UK Web Hosting » Site Access

Temporary site address

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:26:22 +0000

Temporary access to your site can be useful if you want to develop it prior to changing over the nameservers and setting it live, to do this you should use the following method. The HOSTS file takes the structure of the IP address you wish to point to followed by the hostname you are mapping to it. E.g.

10.20.30.40 nethosted.co.uk www.nethosted.co.uk

This format remains the same across operating systems, however the location of the hosts file does vary. Here is where you can find it on different operating systems:
» Windows 95/98/Me: c:\windows\hosts
» Windows NT/2000/XP Pro: c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
» Windows XP Home: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
» Windows 7: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
» Mac OS X: /private/etc/hosts
» Linux: /etc/hosts

On Windows Vista they have unfortunately decided to make things more complicated and less accessible, but it’s still possible to make changes to this. You need to edit the file with administrator rights, to do this in Vista:
Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories
Right click “Notepad” and choose “Run as administrator”
Click “Continue” on the security prompt
Select File -> Open
Browse to “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc”
Change the file filter selection from “Text Documents (*.txt)” to “All Files (*.*)”
Select the “hosts” file and “Open”
Make the changes that you require and save the file.

For OS X or Linux you should edit this file with your favourite text editor from the root account.

Using this method can save you a lot of headaches in the site development process, and offers you the flexibility to develop your site from anywhere without having to mess about with changing the DNS servers on your web hosting. It also removes the need to consider DNS caching and propagation. This method works for any kind of hosting you have, be it linux hosting, reseller hosting or VPS hosting.

Is SSH access available on my hosting?

admin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:54:43 +0000

SSH access is restricted on our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans. We do not believe it is secure enough to allow our clients to use in an environment where they would be able to affect other customers who are hosted on the same server.

We do provide full unrestricted SSH root access on our VPS servers and our Dedicated servers, if this is required then these are the services you should look at.

Taking a Traceroute (tracert) in Windows

admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:11:44 +0000

To take a traceroute (in windows this is done by the application called tracert) you need to open a command prompt, this is done as follows:

Windows Vista: Go to the Start Menu and in the search box type “cmd” and press enter.
Windows XP/2000/98/etc. : Go to the Start Menu and choose Run… . In the box type cmd (Windows XP, 2000) or command (Windows 95, 98, Me) and press enter.

When you do this you will have the command prompt open, from here you can run the command “tracert ”, being the IP or hostname of the computer you are testing your connection to. Here is an example: Once you have taken the traceroute you can copy this by clicking the icon in the top left and going to Edit -> Mark, then dragging the cursor over the text and right clicking once it is highlighted to copy this to the clipboard. From here you can paste it into a support ticket or email and this information will be useful in diagnosing any connection problem you may have.

Problems accessing your site

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:21:37 +0000

If you cannot access your site but you can view other sites the first thing you should check is our status page which shows the live status of our servers updated in real time. This is viewable here: http://status.nethosted.co.uk/.

If the server you are hosted on is running fine but you do not appear to be able to access your site but can access other sites it is possible you have been blocked by our firewall. This will ban your IP if you have repeatedly failed logins for services such as FTP, Email or cPanel hosting account logins. If you think this might be the case you should take a traceroute to your server, to do this on windows run the following in a command prompt:

“tracert yourdomain.com”

You should then find out your IP, you can do this using our script here: http://www.nethosted.co.uk/check-ip.php and put the results of the traceroute and your IP into a ticket to support stating that you cannot access your site. We can then use this information to determine the cause and unblock you if needed.