Support
If you have a problem, or a question, or you just need some more information you've come to the right place. We'll try and keep the most commonly requested support information on this page and we also have information about getting an expert to personally attend to your problem or answer your question over the telephone.
Self Help
Your first point of call should be the server status page (login required) from there you'll be able to see if there's any scheduled maintenance or temporary problems that might be affecting your service.
Next you should consult our Hosting Guides (see below) to make sure you have everything configured correctly.
Contact our experts
If you've tried to work it out on your own but need a bit more then get in touch. Together, our team have more than 66 years of experience in IT, the Internet, Server Administration and Software Development.
- Bundled Support
As part of our service to you we provide you with a best-efforts based support solution. This is available via email (and soon from this website) only, i.e. not by telephone.
- Paid Support
We have a variety of support options to offer you. From subscription based 24/7 telephone support, on-site support, support via instant messenger and remote-control, to bespoke programming or consultant visits. Request more information.
Hosting Guides
We have provided the key information that will help you get started with your hosting in these easy to follow guides, there are two guides because the instructions differ depending on what type of hosting you have purchased. If you're not sure which of the hosting guides applies to you, check your hosting details here (login required) or contact our experts.
Hosting Guide: UNIX and Windows Guide
This section of the hosting guide is for customers with our UNIX based or Windows based hosting.
Here is some information that you will find useful when setting up your account.
Control Panel
To use your control panel point your web browser to cp.<yourdomain> and login with your username and passord. With your control panel you can access a whole range of settings and information to customise your hosting such as Mailbox, MySQL and Usage Statistics
You can access your email with a mail client (eg. Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook) using POP you can use your web-browser to access webmail.
Your email address will normally be <username>@<yourdomain> (e.g. 'fred@bloggsco.com') but you can set up forwarding to create other addresses and have mail delivered to your address,you can set this up yourself from your control panel.
POP3 (Incoming Email)
Set your mail client to collect mail from mail.<yourdomain> (e.g. mail.bloggsco.com) you will also need to provide your mailbox username and password. Hint: your mailbox username is your account name followed by a dash and the mailbox name (e.g. 'bloggsco-fred'). If your account allows it, you can also set up additional mailboxes from your control panel, please ask if you need more than your account allows.
Webmail
To access your mail with a web browser (eg. Firefox
or Internet Explorer) simply go to webmail.<yourdomain> and sign in using your usual
mailbox username and password.
Webmail is a great way to keep in touch while on holiday (from an Internet cafe for example) since all
you need is a web browser and an internet connection.
SMTP (Outgoing Email)
SMTP is for outgoing email, we do not normally provide this feature for our UNIX Hosting customers as most are happy to use their ISP's smtp server (e.g. freeserve, aol) However if this is something you do require we can provide it at a small extra cost, please contact us for details.
Website
Your site is intially configured with an empty website directory, there are no html files at all, and accessing your domain name will produce an access denied error for this reason. You should upload (via FTP) a page called index.html which will be the page your visitors see when they first visit your site. If you don't have a website already we can provide advice and full website design solutions, see our services page for more information.
FTP
Set your FTP client (e.g. FileZilla) to connect to <yourdomain.ext> (e.g. 'bloggsco.com') with your usual username and password. Set the 'Default Directory' to /web as this is where your main website files are kept.
MySQL Database
If you have purchased a MySQL databases you can use your control panel to manage your table structures and data. To access your database from a scripting language (eg. PHP) use a hostname of localhost and specify your username and database password.
Hosting Guide: Linux
This section of the hosting guide is for customers with our Linux based hosting which we sometime refer to as 'Pro Hosting' or 'Virtual Hosting'.
Here is some information that you will find useful when setting up your account.
You can access your email with a mail client (eg. Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook) using POP or IMAP or you can use your web-browser to access SquirrelMail Webmail, the address for our Linux customers is http://<yourdomain>/mail/.
Your email address will normally be username@yourdomain.ext but you can set up aliases to be your nickname, your full name or whatever you like if you need help with this let us know.
POP3 (Incoming Email)
Set your mail client to collect mail from mail.opticblue.co.uk you will also need to provide your account's username and password. We can also provide APOP connections (where your password is sent encrypted) if you want to use this feature please ask us to enable it for your account.
IMAP (Read Email on the Server)
With IMAP your mail client accesses your mail directly on the server, it is not downloaded and removed from the server. This is very handy for accessing your email from several places (eg. home and work). You can organise your mail into folders on the server itself using your mail client. Set your mail client to access mail.opticblue.co.uk.
SMTP (Outgoing Email)
SMTP is for outgoing email, we provide this feature on the strict understanding that you will not use it to send Spam (or any unsolicited bulk email), any misuse of our SMTP server will lead to your account being suspended. Set your mail client to send via mail.opticblue.co.uk and also set your client to collect via POP before sending, this is important because our SMTP server requires that you authenticate yourself via POP before it will allow you to send email.
Webmail
To access your mail with a web browser (eg. Firefox
or Internet Explorer) simply go to
www.yourdomain/mail and sign in using your usual username
and password.
Webmail is a great way to keep in touch while on holiday (from an Internet cafe
for example) since all you need is a web browser and an internet connection. The
webmail software we use is called SquirrelMail - it's easy-to-use and lightweight
so it won't cost you much in bandwidth charges.
Forwarding
You can forward your email to another account, this might be useful if you already have an email account and want to keep everything in one place. To set this up see your Personal Profile in the control panel.
Website
Your site is intially configured with a single 'holding page' called index.html you should replace this page with your own content using FTP.
FTP
Set your FTP client (e.g. FileZilla) to connect to yourdomain.ext with your usual username and password. Set the 'Default Directory' to /web this is where your main website files are.
You can also put files in /users/your_username/web which is your own personal website (linked to your username, each user of your site has one of these) which can be accessed from a web browser at www.yourdomain.ext/~your_username
.MySQL Database
If you have one or more MySQL databases you can use the powerful yet easy to use tool phpMyAdmin [1] to manage your table structures and data. Log in at yourdomain/phpMyAdmin using your database username and password. phpMyAdmin is a powerful interface to your database and using it you can create and alter tables, search, input and modify data and even export your database schema or use it to backup your database. To access your database from a scripting language (eg. PHP) use a hostname of localhost and specify your database name, username and password.
Shell Access
If shell access is enabled for your account use an SSH client (eg. Putty) and your usual username and password.
[1] See the phpMyAdmin website for more information.
