Hosting News

Handling duplicate content

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News, Web Design by Paul McEwan on March 10, 2010 | No Comments

Trying to increase search engine relevance by duplicating content within a website is an old trick that search engines figured out a long time ago. In those days some SEO people went so far as to duplicate and publish the website hundreds of times with links all point ot one final landing page at the real site. If you try that today, it will not only fail but it will set you to the back of the SEO bus. When building a new website or signing up to a template site where all the content is provided (and therefore duplicated hundreds of times), sooner or later handling the duplicate content needs to be dealt with. How do we do this? Let me count the ways.

If you are signing up to a site where all the content is provided then please edit it all. Every last bit. No time? Hide the pages you will come back to later.

If you have a high traffic web site receiving most of the visits and another one you are planning to move to as a new re-designed website, (giving it a new URL and a fresh new look),  then you don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old site. But you can’t keep both sites online because they will have duplicate content and that is something often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed?

The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page:

With PHP:

The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first.

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

With .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L]

The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page.

With the rel=”canonical” directive:

If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color.

This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified. This code needs to be placed in the header section of all the web pages you wish to lead somewhere else.

With the URL Redirection Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel:

If you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used.

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.

phishing for passwords

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News by Paul McEwan on January 20, 2010 | No Comments

It has recently come to our attention that a lot of our hosting users are recieving emails, prompting them to follow a certain link and update the password for their email address. Please be advised that this type of email is considered as SCAM and in case you receive a similar message, you should either delete it or mark it as Spam/Scam.

The email passwords on our servers can be changed from just one place – the Email Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel by the account owner only.

.CN TLD registrations temporarily disabled

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News by Paul McEwan on January 13, 2010 | No Comments

We have recently been informed by both eNom and Instra, the domain name registrars we are working with, that they are no longer accepting registration requests for the .CN TLD, as well as for its derivatives – .COM.CN, .NET.CN and .ORG.CN. The reason for this is a new policy for the provision of WHOIS details enforced by the CNNIC. The explanation from CNNIC states that they want to enhance the authenticity, accuracy and integrity of the domain name information provided for new domain name registrations.

For the moment, this affects only new domain owners – all renewals of .CN domain names will go without problems.

There is no information as for how long this suspension will continue. As soon as we have new information on the subject, we will let you know.

Online security – prevent your site from being hacked

Posted in: Hosting News by Paul McEwan on January 6, 2010 | No Comments

We don’t really have to say how much website security is important – nobody would like to wake up one morning and see his home page offering cheap Viagra or Cialis, for example. There are a lot of ways to prevent this, and today we will share with you some tips on how to better secure your site.

Use the latest software versions. While this may sound like something, which everybody knows and does, it’s not uncommon to find a very old version of a script running on a certain site. The words “it was working okay, so why update it” can sound like a reasonable excuse, right until the moment your site is hacked. Newer software versions often include security patches for exploits found in previous versions. This is very important if you are using a CMS script like Joomla or WordPress.

Check for common vulnerabilities. Cross-site scripting and SQL injections are the usual suspects – there are a lot of tools, which can help you check if your site is secure. Such vulnerabilities are most commonly found in custom developed websites – the popular CMS scripts are usually well protected against such attacks.

Check your log files. The log files may seem like just gibberish and non-sense technical data, but they are actually important – they can show you information about who tried to access your site, what errors were caused, etc. It’s always surprising what you can find in your logs. A check a week or so will not hurt your free time, but will be good for your site’s security.

Check your files’ permissions. On a Linux sever, the file permissions will determine who can access and modify your files. Select your permissions so that only you can edit them, and avoid using 777 permissions – a file with such permissions can be edited and executed by anybody, which is dangerous.

Use secure passwords. The simplest type of attack is a brute force attack – a script will try to guess your password, using random letters and numbers. The more complex the password is, the harder it will be to break it down. Passwords, such as “mypass”, are much easier to break. A combination of lower and upper case letters plus numbers will make the password much more secure – mYp43s. If possible, you can also add symbols to make your password even more secure. However, have in mind to keep your passwords easy to remember – you wouldn’t want to forget your password and not be able to log into your mail, for example.

Login to your hosting account here

Posted in: Blog, Hosting News by Paul McEwan on January 2, 2010 | No Comments

As we said before, if we build websites then why not offer hosting? There are too many hosting companies out there who offer design. In most cases the web design offering suffers because they’re in the business of selling hosting, not design. Design businesses that offer hosting? Now that’s unique. We’ve integrated the hosting part into our webdesign offering giving you easy access to both.

On the sidebar of every page of this website you will notice the new “HOSTING ACCOUNT LOGIN”. This is for accessing your hosting control panel. Re-direct domains, purchase domains, add an email account, upload files, install a script, install WordPress or whatever you need to do, you can do it from here. The Hosting Account Control Panel is equipped with video tutorials and 24/7 support if you ever need it.

Keep up-to-date with the latest news regarding your web server with our new blog category ‘Hosting News‘

Don’t have a website? Get a website here!

Just one more example of how “integrated” design works to make your life easier.

Tribal Yell Control Panel updated – Video tutorials included

Posted in: Hosting News by Paul McEwan on | No Comments

Dear Clients,

After several weeks of intense shooting and editing, we have finally completed another interesting project – we have updated almost all of the video tutorials in the our Web Hosting Control Panel!

Aside from just shooting new videos, we have integrated them in almost every section of the control panel. This way, if you are in doubt you can always look for the video icon and watch a short video presentation on how things are done.

All of the videos are also present in the new and improved ‘Video Tutorials’ section of the Control Panel. They are divided by categories, to make it easier to find the needed video at any time.

Scheduled server maintenance

Posted in: Hosting News by Paul McEwan on August 25, 2009 | No Comments

We’d like to inform you of a scheduled maintenance on the server where your hosting account is located – supremecenter25.com. The procedure is explained by the necessity for one of the server’s hard disk to be re-placed with a better performing drive. The procedure will start at 10 AM GMT (5 AM EST) and will take about 15 minutes to complete. Please excuse us for any inconvenience that this procedure may have caused to you or your site visitors.

PHP Settings section gets a major update

Posted in: Hosting News by Paul McEwan on August 10, 2009 | No Comments

Today, we can proudly present to you the new and improved PHP Settings section in our Web Hosting Control Panel.

Before, the sole purpose of the PHP Settings menu was to allow you to change the PHP version for the account. Now, from there you can also modify the php.ini file, responsible for the behavior of the PHP parser for your account. In other words, you can now disable and enable some of the most important options from the php.ini file with, with a single click only.

Next to each of the settings is a detailed explanation of what they control and what will happen if you modify it, a small addition, which can help a lot of the novice users to better understand PHP.
This new menu also allows you to restore the default setting at any time, with just a single click. And for our advanced users, who prefer the traditional php.ini file, there is also an Advanced Mode, which will open the php.ini file, ready to be changed in any way. This way, you will no longer have to go to the File Manager, then browse all the way to the /sys folder, and enter the needed /php folder, a needlessly complicated and time-consuming procedure.

The updated PHP Settings menu is now available on all of our servers. If you run into any sort of problems while using it, don’t hesitate to open a support ticket and let us know about them, so that we can fix them as soon as possible.

PHP v6 Support Now Available on All Servers!

Posted in: Hosting News by Paul McEwan on April 2, 2009 | No Comments

Dear clients,

It us our pleasure to inform you that, as of today, support of PHP v6 is available on all servers in our web hosting network.

This is a brand new version of PHP that still needs to be stabilized online. Therefore, the version is still recommended utterly for test purposes and experimental use. We are introducing the new version in our system earlier in advance, as there are already lots of users interested in developing and maintaining dynamic web sites through PHP v6 enabled software. We would like to advice you, however, to restrain from relying fully only on this version until PHP v6 is officially confirmed as a stable release.

Considering the global software world’s trend of moving towards language and cultural sensitivity, the most outstanding feature in PHP v6 – the Unicode support – comes as a timely response! For all of you interested in implementing the new PHP support, please, switch to the new version from the ‘PHP settings’ section in your Web Hosting Control Panel, or simply by running your files with the extension of “.php6″.