Hosting Support

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We provide some self-service capabilities to allow you to manage your web and email hosting accounts.

Changing your Egressive email details

  1. Use your web browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.) to go to our secure email configuration login.
  2. You will be asked to accept our secure certificate - you can select to accept it for this visit only, or permanently. Either is acceptable. Accepting this certificate means that you can confirm that you're dealing with an Egressive server rather than a mean-spirited third party interested in collecting your password details - don't give them away!

Configuring your email software

There are many email clients available for people to use: Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, MailApp (OS X), among others. Because it is freely available for MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and because it's open source, secure, and very capable (particularly its on-board learning spam filter), the example below features Thunderbird. Other mail applications will require the same information, but the menu items and forms you fill in may have somewhat different organisation and terminology.

  1. Launch Thunderbird.
  2. Edit account preferences: Edit->Account Settings...

Accessing your hosted files

We support the use of the SSH protocol for accessing our hosting environments securely. Many good SSH clients exist, and we've listed good options for MS Windows and Apple Mac OS X below, with download links. If you are a Linux user, odds are that you already have an ssh/scp client installed on your system for use on the command line - here're some handy tips on using SSH (PDF file). Furthermore, Linux file managers like Nautilus and Konqueror among others, have integrated SSH support in spades.

Helpful Links

  • SSH Overview - a helpful one-paragraph explanation of the protocol
  • Putty - a very useful Secure Shell client for MS Windows users which lets you log in to your hosting environment securely. It provides you with a Linux shell prompt (i.e. command line) access and if you know how to use editors like nano, emacs, or vi, allows you to edit files in situ on the server.
  • WinSCP - a very good, free (open source) SCP and Secure FTP client that we recommend for MS Windows users. Provides the options of a Norton Commander or Windows Explorer style drag-and-drop interface.
  • Cyberduck - a very good, free (open source) Secure FTP client for Mac OS X. Highly recommended.

Some customers ask us if we support FTP or Telnet access, but both of these outdated protocols share a fundamental security weakness: they transmit your login and password in the clear across the internet. That means that anyone "sniffing" your details can immediately (and without anyone else's knowledge) gain access to your account as if they were you. As you can imagine, this is not desirable and we make every effort to maintain the security of your data on our servers.

What the heck is DNS?!

Domain Name Services are easily the single most confusing part of setting up a web site. Many have tried to explain it in non-technical terms... most have failed miserably. Here is a layperson's explanation which is pretty good, offering a general overview and then more detail for those who want to delve further. Here's an alternative treatment that seems more technically focused, but might help other people.