Web Concepts

The March edition of the Lunarpages customer newsletter is packed full of great web hosting news, tips and tutorials.  To top it all off, Lunarpages announced two new contests you can enter too.

• Some of the other features from this month’s edition include:
• Better Server Access Logs Come to LPCP
• Your Affiliate Web Hosting Checklist
• News on Google’s Real Time Search Future
• 20 of the Web’s Best News Sources
• and much more!

So do not hesitate any longer, go see what all the fuss is about, and read up about the latest Lunarpages news.  Go check out the Lunarpages web hosting newsletter!

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

There are tons of things you can do from the .htaccess file inside of your web hosting account.  From redirecting the users to controlling who can get in and who can get out, it is a very useful file to have on your hosting account.  To help out the new web hosting clients and to act as a reminder to the old pros around here, I thought I would go through five of the most popular .htaccess tips I know.

Redirect to a Maintenance Page

This is a great one to use if you need to make some quick web page edits, and you don’t want the public to see you edit your web site, while it is still live.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/offline.html$
RewriteRule .* /offline.html [R=307,L]

This will redirect anybody who checks out any web page on your web site to the "offline.html" file.

Force the Use of “www” in Front of a Domain Name

If you want to keep the www in front of your domain name, no matter how somebody types it in, here is the ‘bit of .htaccess magic you will need:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mydomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Once you have done so, both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com will both send you to www.mydomain.com

Remove the “www” From in Front of a Domain Name

You can also force your domain to drop the www from the address when typed in, if you would rather have it the other way around. In that situation, you would need to add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will make both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com send you to just mydomain.com.

Manually Create Custom Error Pages

Ever check out some of those customized error pages and wonder how it could be done? Just use these snippets of .htaccess code to tell people where to look for your error pages.

   ErrorDocument 400 /errors/400.html
   ErrorDocument 401 /errors/401.html
   ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.html
   ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.html
   ErrorDocument 500 /errors/500.html

This tells the server to look inside the “errors” folder and that specific page for each of the different error types. That is not all of the error codes, but they are the ones that will be ‘hit by your users 99 percent of the time.

Block Visitor By IP Address

Need to keep somebody from checking out your web site?  This next tip will give you the ability to deny somebody based on what their IP address is:

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

The above blocks access to the site from 123.45.6.7, and from any sub-domain under the IP block 012.34.5. (012.34.5.1, 012.34.5.2, 012.34.5.3, etc).

That is it for this round up of tips.  For more help with the .htaccess file, and many more things you can do with your web hosting account, be sure to check out the Lunarpages Web Hosting Wiki.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Who doesn’t love a cupcake or two? 

In celebration of National Cupcake Day, I give you some web site tips that will be sure to leave your web development sweet tooth wanting more.

Socialize Yourself

There are many easy ways you can plug your social profiles or micro-blogging services out there.  Here we have a source that will give you cute icons for the following social networks:  Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Twitter.

How to Embed a YouTube Playlist

Thanks to relist.tv, you can now deliver a nice flash playlist player for your YouTube videos.  How does it work?  Well, after visiting relist.tv, you just fill out the options and then grab the code to copy and paste into your site’s design.

Tons of WordPress Fun

For our WordPress using clients, these tasty links will be the icing on the cake.

• 25 Most Popular Twitter Plugins for WordPress
• Add Fixed Social Buttons to WordPress
• 4 Great Wooden WordPress Themes

Is that not enough?  Ok, let us top it off with 55 of my favorite WordPress plugins and the best blog hosting guide out there.

May you all have a very fun and fattening cupcake day!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

The important key thing to remember about any password is to keep it easy to remember, but hard to guess.  It might be overlooked by some, but having a good password can mean a lot when it comes to web site security.  Hackers can often guess your password if it is a person, place or thing in the dictionary – even with trailing numbers or letters.

The best password advice I can give to you would be:

• Use Several Capital Letters
• Use Some Symbols (if allowed)
• Toss a Few Numbers in There
• Also Use Some Lower-case Letters Too

Let’s do a little test.  Which one of these password do you think would be more guessable by a hacker.

password1234 or 6Pa55W0r|>9

The second one of course, silly. 

Now how you store your password is just as important as the password itself.  Never write down the password and keep it in plain sight.  Jotting it down on a sticky note and then putting your password on your monitor is about as logical as using the 12345 as a password.

So there you have my general password advice I think everybody should use and follow.  Picking a good password is not hard to do.  When you stop and think about it, common sense goes a long way when security comes to mind.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Lunarpages affiliate program members get a lot of tools to use, when it comes to marketing.  An affiliate advertising campaign is a great way to track the success of one particular affiliate link, in comparison with another one.  At Lunarpages, you can track your own affiliate tracking campaigns with just a simple quick edit to your Lunarpages affiliate program address.

The first thing you need to, is add this to your address:

&campaign=CampaignName

to the end of your affiliate tracking address. 

So for a campaign tracking a 100×100 banner for the affiliate ID "blog", the campaign URL could look like this:

http://www.lunarpages.com/id/blog&campaign=100×100

To see all clicks made from this campaign, login to your affiliate stats, click on the &quotoverview&quot tab and then the &quotreferences&quot link off to the right. You will see the following:

If you have one banner for Lunarpages and a text ad, you could format our campaign tracking to manage all clicks and sales for each placement and, at the end of the month, take a look to see which performed best. Did your audience prefer the text link or the banner?

You can create unlimited campaigns and can track these from multiple websites, as well as view the results by day or month.

Want to get paid $65 for every person you refer to Lunarpages?  Be sure to check out our Lunarpages Affiliate Program. 

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

The world of reseller hosting might be a little confusing to some.  However, with the right tips in hand – anybody can be a reseller hosting success. In a nut shell, reseller hosting is a form of web site hosting where the account owner has the ability to use their allotted space and bandwidth to host their own or a third parties’ web site.  The account owner can sell the allotted space and bandwidth to the third party in question, and (in most cases) make a profit.

To help you get started in the world of reseller web hosting, here are a few tips you might look into or follow:

• Start off small.  Don’t think you have to sell 10 or 20 accounts in one day.  Start out with a couple, and expand as need. 
• You don’t actually have to sell the space.  It is up to you how you want to setup the web sites on it. 
• Go to friends and family members first, if you are looking for your own customers. 
• Go visit webmaster related forums, and look for web site designers or customers that might be looking for a new or a different web host.  Then pitch your own service to them.
• Look for your own unique perks or services you can give to your own clients you are reselling to, so that you can make a good first impression.
• Keep a watchful eye over those you are hosting, to make sure they don’t get you in trouble with your reseller hosting provider.
• Get a billing manager in place to help manage your own accounts you are reselling.  The Lunarpages Webmaster Reseller plan comes with a nice one you can add as a service, AccountLab Plus.

Speaking of Lunarpages, we now offer two great plans for web hosting resellers out there.  Check them out here:

• Reseller Web Hosting at Lunarpages

I hope those reseller web hosting tips will be of some use to you.  If you have any more tips, be sure to share them in the comments.  Would love to hear your own web hosting reseller success stories too, if you have them.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

When it comes to running a trace route, some people become confused on how you get that trace route from your command prompt window to your uber-friendly support team.  The easiest method would be to save the trace route as a .txt file, so you could copy the data, and paste it in your e-mail or help desk ticket.

It is all pretty simple:

1. Go to Start > Run…
2. Enter cmd and click OK.
3. At the prompt, type tracert yourdomainname > yourfilename.txt and hit enter.

After it is complete, the file is saved to:

Vista - Usersyourpcusernameyourfilename.txt

XP - Documents and Settingsyourpcusernameyourfilename.txt

Now all you have to do is find the file, open it up, and copy the trace route from the .txt file to your e-mail to the support team or into your help desk ticket. You can seen an example of the process being done in less than a minute here:

Hope this tip comes in handy!  If you’d like to see more quick video tips, leave a comment and let us know.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Create Your Own .htaccess with LPCP
• PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages
• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Over the past year or so, a lot of people have enjoyed the write-up on how to create your own .htaccess file from within cPanel, so I figured I would give the same sage words of advice for everybody out there using the LPCP control panel.

To create a .htaccess file in LPCP, log into the LPCP, and then go to your File Manager. Click on the text link labeled, ” public_html” to navigate yourself inside the public_html folder.

Now, in the empty text box to your upper-right type in .htaccess, make sure the drop down box is set to “File” and then hit the button labeled, “Create”.

Your .htaccess file will be created in your public_html folder on your LPCP powered account.

• Find out how to manually create and upload the .htaccess file to your web hosting account!

For more LPCP help, tips, tutorials and more, be sure to check out the web hosting wiki.  Over 340 guides have been published there to help you get more out of your web hosting account at Lunarpages.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages
• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages
• E-Commerce Hosting with Zen Cart

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

The free, user-friendly and open source shopping cart software, Zen Cart is perfect for any e-commerce web site hosted at Lunarpages.  With the thoughts of shop owners, programmers, designers and more in mind, Zen Cart is one of the best third-party shopping cart scripts out there.

You can easily install Zen Cart one of three ways.  We give the option to install manually, through LPCP’s WebApps page or cPanel’s Fantastico page.  The process is simple, straight forward and to the point.

If you need to see example of Zen Cart powered web sites, you can check out Zen Cart’s showcase page.  OpenSourceCMS.com also has a hosted demo of the shopping cart script on it’s web site.

Here are a few more Zen Cart tutorials that should come in handy:

• How to Move Your Zen Cart Install to Lunarpages
• How to Reset the Admin Password
• How Can I Upgrade Zen Cart Manually?

You can find more how-to articles in our web hosting wiki.  The third-party scripts and services section of the Lunarforums should also come in handy if you run into a problem.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third-party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third-party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third-party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

Related Tips and Tricks:

• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages
• PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages
• Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

One of the world’s best open-source newsletter managers can be installed a number of different ways, here at Lunarpages.  PHPlist is a free script that will handle all your  newsletter or mailing lists for you.  It is downloaded over 10,000 tie per month – and is possibly one of the most popular open-source scripts out there today.

PHPlist is fully installable via cPanel’s Fantastico, the LPCP WebApps, or by downloading it and installing it manually.  Here are a few more features that it includes:

• double opt-in subscription mechanism
• scheduling
• RSS
• list segmentation
• click-tracking
• attachments
• bounce management

Here are a few more tutorials on PHPlist to help you out:

• Changing E-mail Sending Rates
• Configuring E-mail Sending Rates
• How to Create a Custom Subscribe Form

To learn more about PHPlist, be sure to check out their official web site, the support page for PHPlist and the official PHPlist documentation. If you need anymore help – you can always turn towards the Lunarforums too:

• Lunarforums – Third Party Scripts and Services Forum

It is easy to see why PHPlist is possibly the best mailing list script out there.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!  

Related Tips and Tricks:

• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages
• Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages
• WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch