Positive Internet

Welcome to your new Positive Internet Z account. The purpose of this guide is to give you an overview of how to use your Z account. For more information on specific aspects of our service, please see the individual topic areas of this support site. When viewing the support pages on this site, note that you'll often find topics are spread over several pages and you can use the arrows and links at the top and foot of each page to step through the information. If you have any specific questions, please email them to us at support@positive-internet.com and our support team will endeavour to answer your questions promptly.

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Before using your Positive Internet account for the first time you will need to activate it using the Activation Code which we send to you by post. We use an activation code system for two main reasons:

1. To ensure that you only start paying for your new account once you intend to use it - we will start your invoicing period from the date of account activation.
2. For your security. By validating your postal address we are able to ensure that only legitimate customers are able to open accounts on our service, as anyone with ill intent will normally be reluctant to give out their postal address. We do realise that this activation code system can slow down your getting up and running by a day or so, but in our experience most of our customers are happy to take this in their stride for the extra security for all that this helps ensure.

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You may log into your account via two main methods:

SFTP: Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is used to upload files to your site. You will need either some SFTP software or a web publishing tool that supports SFTP transfer, such as Dreamweaver.

SSH: Secure Shell (SSH) is used to connect to the Unix shell (command line) so that you can issue certain commands, such as for changing file permissions or accessing your MySQL database via direct SQL commandline. Many customers never feel the need to use SSH, but it's there if you wish to use it.

When connecting via SSH, SFTP or a web publishing tool you will normally need to enter the following information:

Hostname: www.yourdomain.com (replace with your own domain name, and always include the www part)

Username: your account username as detailed in your welcome mail

Password: your account password as detailed in your welcome mail

Host Directory / Remote Folder: public_html

Note: using your domain as the hostname will only be possible once your domain name is active or transferred to our service. In the meantime you should use the name of the server you are hosted on, as detailed in our welcome mail. For example muon.positive-internet.com or boson.positive-internet.com etc.

If you are using Microsoft Frontpage to publish your site, please read our separate Frontpage section.

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Your site files must be uploaded to the correct place in order to be viewable on the Web. Unless instructed otherwise (for example Vhosts) you should always place your web files in your public_html directory. This is known as your web root. You may of course create sub directories under your web root if you wish and place files in these too.

The front 'home' page of your site must be named a certain way and placed directly in your public_html directory in order that your can be domain is accessible via the format www.mydomain.com (i.e. without specifying any file name). The choices for naming your home page are:

index.html index.htm default.html default.htm main.html main.htm home.html home.htm index.cgi index.php index.jsp

Note: other variations are possible but might need special configuration - please contact our support team for advice.

When uploading via FTP, you should normally upload most files in binary transfer mode (usually the default mode for most FTP clients). There is one very important exception. All CGI scripts MUST be uploaded in ASCII transfer mode. This will normally be files named with either a .cgi or .pl file extension.

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When you open an account with us, by default we only set up a postmaster mailbox for email to your domain(s). all other e-mail addresses will bounce. It is important therefore to set up your user accounts as soon as possible using the web based administration system.
To do this you need to point your web browser at:-

https://pop3.positive-internet.com/

The postmaster user has administrative rights to create new users and manage them. Log in as postmaster by entering your domain name (without the www part) and your password as issued in your welcome e-mail

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Obviously the most important aspect of your new account is getting your domain(s) fully up and running. If you have registered a brand new domain as part of opening an account with us, you will normally need to wait about 24 hours for your domain to become active on the Internet. This is because the domain needs to get into the registry database and also into DNS, which can take a few days to occur. If you are transferring a domain or series of domains to our service then the methods you need to use will vary depending on the 'flavour' of domain (.com, .co.uk etc) and the policies of the registry or company through whom you registered it. Please refer to the specific domain transfer information included in your welcome email, or look at the domain section on these support pages.

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There is a wealth of further information on our support pages here - please choose from the topic menu on the left. If you have any questions, please email us at support@positive-internet.com and our support team will be happy to help.

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