Getting Started with Web Hosting

Introduction

The purpose of this Startup Guide is to familiarize you with Own Web Now's Web Hosting. Own Web Now offers two web hosting platforms, one powered by Linux / PHP and the other powered by Microsoft Windows ASP.NET. The choice of the web hosting platform should be made by your web developer who can tell you which infrastructure they are more comfortable developing and managing. Regardless of which platform you choose, the order and configuration process is nearly identical as are the other features: pop3/imap mailboxes, MySQL databases, virtual ftp sites and DNS control.

Before you begin, make sure you have the control of the clients domain name registrar account because you may be making changes to their name servers.


	OWN Web Hosting Tour Shannon and Stephanie take you on a tour of our Web Hosting.

Ordering Website Hosting

1. Please login to the Own Web Now Support Portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com) with your email address and a password.

2. Click on the Service Manager tab. This will bring up the Service Manager Dashboard from which you can order and manage all your web hosting accounts.

3. You can quickly subscribe to all of our services on the right in the Add Services section. Click on New Web Hosting Site to proceed.

4. Please provide the Contact and Billing information for this order. You will be asked to confirm your billing data, address and the usual contract terms of service agreements.

5. Provide the domain name (without www.) you wish to use with your web hosting package. If you already own a domain name please select Existing/Current under Domain Registration. If you would like us to register a domain name on your behalf select Register.

6. Pick the Server Technology that will power your web site. Own Web Now recommends Linux as it's compatible with a wide array of web PHP applications and can be managed and published to using free FTP clients. If you require ASP.NET (1.1 default, 2.5 available by request) you should select Microsoft Windows instead.

7. Review the confirmation screen which will display the website pending to be created. If all the information in the review screen is correct, select Finalize Order. We will send you an email containing your username and password and all the other relevant information.

Deployment & Management

There are two locations from which you can manage your Own Web Now Web Hosting. To obtain configuration information and make service changes (such as cancelling or disabling the service) login to the OWN Support Portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com) , click on the Service Manager and select Web Hosting. You will be provided with a list of your active web sites. Clicking on the blue "I" button will reveal the Detailed Information screen. To manage all other aspects of web hosting, such as adding mailboxes or databases, login to our OWN Web Hosting Control Panel at https://www.ownwebnow.com/cp

Publishing Website Content

Publishing your web site will depend on the platform you chose to power your web site. If you created a Linux web hosting account, you can use an FTP client or any software that can publish to an FTP site. If you opted for Windows instead, you must use a Microsoft technology such as Frontpage, Expression or Visual Studio.

First, you should move your DNS to ownwebnow.com by changing your name servers. Our servers are as follows:

ns1.ownwebnow.com
ns2.ownwebnow.com

If you are not ready to move your name servers because you want to see the site before DNS changes are made, you can customize your hosts file to automatically load content from our web servers.

1. Confirm that you have the Username and Password that was emailed to the administrative contact when the site was created.

2. Edit your HOSTS (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) file to set up a static route. The hostname is separated from the IP address by a tab. Once the entry is added, save the file. As this is a protected file in Microsoft Windows you will have to launch notepad with Administrative privileges.

3. Confirm that the static entry is valid by pinging the domain name. It should respond with "Reply from 65.99.XXX.."

4. If you are using a Linux platform to power your web site just open an FTP client (such as Filezilla) and navigate to the newly created domain. Change to the www directory on the remote site and upload content.

5. If you are using a Windows platform to power your web site you can just open the URL directly and authenticate.

Configuration

1. Confirm that you have the Username and Password that was emailed to the administrative contact when the Own Web Now Web Hosting account was created.

2. Login to the OWN Web Hosting Control Panel at https://www.ownwebnow.com/cp

3. All configuration options are available on the left. If you wish to make any changes just select the service you wish to modify or create and follow the directions.

Advanced DNS Configuration

After configuring the site settings (Email, FTP accounts, etc) and confirming the site content was uploaded properly you can safely change your name servers to ns1.ownwebnow.com and ns2.ownwebnow.com. This change is made at the place you purchased your domain name, often referred to as the Domain Registrar (such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc). It can take up to 72 hours for the DNS name server change to be updated on all the servers on the Internet.

If you registered a brand new domain while placing the order your name servers are automatically set to ns1.ownwebnow.com and ns2.ownwebnow.com.

If for some reason you wish to keep your name servers where they are and only use our network for just web hosting or just email, you will need to obtain IP addresses of the servers that handle your services.

1. Please login to OWN Web Hosting Control Panel.

2. Select DNS Settings and write down relevant IP information.

3. Login to the DNS control panel for the current provider and modify the @ record and the www record to point to the IP of the OWN hosting server. Your domain name registrar can typically assist you in making this configuration change and each one is different.

4. If you will not be hosting your email at Own Web Now, please remove the mail host record and Mail Exchangers and notify is in a support request to remove you from the email hosting. If you do not tell us that email is hosted elsewhere, all the email sent from your web site or Own Web Now customers will loop back to your virtual mail hosting account at Own Web Now.

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Knowledge Base articles for this product:

	I want to transfer my hosting to you. What are your name servers?
	Our name servers are as follows: ns1.ownwebnow.com ns2.ownwebnow.com ns3.ownwebnow.com ns4.ownwebnow.com Just point your domain to those servers and you will be able to advertise and manage the zone right out of our Virtual Hosting control panel.
	Which development platforms do you support?
	Own Web Now runs two virtual hosting platforms: Windows-based, running Microsoft Windows 2003 and Linux-based, running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4. Windows-based platform supports Frontpage Extensions (including other WebDav publishers like Visual Studio, Visual Interdev, ASP.NET Matrix, Expressions) and full support for ASP scripting and ASP.NET & ASP.NET 2.0 (currently we only offer ASP.NET 3.0 on Windows 2008 Preview Servers). Linux-based platform supports all FTP publishing programs which includes pretty much everything commercially available. We support perl, PHP and python programming environments as well as several popular toolkits. Web server runs on Apache 2.0. Own Web Now recommends Linux-based hosting unless your web server admin is specifically developing software in ASP or ASP.NET settings.
	I uploaded my web page via FTP but I do not see it.
	FTP uploads are only permitted for web hosting on Linux-based hosting plans. If you have a Windows-based hosting plan and you uploaded your web pages via FTP, you just uploaded them to the file sharing area, not to the web server. Please upload web pages for Windows-based hosting using a WebDav client like Frontpage, Expression, Visual Studio, Visual Interdev, Microsoft Office, etc. If you are on a Linux hosting plan and you uploaded your pages using FTP, make sure you place those files in the www/ directory. The area above the www directory is intended for private file storage, www/ and below are meant for web pages.
	My ISP is blocking or filtering port 25 traffic. What can I do?
	If your Internet Service Provider starts blocking or filtering traffic on port 25 (outgoing email), you will know almost immediately because your outbound mail will stop going out at best or start producing errors at worst. Internet Service Providers enforce port 25 restrictions from time to time in order to help police their networks and make sure they are not being used as a source of SPAM. Unfortunately for you, port 25 restriction means you will not be able to send mail through your domain. One way to get around this is to not use port 25. Own Web Now allows mail relay on port 2525 and 25252. So if you can't get to port 25, odds are the higher ports will be unmonitored/unfiltered and you can use them to gain access to our servers. (The other option is to use SMTP-over-SSL on port 587.) The easiest way to find out if your ISP is not interfering with 2525 or 25252 is to telnet to our server on those ports. For example, drop to the command prompt and type: telnet mail1.ownwebnow.com 25252 Trying 65.99.192.2… Connected to mail1.ownwebnow.com (65.99.192.2). Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail1.ownwebnow.com ESMTP ExchangeDefender; Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:20:37 -0500 If you see the 220 mail1.ownwebnow.com …. prompt you should not have any issues using us as your outbound relay.
	I would like to use my iPhone with the service. What do I set as my SMTP server?
	For mobile devices, you should always use the local SMTP server provided by the mobile operator, mobile carrier or local ISP. While setting up mobile devices to use our servers is trivial, it is important to remember that each provider may have their own network policies that restrict access to remote servers, both through port restrictions and proxy policies. The same recommendation goes for iPhone as well. Contact your mobile operator and request the address of their local SMTP server for the messages you send from your iPhone. For AT&T Wireless / Cingular in the United States, the address of the SMTP server is: cwmx.com.
	How can I redirect my domain to another domain or another subdomain?
	When you sign up for virtual hosting, request Linux as your web hosting platform. After your site is created, upload the file named index.php to /www directory with the following contents in it: header("Location: http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog"); ?> Replace the web address above with the address you wish to redirect the URL to.
	I want to control my own DNS. Can I still use you?
	Absolutely. While Own Web Now control panels give you access to manage your DNS zone, we understand if you wish to use your own third party subscription service. Unfortunately, we cannot provision hosting without provisioning the DNS zone. Local DNS resolution is a requirement. You can still use your external name servers- just make sure you synchronize the zones. In other words, make sure your zone has the correct IP addresses and that the zone hosted on our name servers has your other records. For example, say you wanted to use us for web hosting only and had your DNS hosting elsewhere and email in another place altogether. If your web site generates email and sends it to a user at this domain, it will automatically go to our local mail server. To avoid this issue, make sure you create all the neccessary A, MX and CNAME records that match the records on your name servers.
	How many domains can I host in one account?
	Our hosting plans are sold per-organization, not per domain. We understand that a company may have multiple web pages for SEO purposes and/or legal or branding reasons. So long as all the domains belong to the same organization and they all point to the identical content, there is no limit to the number of domains you can have. Please keep this within reason, however. If you have dozens of domains, you will typically go well over the traffic allocation so a Virtual Server may be a better suited service for a large domain portfolio. If you are unsure what may fit your needs, please contact us and we will offer any helpful information you need to help you decide.
	I changed my MX record away from OWN mail servers and now other users that are hosted at OWN cannot send me mail.
	ExchangeDefender, Own Web Now and all our properties use Own Web Now’s name servers for resolution. When you create a new hosting account with us, Own Web Now name servers are configured as authoritative for your domain zone and point the MX record to our mail servers. While you can change the MX record (or any other record for that matter) at anytime through the control panels at https://www.ownwebnow.com/cp, our system will always treat virtual hosting mail as local. Even if you host your mail elsewhere, users hosted on Own Web Now’s mail servers will always loop back to our own infrastructure. If you do decide to host your mail elsewhere, please open a support request to remove mail hosting from our network.

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