Archive for October, 2009

The New Client Area

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Here’s another time-saving tip that’ll make you more productive and efficient with your Flare Hosting account.  Instead of sending a support ticket to get your account changes done, let’s have a look at how the new Flare Hosting Client Area has put you in control of your account by giving you the ability to make changes previously done by the support teams.

First of all, you might be asking what is this “Client Area”?  This is your account portal and command central.  To log-in( https://www.flarehosting.com ), you’ll need to use the full email address(ie. yourname@domain.com) that you signed up your account with us as the username and your password will be your FTP password.  Once logged-in, you’ll see the “Client Area”.  The first bar across the top, positioned with the “Home” link in the center of the page is the Flare Hosting site navigation bar.  Here you can go back to the Flare Hosting Homepage, view our products, find-out more about us, check the blog area, or contact us.  This will move you around our site and you will not need to log-in to use this particular navigation bar.

Notice to the far right there is a “Quick Navigation” list and it does the same job as your “Client Area” navigation bar, but slightly more detailed.  Under the quick navigation icons you can see the contact information that we have listed on your account.  Further down is your Account Statistics. This gives you a quick overview of how may Products and Services you have with us, how many domains, how many referrals, your account balance, and the amount of any due invoices.  This is a very useful tool and you can quickly look here to see your account info without digging down into your account.

Now, the next bar across the screen and positioned more to the left of the page is your “Client Area” navigation bar and it is right above the words “Client Area”.  This toolbar navigates you through your Flare Hosting Account.  To come back to this main page at any time simply select the “Home” link.  Under the “Client Area” heading you will see where you are located in your account.  At this point we are in “Portal Home” and in the “Client Area” section, so you will see “Portal Home > Client Area”.  This will show you where you are as you browse your account.  Just as you select the Home link and come home, you can select any of the other links in this tool bar and you will be directed accordingly.

The links on the “Client Area” navigation bar are:

  • My Details
  • My Services
  • My Domains
  • My Invoices
  • My Support Tickets
  • Affiliates
  • My Emails

When you select “My Details” you are taken to the area where your personal information can be updated.  Please see the sections listed under “My Details”:

  • Manage Contacts – This is where you can manage the additional contacts that you added to your account.
  • Add New Contact –  This is where you can add additional contacts to your account.
  • Change Credit Card Details – This is where you will update your credit card on file
  • Change Account Password – This is your Client Area log-in password(not FTP)
  • Change Security Question – Security for your Client Area password

Next, to go back to the “Client Area”, we can select the link listed right under the heading “Client Area” (“Portal Home>Client Area> My Details”) or you can us the bar right above this and select “Home”.   We’ll now have a look in the “My Services” section.  Once this is selected you will be taken to a list of your products and services.

Notice that if you have multiple services or previous services, you will see some packages highlighted in green and some highlighted in red.  What this means is the green highlighted services are active services and the red highlighted services are inactive or closed services.  To the right of each service is a small white icon that looks like a sheet of paper with an arrow pointing to the right.  When you select this icon it will give you details about that particular service.  This is where you will need to go to make changes to your specific services such as purchasing add-ons (disk space, dedicated IP, sub-domains, additional ftp users, etc), upgrading or downgrading your packages.  Also this is where you would go to cancel your service.  Now, moving back to the Client Area, we will discuss the “My Domains” section.

From anywhere in the portal, you can select where you would like to travel next from the navigation bar across the top..  This time we’ll go to the “My Domains” section.  Once here you will see the domains that you have registered through Flare Hosting.  Again you will see the domains highlighted in red or green to label the domain as active or inactive.

Our next stop is in the “My Invoices” section. From here you can see what invoices are on your account.  The new billing system sends out your invoice 7 days before we attempt payment unless you use the mail-in option(Yearly Plans Only). This is why you may see an invoice on your account before it is actually due.  In this section you will see your recent invoices and you will be able to pay an existing invoice if it’s marked Unpaid.

If an invoice is red, this means that the invoice will need to be paid very soon. Anything in green will be listed as “Paid” and this can be printed out to act like a receipt.  To view your invoice, click on the “View Invoice” link.  When attempting to make payment on a invoice, you can select from the drop down box to pay via PayPal or credit card(authorize.net).

Under the “My Support Tickets” link you can go in and respond to any tickets you have sent to our support teams (Billing or Tech Support) under the email listed on the account.  If you have sent an email from a different address than what we have on file, it will not show up here.  You can create a support ticket here by selecting the “Submit Ticket” link.  You can review your emails sent and emails that have been replied to by the support teams.

Please also rate the tickets you have received from support as we try to supply great service and support. This rating helps us understand who is helping you and who is not.

Affiliates, we are working on getting our affiliate program up and running right now and should be finished pretty soon!

Our last stop is the “My Emails” section and this is where you will find emails that we have sent to you(ie. Customer Invoices, Order Confirmations, etc) .  This is your email history with Flare Hosting.

Blocking Port 25

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Have you ever been away from the office and your expecting an important email?  You grab your laptop and get over to the nearest hotspot/restaurant or you might even be in your hotel room.  You log-in as usual and send one or two emails out and everything’s fine but your Inbox is empty and it doesn’t seem like your getting any emails.  Before you give a call-in to your email support team, there are a few checks that you can do on your own to help you diagnose the problem, saving time and frustration.

There are a few basic checks you can do on the ports that your emails are sent through, but we’ll focus on one.   First, the most basic test is to check the connection to the port in the Command Prompt.  To get here, open your Windows ‘ Start Menu or select the Windows Key on your keyboard.  Go to “Run” which should be right above your “Start Button” in Windows.  Select “Run” and a box will open and type into the field “cmd” and OK or select your  Enter Key.    Wait for another box to open.  This will be the Command Prompt and it will be all black w/white letters.  It will say C:\Documents and Settings\yourname> and the cursor will be blinking.  Type in:

telnet mail.domain.com 25

…where mail.domain.com is your domain.  If everything is okay you will see something similar to  “220 mail.domain.com”.  If the port is blocked it will say “Cannot Connect”.

The protocol that runs over Port 25 is called SMTP.   So basically this port is being blocked by either the ISP or a firewall.  Again this is just a quick diagnostic test that you can run on your own and it gives you some general idea of what’s going on if your experiencing problems receiving your mail away from the office.

What should you do if Port 25 is being blocked?  The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking this port and you will need to call them.  If you’re in a hotel room check with the front desk first to see if there is a firewall that’s blocking your port and if they don’t have one they should be able to direct you to their ISP for help if those ports can be changed.  If you’re at a hotspot/restaurant you’ll need to move to another hotspot that isn’t blocking port 25.  Good luck, because getting the port changed at one of these spots is unlikely.   If you are getting this error it’s the ISP you need to contact, it’ll be easier to find another hotspot. Your support team cannot fix the issue, they can only inform you to contact your ISP to make these changes.

Linux Hosting is here!

Monday, October 19th, 2009

FlareHosting.com is pleased to announce the offering of Linux hosting plans.  While we have technincally offered Linux hosting plans to our customers for a few years now, we have not actively marketed these plans.  As of today, Linux hosting plans can be ordered directly from our website.  With all of our Linux plans, our customers receive the following:

  • Debian based Linux distribution running Apache 2.2
  • PHP5 support
  • MySQL database support
  • Perl / Python / Ruby on Rails
  • mod_rewrite support
  • SSH / SFTP support

More details on the plan features and pricing are available on our products page.  Linux hosting is a great solution for any one looking to host a PHP / MySQL based website.  A number of open source software packages run on these technologies. Linux would be a great platform for our customers to host a Wordpress blog, a Drupal CMS, a Joomla site, or their own custom application.

If you have questions about our Linux hosting offering, please feel free to contact our support department today.

Corrupt Exchange 2007 Information Store

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Have you ever had a corrupt Information store when using Exchange 2007?

It does happen. Hopefully you have a back up of the Information Store otherwise, you can try to repair the store using the exchange server tools. This process is not always successful and even if it is successful you can end up with errors and mailboxes that have corrupted indexes.

There are not any tools or commands available to re-index the mailbox. Here is a solution that I found that fixes the index of the mailbox.

  1. First open the “Exchange Management Console”.
  2. Expand “Server Configuration”.
  3. Click on “Mailbox”.
  4. On the right side of the screen click on “New Mailbox Database”.

This will open up the wizard to create a New Mailbox Database. Next, enter the new database name and the path to where you want to store the database. Click on “New” which will create and mount the new database.

Now, we need to expand the “Recipient Configuration” and click on “Mailbox”. Locate the user that you are having issues with and click on that user (Hold the “Ctrl” key to select multiple users). After selecting the users, click on “Move mailbox” on the right side. This will bring up the Move Mailbox Wizard. Click on the “Browse” button to select the database you created above and then click “OK”. Click “Next” on the next window. Select the “Global Catalog” and “Domain Controller” and then click “Next”. On the next screen, leave “Immediately” checked and click “Next”. This will move the mailbox.

After the move is complete, repeat this process to move the problematic mailbox(es) back to the Primary database. After this is completed the mailbox will be re-indexed.

I hope that is you ever come across this issue this helps you resolve it.

Backup your files

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Have you ever lost your hard drive at home or work?

It could really be disastrous.

Today with all of the digital cameras and video recorders, most people are saving all of their family pictures and videos to their computer. If their hard drive fails, they will lose everything, so to ensure that this does not happen, one would need to have a solid backup solution in place.

Most businesses rely on storing all of their important files on a computer somewhere. If these files are lost due to a hard drive failure, one could jeopardize their entire company. This is also a great place for a backup solution to come to the rescue.

Flare Hosting is now offering a new backup solution. Our solution is powered by BackupSpace.com. For a limited time, you can try this service with the low cost of $1.00 for the first month. If you like this product you can continue at the normal price.

  • Supports Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008
  • Off-site Secure Backup
  • Easy To Use Client Utility
  • Automated Scheduler Process
  • 256-bit Encryption
  • 128-bit SSL Secure Connection

Protect yourself from disaster and backup your files.

http://www.flarehosting.com/backups

Welcome to the FlareHosting.com Blog

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

About a month ago, FlareHosting.com launched our re-branded website and new billing system.  Along with those changes we also decided it was finally time to roll out a blog.   With the blog, we hope to be more interactive with our clients and bring us closer to those who are hosting with us.  We have a very knowledgeable staff with over 55 years of IT / hosting experience.  We will be using this blog to pass on some of that knowledge to you.

We’re hoping to get some feedback from everyone on the new website and blog.  Feel free to register for the blog and make a comment or two. The more interactive we can get with this the better.  Also, be sure to subscribe to our news feed if you find the content useful.  We plan on adding to the blog frequently.