup in case of disasters. 3) You will need some room for your site to grow.

Q Can I upgrade a virtual host to a virtual server? A Yes, and for no setup or upgrade charge. We will transfer all files from the virtual host to the virtual server for you, though you will need to check the paths to ensure that they are still correct. Remember though that you will have a short amount of downtime (a few minutes) while we do this, and also move the IP across and do other housekeeping work.

Q Can I have more than one domain name pointing to the one site? A Yes - you just need to ensure that they are all entered in both the DNS records and the webserver configuration file.

Q Which web log analyser should I use - Webalizer or Analog? A These are very different. Webalizer is designed to create "pretty" reports which will impress your boss, your clients, or your advertisers. It does this very well. However, it does not produce failed file reports which makes it useless for tracking down missing files or broken links. Also, its "number of visitors" statistic is open to debate - it's based on assumptions which you may or may not like. Analog, on the other hand, produces reports which are "pretty" enough (depending on your viewpoint) but intended more for webmasters and others who are interested in the nitty gritty details of their site. It does not list "visitors", but instead "hosts" (which may be considered a rough approximation of visitors). It has very good reporting on failed files, referrers, etc, and this is vital information for webmasters. Both analysers are fully configurable, and you will probably find that you use both - Webalizer to show your clients and Analog for yourself.

Q As I need to use SSH, rather than telnet, what tools are available to connect with? A You can get a Java client called 'MindTerm' from AppGate.com - it requires only Java 1.1.x and so should run on any platform. If you are using OS/2 or Windows, then you will be able to use the versatile and extremely powerful ZoC from EmTec. This can communicate by telnet, SSH, Rlogin, named pipe, or serial modem. It can emulate various terminals, operate as a BBS to receive calls, and is now very mature and stable. On Linux/*BSD/*nix there is a Tcl/Tk X client called SecPanel from Freshmeat And of course there are command line versions of SSH for Unix and OS/2.

Q I need to connect to my MySQL database from my local machine A>The MySQL database cannot be directlyu connected to from outside of the server for security reasons, but you may use 'port forwarding', or 'SSH tunnelling', to achieve this result. See this page for documentation and examples

Q Do you provide Windows hosting, or FrontPage extensions? A No, absolutely not. in the interests of the security and stability of our systems and for the benefit of our customers we do not provide Windows hosting or any MS 'tools'.