It's Easy to Setup Your Web Hosting Account

This page goes through all the points required to setup your new web hosting account.

If you are transferring from an old web host, also be sure to read over the transfer check list as well as all the details here.

Contents

Where to begin

When you signed up with Alive Hosting you would have received 3 important emails from Alive.

1. The signup Invoice email - just for your records, shows how much you have been charged
2. The welcome Login email - has all the important information on how to access your new hosting account, including Alive Control Panel login details, FTP details, and temporary URL details
3. The new DNS details email - this is for you to change at your registrar so that you can point your domain to our servers

With these details you can begin setting up your new web site. We recommend that you do it in the following order:

1. Login to the Alive Control Panel and configure and setup the email accounts that you require.
2. Then login to the server with an FTP program to upload your web files.
3. Lastly change over your domain name to point to our servers, being aware that it takes between 24-48 hours to do this. When you are ready to do it, login to your registrar and re-configure your DNS details to point to our servers.

Once this is complete, tested and working, your web site is fully setup.

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Control Panel - How to login

You can easily login to the Alive Control Panel by visiting www.alive.com.au and entering the login username and password that you used to create the web hosting account into the bottom right hand corner of the screen and clicking the red GO button. You can also find the login username and password in the welcome login email you received when you signed up.

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Email Setup

To setup the email accounts that you require you need to login to the Alive Control Panel as shown above. Once you are in the control panel, you will see a group of icons at the bottom of screen.

Please click the Email icon (you can also get to this from the Mail Info on the left hand menu).

On the next screen you will see a box that shows you all your email details.

At the top it has a drop down list that shows which domain you are creating email accounts for. If you have multiple domains associated with this account, please select the appropriate domain and click Go.

Next you will see your Incoming and Outgoing mail servers. Your POP3 Incoming Mail server is always mail.yourdomain.com (yourdomain being your actual domain name). Then below all this it shows the list of current email accounts setup.

The 2 email addresses shown by default are postmaster@yourdomain.com and webmaster@yourdomain.com

postmaster@yourdomain.com
You cannot delete the postmaster@yourdomain.com – it is part of the system and must remain there. If you do not want to use this domain, just leave it and do not tell anyone about it, therefore you will not receive any email to it. If you do want to use it, you will need to add it as a new email address to your email program. Its username will be the full email address and the password will be the same as the password to the control panel and the FTP.

webmaster@yourdomain.com
This email address can be kept or deleted. If you wish to use it its username will be the full email address and the password will be the same as the password to the control panel and the FTP.

To add new email addresses click the Add new mail resource link.

You will then have the option of setting up either a:

• New mail box – this is a fully operational POP email account
• A mail forwarding address – this points to another already existing email address - this can be ANY email address
• An alias to a mail box already setup on this domain – you need to select a POP email account that you have already within our system and point the alias to it
• A mailing list – this creates a new mailing list which will have members
• A new auto-responder mail address – this can be an auto-responder for a new email address or be an auto-responder for an already created email address, you create the email that you want to be automatically sent to people when they send an email to this mail address

Once you have created an email address - a fully operational POP email account - you will need open your email program to configure it – this could be Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, or any other number of email programs.

Most of the time you will select a menu item like Tools and then an option called Accounts, or Email Accounts. From this you will be able to configure your new mail box.

To configure your email program to collect new mail from the new POP mail boxes you have just created you will need to enter the following settings:

With these details your POP email accounts will be setup and fully operational.

You do not need to configure your email program to check email forwarding or email aliases as they just point to other real POP email accounts.

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FTP Setup - File Transferring

After you have setup your email addresses you will want to upload your web site to our server. There are 3 main ways you can do this:

1. You can use an FTP program to upload the files and access your server, some examples are:
• WS FTP LE - free
• CuteFTP - free
• FTP Voyager
  
2. You can upload your files via the web using the Alive Control Panel. For this you will need to login to the control panel, then click the WebShell3 button at the bottom the screen. Following this you will have to enter your username and password. With those entered you'll be loged into a web based FTP program and you can upload files and make changes on your server.
   
3. Or, if you are running a modern operating system like Windows XP you could add your server details as a New Network Place.

Whichever way you wish to upload your files, each of the 3 methods above will require you to enter 3 things to login to the server. Please check your welcome Login email, as it has your required FTP login details in it. These will be:

Enter these details via the FTP methods mentioned above (FTP program, Alive Control Panel, or network place) and you will have access to the server.

Once you are in the server, the first thing you will see is a folder for each domain name you have associated with our hosting service, plus a folder called logs.

The logs folder has within it a folder for each domain name, and within those folders are the raw log files for all the site statistics for that domain name. You would only need these if you wish to import this raw data into a statistics analysis program. Please see the section below on Site Statistics.

To actually upload your files, you will need to enter the folder which is called yourdomain.com

From there you will see a few folders and a couple of .HTML files.
It is recommended that you do not delete the login.html file and that you rename the index.html into something else (eg. windex.html)

You can now upload all your web site files and folders.

It is recommended that after you have FTPed up your web files you test the site on the temporary URL included in your welcome Login email. If everything is working as it should be, your domain name is ready for transfer and re-deligation.

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DNS Setup - Domain Name Server

To actually transfer and re-deligate your registered domain name to our servers you will need to contact your domain name registrar (the company who registered your domain) or login to your domain name registrar’s web site (if you have the username and password required to login) and re-configure your DNS details yourself.

If you registered your domain name with Alive Domains, just refer back to your membership email which has your username and password, login to the admin area and modify your DNS details.

Every domain name as 2 DNS (Domain Name Server) entries, a Primary DNS and a Secondary DNS.

Please check your third welcome email from Alive Hosting which includes the new correct DNS entries. They most likely are:

But please check your email and make sure you enter them correctly.

It takes 24-48 hours for the re-deligation changes to propagate around the whole internet and for all servers to point your domain our servers. During this time there could be minor disturbances to the delivery of your email. It is recommended that you choose a quieter 2 days (eg. a weekend) to make this change over. If you follow the order of the steps above, you will minimise all such disturbances during the change over, and most likely will have none at all. We have found that when our clients follow this simple order, they have had no disturbances. Following the steps above, your web site itself should have a very smooth transition to our servers with little or no down time.

If you have multiple domain names you will need to make these DNS changes for each one.

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Register with the search engines

Be sure to register with the search engines and directories as soon as your site is ready for launch on the new server. It usually takes about 6 weeks for the results to show up from the major search engines and directories.

Our Alive Control Panel includes a basic registration service that tells the search engines about your web site. You can find it under Domains Settings in the left hand navigation menu - a link called Submit URLs. Click the link then select the domain you wish to submit, and fill in the keywords and site description, tick the search engines you wish to submit to and then click submit.

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Site Statistics

Our web hosting services come standard with detailed site statistics. The program for analysing your site stats that comes for free with our hosting plans is called Webalizer. To view your site stats with Webalizer please use the following links, using your domain name and depending on your server type:

www.yourdomain.com/webalizer/default.html - Windows
www.yourdomain.com/webalizer/index.html - Linux

Apart from this, you have 3 methods of view site statistics:

• Webalizer, as shown above
• Raw log files – seen in the FTP login area, these are for importing into an analysis program of your choice
• Urchin – a very sophisticated site statistic business analysis tool which provides you with a great deal of useful information to understand how people are visiting and using your web site. Urchin can be added to any domain name on our server. See our add-on pricing.

Improve Your Site - Increase Revenue

How are visitors getting to your site? How are they using your site? Are visitors converting into customers? Which marketing efforts are paying off? Urchin answers all of these questions and many more with its detailed unique visitor reports. Urchin sets the bar with the most advanced visitor tracking methods in the industry. Urchin's reports allow you to optimize your website and save money by increasing the effectiveness of your marketing dollars. And Urchin is the only analytics product to use Adobe's SVG technology to display stunning charts and graphs that load instantly. Change your report's date range or use Urchin's report side filters to modify the information you are viewing and Urchin's graphics update in a blink.

With Urchin's powerful analytics engine, you can:

• Analyze and optimize Cost-Per-Click campaigns across networks such as Google and Overture
• Create vivid 3-D charts and graphs and easily import them into common Office applications
• Get the most accurate Unique Visitors and Click Paths information in the industry via the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM2), which is included at no charge
• See where your traffic is coming from - search engines, banner ads, referrals, email campaigns and more
• Analyze downloads, bandwidth usage, errors, and much more that is only possible with software-based web analytics

To find out more about Alive Hosting's Urchin service, click here.

You activate Urchin from within the Alive Control Panel - under Web Options, under the domain of your choice - you click the Urchin 4 statistics option.

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Webmail

Webmail is a service which enables you to view your email online. This comes standard and part of our web hosting services.

To access your email via webmail you can:

1. Go to http://mail.yourdomain.com and click the IMP mail client link
2. Or you can login to the Alive Control Panel and click the webmail icon

Option 1 - Logging into http://mail.yourdomain.com

• Enter the login username of your email address – this is the full email address
• Enter the password of your email address
• Choose a mail server – there are two to choose from, try the second one first, if this does not work, select the first one
• Choose the language of your choice – eg. English
• Then click login

Option 2 - Logging into webmail via the control panel:

• Enter the login username of your email address – this is the full email address
• Enter the password of your email address
• Then click to login

Once you are inside you can compose new email messages and receive email as well. You can create new mail folders, delete email, add attachments to emails, create address books and all other normal email commands.

The system does not come default with the ability to save sent mail items. This will take up a lot of your allocated disk space. However, if you wish to set up this function:

• First setup a new email folder called “sent items”
• Then click options
• Under “your information” click the personal information link
• Click edit your profiles
• Enter all the related personal information
• Click the save sent mail box
• And choose the “sent mail folder” from the drop down list
• Click the create button – and you’re done, you now have saved sent items

You will now have all sent emails saved.

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SiteStudio - Auto Web Page Builder

Every hosting account comes standard with the ability to build web pages from the online web page builder SiteStudio - for free. You can access SiteStudio and start building web pages right away through the control panel. No coding is needed, everything is a simple point and click, even the uploading to the server. If you can send an email, you can easily build a web page with SiteStudio.

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Database Setup

There are a number of database options available to you with our plans. The following plans have the following databases available:

You can activate and setup these databases from the Alive Control Panel. Some of these have additional pricing. To see this pricing please see the add-on pricing page.

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Web Hosting Add-ons

There are a number of add-ons that do not come standard with our web hosting plans, such as media streaming, certain database functions, custom DLL components, etc. To see a list of them see the add-on pricing page.

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Custom Components

It is possible to add additional components to our servers. You must first request this, the component will be reviewed to see if it suitable and safe to run on our servers. There is a small setup fee. With this service, for example, you can add custom DLL and PERL components, plus others. Please contact us regarding this.

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Media Streaming

As part of our web hosting options we offer media streaming. This is the capability to have streaming video on your web site.

We offer the two main forms of media streaming, Real Streams (available on both Windows and Linux – standard 1 stream) and Windows Media Streaming (only on Windows – standard 5 streams). To have this feature please contact us and we can set it up for you. See the add-on pricing page.

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Multi-Domain Name Accounts

Do you have multiple domains that require hosting? An amazing feature of Alive Hosting's plans is that we offer multiple domain accounts. This means that you can literally host 2, 3, 5, or 10+ domains on a single account. You don't pay any extra for this service, so long as your account remains within it's allotted server space requirements.

Most other web hosting providers charge a separate monthly hosting fee for each domain, but not Alive. We are committed to offering you cost effective web hosting - if you have a couple of domain names, group them under your accounts and start saving today!

You simply add additional domains through the Alive Control Panel, you click the domains icon.

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Registering New Domains

We offer a full domain name registration service through Alive Domains. We offer great value for money with .com’s only AU$16.50 per year to register and a .com.au being only $88 for 2 years. If you need to register any type of domain name, simply click here.

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E-commerce Setup

We offer the ability to setup merchant accounts that provide your web site with real time live e-commerce capabilities. You just need to setup a merchant account with one of the major banks and then we can assist you with setting up your merchant gateway so that you can take credit card transactions online in a safe and secure environment. Contact us today to find out more about this.

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Shopping Carts Setup

We offer great shopping cart solutions for your e-commerce requirements. MIVA Merchant is a great option for setting up your online shopping cart. It has all the features you need to setup a professional shopping cart and it can integrate with your existing web site. Setting it up is available from the Alive Control Panel - you just click the MIVA icon.

A second option is the osCommerce shopping cart, also within the Alive Control Panel - you just click the osCommerce icon.

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Online Billing

To keep track of your web hosting payments you can login to the Alive Control Panel and click the online invoice icon. From here you can see what you have been charged for your web hosting and what dates you have paid up to.

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Technical Support

Alive Hosting is known for its superior level of support. Our experienced support team is dedicated to helping you get your questions answered in the quickest possible time. From extensive online resources to a convenient Trouble Ticket system Alive Hosting is here to help with all of your needs.

To find a quick answer to your question, go to our web site and click the support link and read the pages online to see if you can answer your own question.

Otherwise, to create a Trouble Ticket, simply login to the control panel and click the Support Centre link in the left hand navigation menu. You will see a knowledge base page appear with answers to some frequently asked questions.

On the left hand menu you will see a link to “Make a Ticket” click this and enter your details into the web form and press submit.

Alternatively, send an email to support@alive.com.au

Either way, we will get back to you promptly with an answer to your questions or problems.

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Guarantees

30 day money back guarantee
We're so confident in the quality of our services that we offer a full 30 day money back guarantee on all our website hosting plans. Remember, if you aren't happy with our web hosting you are free to cancel it and get a full refund if you do so within the first thirty (30) days of service. You will receive a full refund of all account fees, including set-up fees.

For more details - please see our Refund Policy.

Our 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Unlike other providers who claim to offer an uptime guarantee, we offer a true uptime guarantee policy with compensation for failure. While most hosting companies have vague to no information on monitoring information, calculation on their uptime statistics, and possible compensation, we spell out our responsibilities for our clients with respect to uptime.

Support Guarantee
Alive guarantees that an open trouble ticket or email sent to support will be answered within 2-24 hours from the time of arrival. Support issues not answered within that time limit will be granted 10% off monthly charges for that account.

Compensation For Failure
A guarantee is only as good as the issuer. Some providers guarantee the uptime, but offer no compensation for failure. Because we can stand behind our guarantee, we provide our clients with a 10% discount for the month in which we fail to meet our 99.9% uptime guarantee. Simply put, if a client hosted on one of our virtual servers registers less than 99.9% for the month, then at the end of the month the client will receive a 10% discount credit for that month.

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Transfer Host Check List

If you are transferring from an old web host, also be sure to read over the transfer check list, follow it, as well as all the details here.