Information for New Accounts: Introduction

So you've obtained your Level Ten Hosting hosting account and have your web site already under construction. Now is the time to examine some of the resources available to you on Level Ten Hosting, and see how you can take advantage of them to build a more powerful, efficient site. Our services are designed to facilitate the construction of web sites that do more than merely present static information to your visitors. Successful web sites use many technologies that provide 'behind the scenes' information processing, to create content that engages and involves your visitors.

The following is a short overview of resources available on Level Ten Hosting servers, and how you can make use of them to build a better web site.

Apache is the most widely implemented web server on the internet today. Fully two-thirds of all web sites are hosted on Apache servers, which has proven to be a secure and reliable platform. Apache if fully capable of serving tens of thousands of web pages every minute. In all but the largest of web sites, apache is simply faster than the competition.

Apache's noncommercial, flexible development methods mean that bugs are fixed, and distributed to end users mere hours after their discovery - so when a security problem is discovered within the Apache software, you wont be left waiting for a corporation to fix it while your web site lies vulnerable to hackers.

Apache's core abilities are powerful in themselves, and new abilities may be added to it in the form of plug-in modules. In the day to day running of your web site however, some of these functions will be used more often than others:

Server Side Includes

By including specific text in your HTML documents, you can pass instructions to the apache server for it perform various actions on your HTML, before it is actually sent out to a visitor on your site. A common usage of this is to include a 'footer' at the bottom of all web pages from your site. By including a "server side include" [a small extra tag] at the bottom of each HTML document, the web server will attach a file you specify to each page. In this manner, instead of wasting time and disk space adding this footer by hand [and checking to make sure you haven't missed it anywhere] you can have the web server perform this for you. If you're tired of adding that "copyright, your company, 2000, all rights reserved" at the bottom of every page, you'll appreciate that SSI is a serious tool. More can be found on SSI in Building your Site: SSI.

HTTP Logs

If you've come from a free web hosting service before Level Ten Hosting, you've probably tried to use 'counters' to track the number of visitors to your web site - and likely discovered that counters are not a great way to monitor your site's traffic - they just aren't designed for the job. The Apache web server maintains its own HTTP Logs - blow-by-blow accounts of every file served up by your web site, who viewed them, with what browser, and when. With this raw information you can make use of Log Analysis Tools that can analyze your traffic patterns over certain times of the day, to certain areas of your site, and other information.

Secure Socket Layer

Called SSL for short, this is the basis for secure sites. SSL allows visitors to your site to both submit and view information over a cryptographicly secure link that renders 'wiretapping' of the data sent impossible. With SSL your customers' data is protected.

CGI

For a site to be more than just a collection of static pages [the 'electronic brochure' syndrome] it must offer interactive content. For that to come about, your site needs to do things - to offer functionality to your visitor. This may be as simple as a guestbook or message board, or a fully operational online ordering and tracking system. CGI is the path most taken to achieve this. CGI is Common Gateway Interface - a way to run programs on the web server itself and process information dynamically. Alongside the preconfigured CGI applications we include with your account, we allow you the freedom to run your own CGI scripts. Several languages are supported, including Perl, Python, TCL, and C.

Protected Directories

Apache can be configured to behave differently, depending on what directory within your site it is serving files from. One of these configuration options is to only serve pages from that directory after a password is provded. More on this here.

Configurable Error Pages

'404 Error not found' - not only is this sight disheartening, its downright unhelpful. We all want to make our web sites accessible to our visitors, and custom error documents are one way to help achieve this. Instead of the dreaded '404' message, you can instead have the web server display a page that gives a set of links to major areas of your site, to get your visitors back on track. The same can be set up for other types of errors - pages that have moved, or when a login to a protected directory is denied. All of these pages can be edited in real time using your Control Panel.

E-mail has always been, and continues to be the true 'killer app' of the internet. Having a strong e-mail system behind your web site is one of the best ways to communicate with your site visitors. People make note of addresses that are easy to remember, and e-mail is often the first line of contact for your visitors after your home page. You most likely already have your own e-mail addresses through your internet service provider, so being able to incorporate your Level Ten Hosting mail with your existing mail is important here too. Here are some of the tools available to you with Level Ten Hosting.

POP Accounts

Like your e-mail account with your ISP, POP accounts are e-mail addresses that store received e-mail on the server, for you to collect later. Your account starts with one of these by default, and you may add extra addresses to your domain, so people within your organization can receive e-mail at your domain as well.

IMAP Accounts

For those that need to access email from multiple locations, POP might not be sufficent. IMAP is a great alternative in which mail and folders are kept on the server, giving the user ubiquitous access to email from any location. All popular email clients support the IMAP protocol.

Email Forwarding

Forwarders allow you to receive mail at several addresses, all while receiving it with the same account. A common example is to set up a 'webmaster@yourdomain.com' address, which is forwarded to your main e-mail address.

Auto-Responders

Auto Responders allow you to automatically reply to messages without having to respond to each individually. This is a valuable tool for automating information requests sent to your site.

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists have a long history on the internet as an efficient way to facilitate communication between interested parties - and they work much like their real world counterparts, with the exception that people subscribed to the list may be given permission to send their own messages to the list.

File Transfer Protocol [FTP] is a well established standard for transferring files across the internet. There are several FTP clients available on all major operating systems. With FTP you can quickly and easily add or remove files, all in real time.

Several features allow you to setup and control ftp accounts on your domain.

Anonymous FTP Access

If you've ever downloaded a file from the internet, chances are you've used anonymous FTP. The 'anonymous' part indicates that you don't need to have an account on the system you're receiving the file from - its a public file server. Offering a public file server on your own site has many strong points in its favor - although you can make files available on your web site through HTTP, ftp is much faster and more reliable than HTTP for transferring files, and has additional features, such as the ability to resume a failed download. Used correctly, anonymous FTP can become another valuable part of your site design.

Extra FTP Accounts

You can create extra FTP accounts on your domain to allow access to certain directories, or to have another user maintain your site's files without giving them access to your main directory or control panel.

More on FTP

Learn more about FTP here.

If data is the heart of computing, then the SQL language could be the blood. For over twenty years, the Structured Query Language [SQL] has been the defacto standard for accessing databases over a network. SQL servers provide data storage and management services that can be accessed conveniently from many scripting languages and CGI systems. Using SQL is both easier and quicker than storing and accessing data from a 'flat' text file.

Level Ten Hosting offers the MySQL database server, which has a reputation as a fast, reliable, and easy to use database server. MySQL's performance makes it the ideal solution for web based solutions.

Data Storage / Processing

The basis of the SQL language is the concept of storing data in tables of related information, and retrieving this data according to certain criteria:

"show all inventory categories with less than ten units remaining"

"show all accounts whose payment is due in the next week"

This data could be any type of data; customer records, product information, inventory, etc. The SQL language is extremely flexible in the kind of data that can be expressed.

E-commerce Applications

If you are looking to create online commerce solutions, then the use of SQL services will likely be a high priority. Much of the work involved in a commerce site can be accomplished through the use of the SQL language, and the speed and security of data stored in SQL databases fulfills much of the criteria for a successful commerce site.

More on MYSQL

There are many books and tutorials for SQL online. You can also find documentation for MySQL at http://www.mysql.com.

If you have encountered web development tools such as Cold Fusion or Active Server Pages, then the uses for PHP will be immediately apparent.

PHP [www.php.net] is a server-side scripting language, with built in methods to access database services through SQL, and is a powerful alternative to CGI applications for processing data before it is viewed by your sites visitors. The uses for PHP are too diverse to go into detail here, but here are some ideas to start with:

Rapid Database Driven Site Generation

It used to be the case that database access was only possible through the use of a CGI application running on the server, which requires extra modules and lengthy code. PHP, like other server-side script languages [ASP, Cold Fusion, etc.] speeds this process by providing fast, direct access to SQL databases in a very human readable syntax. Unless your needs are very specific or you have a pre built system, implementing your site with PHP is often the fastest way to build database services into your web site.

Dynamic Page Generation

Another common use of PHP with a SQL server, is the ability to create web pages on the fly. Using a template page written in PHP, you can retrieve images, text , etc. from an SQL server to construct the final HTML page that is seen by the web browser. A classic example of this is a product information page. Instead of generating hundreds of HTML pages, each describing a separate product and consuming much disk space, product descriptions, photographs and other information are stored in an SQL database, and a template PHP is generated. When a client requests information on a certain product number, the PHP template requests the corresponding information from the database, and constructs a completed web page of the product information that is presented to the client. This approach saves much work, especially when the time comes to alter product information, add/remove products and other site management tasks.

More on PHP

There are many books and tutorials for PHP online. You can also find documentation for PHP at http://www.php.net.

Linux is a true multi-user operating system, able to have many users logged into the system and running programs simultaneously [not just accessing files, but using the system as though they were actually at the machine's keyboard].

This remote access to run programs on the server is provided to Level Ten Hosting customers through Secure Shell [ssh]. Secure shell allows remote access to the server while encrypting all data that is sent over the connection. Shell access allows you to manage your site and files very efficiently with a unix command prompt. Many tasks that would take hours can be scripted to run automatically.