Setting up a Mail Group in Plesk 9

By on May 17, 2012 in User Guides

We recently touched on mail forwarding within Plesk 10 and how to handle the setup of emails that get forwarded to a group of people within your organization. Today we’ll touch on the same topic, but within the Plesk 9 control panel.

Plesk 9 has different terminology and configuration for forwarded or group email compared to Plesk 10. Although we provision Plesk 10 on all new servers, we thought we’d cover this in case you are still running with 9. The tool we will be looking at today is called the Mail Group, and it is very simple to setup and it lets you quickly add and manage group-based email accounts within the control panel.

If you have any questions about the video or mail groups please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know. You can open a support ticket or tweet at us on twitter.

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Understanding Bandwidth and Disk space usage statistics in Plesk 10

By on May 15, 2012 in User Guides

Plesk 10 introduced a much more comprehensive statistics reporting system than what was available in previous versions of the control panel. It has a very easy to use and easy to understand interface that allows you to quickly identify what is using up your bandwidth or disk space.

If you have been receiving notices from the control panel that you are approaching or already over your limits, be sure to check out this video and understand why before opening a support ticket.

If you have any questions about this video or anything within it please dont hesitate to open a support ticket or connect with us on twitter.

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Generating a Certificate Signing Request for SSL Certificates with Plesk 10

By on April 24, 2012 in User Guides

Securing your website is extremely important. There are a number of things you can do to help secure your site both from your computer, on our server, and by following best practices when storing information and passwords. One big piece of the puzzle when securing a website is the addition of an SSL certification. This is a secure socket layer certification that encrypts data that is passed between a visitor and the server.

SSL certificates are very important – essential even – when handling sensitive information over the web. This information could include credit card information during the checkout process of an online order, or even member’s personal information if you are building a membership website.

Regardless of the reason you want to install an SSL certificate, it is not as difficult to do as many people seem to think. Below is a demonstration of generating the CSR (certificate signing request) from within Plesk 10 that will allow you to purchase an SSL certificate from any vendor.

I mentioned a couple times during the video that in order to install and run an SSL certificate you will need to have a dedicated IP address for your website. Also, it’s very important that you pay attention to what you put into the domain field as this cannot be changed. If you pay for the SSL certificate with the incorrect information entered, you will need to purchase an additional certificate as it will not be able to be changed. Use the subdomain or exact domain that you will want the certificate for.

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Handling Mail Groups in Plesk 10

By on April 23, 2012 in User Guides

Mail groups allow you to add multiple email accounts to the same email address. This is great if you have multiple people that need access to the same account but do not want everyone logging into the same mailbox. For example, if you have a support staff of three people and they all need to have access to the emails that are sent to support@yourbusiness.com then a mail group is the perfect solution.

Before Plesk 10, there was always an option to create a mail group within the control panel. You could add internal or external email accounts easily by selecting them from a list or adding them in a frield, respectively. Although this process was easy to do, Plesk 10 removes the complication of Mail Groups and handles it all with mail forwarding. Instead of having a specific group with both internal and external accounts, you simply add whatever email addresses you would like the account to forward to within the Mail Forwarding tab.

Here is a quick demo video on how to setup and manage your Mail Forwarding and Mail Groups when using Plesk 10.

If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us Twitter or open a support ticket.

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Changing and Increasing Mailbox Quota in Plesk 10

By on April 4, 2012 in User Guides

Here is a video on how to change the mailbox quota of a mail account from within Plesk 10.

By default, the mailbox quota is set to whatever you first entered when setting up the domain. If you are using pre-set templates this can be as little as 10MB. If you are getting notifications of approaching your quota, it does not mean that you are approaching your total hosting space limit, instead, you can simply increase the quota by following the steps in the video below.

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Setting up an email auto-responder in Plesk 10

By on March 26, 2012 in User Guides

Setting up an email auto responder is a great idea if you are going away on vacation, or you receive too many emails to respond to in the run of a day. Having a good auto responder can help automate and streamline your business, and provide excellent customer service while you are away on vacation or simply out of contact for a short period of time.

Here is a quick video on setting up an email auto-responder or auto-reply within the Plesk 10 hosting environment.

If you have any questions on setting up an auto responder connect with us on twitter and we will be happy to help.

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Adding SPF Records in Plesk 10

By on March 13, 2012 in User Guides

This morning we are doing a quick tutorial video on how to add an SPF Record in Plesk 10. If you are not using SPF records, we highly recommend that you enable them by simply adding this TXT record to your DNS Settings in plesk. Having an SPF record will make sure that no other servers send email from your domain, which is dramatically reduce the amount of spam you could potentially send a receive.

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Adding MySQL Databases and Users in Plesk 10

By on February 29, 2012 in User Guides

This is a quick video post demonstrating how to add MySQL Databases and User accounts using the Plesk 10 Control Panel.

Some important things to remember:

  • Keep your username prepended to the start of the Database name to avoid issues with duplication
  • Choose a username that you will easily remember, perhaps related to the domain
  • Every team member can be assigned their own user account to ensure better change tracking
  • You can and should create separate MySQL Databases for each web application you are running

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Quick tip to reduce spam: optimizing Spam Assassin

By on February 27, 2012 in Email Hosting

We would like to introduce the first of our weekly tips to reduce the amount of spam you receive. From client-side filtering to server-side tweaking, we will show you how you can reduce the amount of spam you receive in your inbox on a weekly basis.

The first tip starts with optimizing Spam Assassin, a popular spam filter used mainly in Plesk hosting environments. Instead of boring you with text, we decided to put together a quick demo video on how to optimize the Spam Assassin’s spam sensitivity to increase the number of spam it catches.

The main takeaway here is that normal emails typically score between a 0 and 1. This means that the default sensitivity, 7, is very high and is likely to miss a lot of spam email. Most email that gets flagged as a 3 and above are typically spam and therefore by lowering the sensitivity, we allow Spam Assassin to catch and flag more spam.

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Reseller vs. Affiliate Web Hosting: How to get your business off the ground

By on February 22, 2012 in Web Hosting

If you are looking to add web hosting to your service options as a web-based service provider you might be stuck deciding between reseller web hosting or affiliate web hosting. Each have their distinct pros and cons but each have their place depending on what your goal is with the service. First lets look at what exact they each are and when you should consider them.

Affiliate web hosting

Affiliate hosting is when you sign up as an affiliate – or someone who refers customers for a commission – with a web host and simply send traffic or leads to their website. When one of these leads signs up as a customer, you earn a commission. The more you refer, typically, the higher your commissions will be per sale.

This type of hosting is great for people that:

  • Are looking to offer hosting as a service but do not want to deal with the customers themselves
  • Gain the trust of their readers or visitors easily and are comfortable referring them to a specific service
  • Are looking to add a little low-maintenance income to their online earnings portfolio

This type of business is very low-maintenance and is perfect for web master that have websites that are authorities in their industry. If you have the trust of your readers and can recommend a specific service you are able to make decent month this way. Instead of saying “sign up for web hosting” you simply recommend that they “sign up for web hosting at [my affiliate web host].”

Reseller Web Hosting

This type of web hosting is much more popular among web designers and developers that are looking to expand their service offerings. By offering an ongoing web hosting service not only will you potentially increase your revenue, but you also stay in touch with your customer and build an ongoing relationship.

The downside to reseller web hosting, is that for the most part you will be the primary contact with the client in the event that something is wrong with their web hosting – even when sometimes you won’t have all the solutions.

This type of hosting typically starts around $15 per month with the ability to manage and add/remove your own clients within a hosting environment. The great thing about this service is that when need be, you can scale your business and hosting needs with VPS hosting or a dedicated server when you outgrow your shared reseller package at very little extra cost.

This type of hosting is great for those that:

  • Want to stay connected with their clients on a monthly basis
  • Are more technically-inclined and are not afraid of doing a little troubleshooting
  • Already offer web-based services to clients surrounding design or development

Regardless of whether you are looking to setup an affiliate account or sign up for reseller web hosting, we can help you out. Click on the website hosting link at the top of this page for more information on our affiliate and reseller plans.

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