The smaller images are on your webpages, the faster your site will load which will provide your users with a much better experience, especially those on slower connections and even dial-up access. This will also benefit you as you will be using less disk space to store the images, as well as less bandwidth to transmit them each time a user requests them, so it is beneficial all round!

If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.

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These days many sites are secured by an SSL Certificate, I’m going to explain the reasons for this, when you need an SSL Certificate and when you do not, and also explain how to get one.

Online security is vitally important, in a world of credit card fraud and identity theft people need to be more and more vigilant when divulging their private details. Having the padlock symbol at the bottom of a page gives people a feeling of some security at least, this means the site is using an SSL Certificate so communication between the user and the website should not be able to be viewed by anyone else. (more…)

During website development you may need to access a site without making changes to the DNS, for example if you wish to start developing a site on a new uk web hosting server without changing the live site. Often you will be able to access the site through a temporary address, but with the way that many of the current Content Management Systems work such as b2evolution, WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, etc. then access through this temporary address may result in the site displaying incorrectly. There are a few ways around this (more…)

One of the primary purposes of a domain name is to translate a word or series of words into a numeric IP address which can be referenced globally on the internet by any other machine on the internet. An example of this would be www.nethosted.co.uk which can be resolved to 85.13.250.34. This use is facilitated by the use of the Domain Name System (DNS) and domain registrar authorities.

For domain name registration will need to use a domain registrar. In many cases web hosting companies also offer domain registration services so (more…)

As you will no doubt know by the amount of spam that arrives in your inbox purporting to be from a large bank or business asking you to confirm your details, email spoofing, pretending that an email came from a different sender, is simple to do and heavily exploited by spammers. By forging these email addresses they attempt to fool people into believing that this email originated from a trusted source, and with no checks carried out on this mail it can be difficult if not impossible to tell the original source.

If your web host or email host supports SPF then this can go a long way towards confirming whether an email is from the domain that it claims to be from. The way that SPF works is by (more…)

Country specific hosting is vital to search engine rankings; this is because they have a bias towards websites being hosted in the country that the domain originates from. This means that for .uk domains having a UK web host could provide more profitable and targeted traffic. This is the reason that many people looking for UK business hosting choose a UK hosting provider.

Of course this traffic is most important for businesses that will benefit a lot more from a visitor in the UK than one from somewhere else as they are more likely to purchase a product, but individuals can also benefit from this too. (more…)

Generally if you are using a mail server apart from your ISP’s one, such as your web host, then you will need to enable SMTP Authentication on it to be able to send outgoing mail. When you try to send mail this will authenticate with the outgoing mail server, giving them your username and password for your email hosting that you are authorized to send mail from. Most servers will not accept mail if you do not authenticate with them, a server not requiring this would be a spammer’s dream and this mail server would soon get blacklisted by spam databases.

Here is how to enable SMTP Authentication in some common email clients: (more…)

When you sign up for an account with NetHosted you will also get access to our advanced webmail service, whether it is an email hosting account or a web hosting account that you sign up for. Our WebMail service is provided through your cPanel hosting account, meaning that you should first have set up any email account that you wish to use in cPanel through the Email Accounts option. Once your account has been setup you can then login to it via the webmail system, accessible by going to www.yourdomain.tld/webmail or alternatively www.yourdomain.tld:2095. (more…)

Our cPanel hosting makes database backup and restoration very simple, allowing you to do this with a few clicks. Once you have logged into your cPanel, go in to the Backups section. From here you will see the “Download a MySQL Database Backup” option, with your databases listed below this. To download a database backup, simply click on the database name and it will download a zipped backup of your database in .sql.gz format. This is the gzip format, a linux archiving file format, you can extract this on Windows using a variety of tools such as WinRAR or Winzip. (more…)

Fantastico is the leading application autoinstaller for cPanel hosting accounts, and we provide this at NetHosted for our shared hosting and
reseller hosting clients free of charge. It allows you to simply install many popular content management systems such as Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc. as well as forums, blogs, e-commerce, support systems, site builders, galleries and more! There are over 40 applications that Fantastico can install for you through its simple, easy to use interface. (more…)