FAQ

For free online help with HTML and other Web technologies visit http://w3schools.com

• Uploading your site files
• Logging in via SSH
• Account password
• Databases
• Logs and stats
• Password protecting pages
• CMS Caching
• Backups
• CGI scripts
• SSL
• Software Versions
• Email
• DNS

Uploading your site files

You can connect using SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol on port 22) SCP (Secure Copy, also on port 22) or regular old FTP (on port 21, though this protocol does not protect your password so it is not recommended.) If you are moving your Web site from a previous host, you'll need to first connect to their server and download all your site's files, then upload them to EE at:

         host/server:  ftp.electricembers.net
            username:  (your web hosting username)
            password:  *********

The HTML and PHP files that make up your Website go in the public_html directory inside your home directory. You can view the site at http://techforpeople.net/~username even before your domain name has been pointed at Electric Embers in DNS.

Logging in via SSH

You can connect directly to the UNIX shell to do many things with your account such as move, rename, edit, or delete files, change permissions or your password, view Webserver logs, work with MySQL, even read email using Pine.

         host/server:  web.electricembers.net
            username:  (your web hosting username)
            password:  *********

ssh username@web.electricembers.net 

Account password

Your password is your responsibility. Maintaining a strong password is how you prevent abuse of your account. You can set it to whatever you like, but simple words make very weak passwords. It's best to include some capital letters and some non-alpha characters like numbers or punctuation. If you forget your password you will have to contact us to have it reset. Keep in mind we can only do this for the contact person we have on file for the account.

Currently, the only way for you to change your password yourself is to log into your Web Hosting account via SSH and issue the command passwd.

Databases

If you would like a MySQL database, simply contact us and we'll create one for you. You can then work with your database using the command line tools or using the friendly graphical user interface of PHPMyAdmin. To use PHPMyAdmin, login with your database username and password (username is same as for FTP/shell logins, but password is different) at https://secure.electricembers.net/dbadmin. To use the mysql command line, or if you are configuring the MySQL settings in a database-backed application, use the hostname "db".

To migrate a database from a previous Web host to EE, you should first create a database dump on the old host, then download that dump file along with the rest of your Web site files and upload it to EE, where you can import it into your new database. The dump command at the old host should be something like:

     mysqldump -u username -p'password' databasename > dumpfile.sql

     mysql -h db -u username -p'password' databasename < dumpfile.sql

Logs and stats

You can see statistics for your Website's traffic by using your Web hosting username and password to access:

       https://secure.electricembers.net/stats/your-domain.org

You can also find the current raw access and error logs at /weblogs/your-domain.org and /weblogs/error/your-domain.org, if you connect via SSH or SFTP. (7 days' access log archives are at /weblogs/old/your-domain.org.[1234567].gz.) These record the IP address, date, time, and specific request. It can often be useful when debugging your site to keep an eye on the error logs with a command like

       tail -f /weblogs/error/your-domain.org

Password protecting pages

If you want to password-protect certain areas of your Web site or the whole site, the best ways to do that involve cookies or sessions that are managed by your Web application. But the easiest and most general way uses the built-in authentication mechanism of Apache, our Web server. You can read about setting up Apache authentication, including the advantages of using the somewhat more secure Digest authentication instead of Basic. Since many users just want the most basic protection and aren't too worried about the details, we've created a script that will ask you questions and set up the necessary files for you using Basic or Digest authentication. To run this script, log in to your shell account over SSH and type the command protect-web, and it will ask you a series of questions before setting up the protected access.

CMS Caching

Caching can be very useful in making dynamically generated websites load faster while reducing the amount of resources required to serve them. If your CMS supports caching, we encourage you to turn it on. However, caching gone wrong can result in the accumulation of thousands of tiny useless files that interfere with our backups, so we ask that Electric Embers clients or their CMSs automatically delete cache files older than 3 hours.

Backups

To protect your data from catastrophic events and, to some extent, from operator error, we back up all user data (files and databases) every night. The backups are stored on a separate server in the same data center and also copied to a geographically remote server, currently located in Portland, Oregon. Each night's data is preserved for three days, so we can recover anything within that window, and we keep some older copies as well. Please let us know immediately if you discover any need for restoring any of your data from our backups.

Automatically backing up your own site or database can be very useful in protecting your data, but as you make multiple copies and store the backups in the same place as the source data, the usefulness factor decreases and is overcome by the increasing waste of resources factor, especially given the existing backup system described above. If you'd like to make automated backups of your EE-hosted data, you should transfer the backup copies offsite to your own PC or another storage system as soon as possible and delete the EE-hosted copy. Electric Embers clients are encouraged not to store more than 1-2 backup copies of the same data at any time.

CGI scripts

Executable CGI scripts written in perl, PHP, python, or any other language should be placed in the cgi-bin directory inside your home directory (alongside the public_html directory.) For reference in your scripts, the paths to Perl and Sendmail executables on our system are:

            /usr/bin/perl
            /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer is a cryptographic protocol useful when you need to exchange sensitive data through your Website (taking online donations by credit card, for example). If you would like private SSL set up under your own domain, please contact us.

Software Versions

We are currently running Apache 2.2.21, PHP 5.2.17, MySQL 5.1.54, Perl 5.10.1, and Python 2.6.6.