When configuring your publishing location as FTP, fill in the host as ftp.yourdomain.com and use the FTP username and password as provided in the email we sent you when you first signed up with us. If you need to reset your FTP login details, here’s how!

You will also need to ensure the Directory/Path field is set to ‘httpdocs’

For those who prefer to skim, here are the same directions in written format:

1. Select the site you wish to publish in the sidebar. If you only have one, it’s likely called “Site”
2. Change the “Publish To” dropdown to “FTP Server”
3. Name your site whatever you like and enter your contact email address
4. Under the FTP Server Settings section, specify the server address as ftp.yourdomain.com (e.g.: ftp.websavers.ca)
5. Supply your FTP Username and Password where prompted
6. Enter ‘httpdocs’ in the Directory/Path field
7. The Protocol can be set to either FTP or SFTP for good results. If you have trouble with one, try the other!
8. Choose the Test Connection button to be sure everything will work. If you get an error, let us know in the comments below or open a support ticket.
9. Enter your website address

When you’re ready to publish simply press the “Publish Site” button to begin uploading. Now that you’ve saved the server settings, you will only need to press the Publish Site button every time you wish to upload changes!

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Extremely Intuitive and Well Laid Out

With Plesk, things are where you would think they should be. There are many control panels that simply shove every feature and icon in your face on the same page without any sort of intuitive layout and design. Once you start using a Plesk hosting package, it does not take long to figure out how to manage everything that needs to be done.

From adding an email account to access your content via FTP, this is all possible with the Plesk control panel, and you won’t be left wondering how to do a task.

Extremely Well Designed

Some people may feel this is not that important. However, if you are spending a lot of your time staring at something and working within a particular piece of software, it is very important that it be well designed and that it looks good.

If you are to compare Plesk to the other popular control panels such as cPanel or DirectAdmin, you will quickly notice how much nicer the Plesk panel really is. If you are someone who spends a lot of time working on their websites, this is something you will quickly appreciate.

Built For The End User

This goes hand in hand with it being very intuitive and well designed. This control panel is very much designed for the end user. It does not require that you have any technical background what so ever in order to use it. Once you log in, everything will be made clear as to exactly what you need to do to accomplish any sort of management task.

Excellent Backup, Restore, and Migration Systems

Plesk prides itself on an extremely powerful backup solution for your website. Although many web hosting companies do routine backups and even provide restoration options should you lose anything, this isn’t always free if you just simply deleted something you shouldn’t have. The Plesk backup utility is perfect for making scheduled backups of your website and databases.

Another benefit of using Plesk is its simple migration manager. This tool allows you to effortlessly transfer your website between servers. If you are moving to a different web host, or are simply upgrading to a new package on a different server, you can do this with a click of a button within Plesk.

Supports both Linux and Windows Operating Systems

Unlike may other hosting control panels, Plesk can run on both Linux and Windows platforms. If you are thinking of converting a PHP website into ASP or adding some Windows-based web applications, you can easily migrate your existing website over to a Windows machine without any hassle. However, if you were on a different control panel, you would have to do this transition manually.

Excellent for Virtual Environments

The creators of Plesk (Parallels) also creates a variety of virtualization software. If you are considering upgrading your web hosting package to a virtual private server or VPS hosting, you may want to consider Plesk as your starting point. This will make your transition much easier when you do decide to upgrade down the road. Many of the best virtual private servers are all running the Plesk Control Panel with the Parallels Virtuozzo containers.

Whether you are starting a web hosting business or simply need the best solution to manage your websites, the Plesk control panel is a great option. Do your research and compare the choices available while keeping in mind what is important to you. The control panel is something you will be using on a daily basis – it’s important that you are comfortable with it and enjoy using it.

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Many web hosting companies support WordPress, but it is still very important that if you are going to be developing a website or blog based on WordPress to check with your web-host before signing up for any package.

What makes WordPress so popular?

You could talk for hours on what it is that makes WordPress and WordPress hosting so popular, but we have boiled it down to two core things that we believe helped WordPress catch on as much as it did.

Extremely easy to use

If you have ever installed WordPress and had the opportunity to play around in it, you will quickly realize that things are very simple and easy to use. It is a very powerful content management system makes it easy to update your content, add new pages and blog posts, and so much more.

Large community support and development

Another major benefit of WordPress is that because it is an open-source project, it has a huge community of developers, designers, and supporters that are constantly helping with extending what WordPress can do. If you ask any web developer if they have used some sort of WordPress hosting before, odds are they have.

It is this community that lets you as a website owner receive help and support from a wide audience. There are also countless numbers of plugins that extend the functionality of what the system can do – many of which are completely free.

What is WordPress web hosting and what do we offer

We believe we offer the best wordpress hosting. We have supported WordPress web hosting for over seven years and know it in and out. All of our packages have the support for WordPress with varying amount of support and resources. For those who already know their way around, you may want to check out our cheap wordpress hosting while those of you who haven’t had an opportunity to use it before, may be more inclined to go with our Support+ Package.

Regardless of what package you choose, we will make sure our servers are running exactly what you need to get the most out of your WordPress website.

One Click WordPress Installer

Another benefit of our WordPress hosting Canada packages is that we provide a one-click installer for WordPress and other popular applications with every package. This takes all the hassle out of configuring and installing WordPress. Here is a quick video and demonstration of our one-click web application installer.

If you have any WordPress hosting questions, never hesitate to send us an email, or talk to us on live chat if we are available – we look forward to hearing from you.

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We’re doing everything we can to try and change that impression by making managing your website and email easy, painless, and (hopefully) fun! With our completely custom designed client centre, our easy to use web applications installer (for installing apps like WordPress in just a few clicks) and our jam-packed knowledgebase full of up-to-date and relevant information, we’re doing everything we can to make web hosting as painless as possible. Adding INTERAC Online as a payment option to ensure you can pay with as many online user-friendly and instant payment options as possible is just one more step in the right direction.

All of our packages allow you to take advantage of INTERAC Online payment, so if you’re a Canadian looking for web hosting, then you’ve come to the right place! Our existing customers can also take advantage; simply login to the client centre to complete payment on any future invoices manually. You will be presented with the INTERAC Online payment option right alongside the usual payment options like PayPal, VISA, Mastercard and American Express.

Have any questions? How about suggestions? (We love those!) Send them on over by commenting below or sending us a quick email. The more ideas you have about how to improve our services, the better we get.

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Things you will need

• Your database username and password for the application. To find this, you will need to login via FTP and open the wp-config.php file. Other applications have similar configuration files. For example, Joomla uses configuration.php and most other apps use config.php
• The version of your installed application
• The path the application is installed to. For example, if you have to enter yourdomain.com/wordpress in your browser to get to the admin panel, then your path is /wordpress

Great, let’s get importing!

1. Login to Plesk through the Client Centre
2. Choose Web Applications in the sidebar and if you see a list of already installed applications, choose the “Applications Browser” tab in the upper right corner
3. Select the application you will be importing. In this example, you will be choosing “WordPress” in the application directory.
4. Choose the “Import Existing Install” button
5. Select the domain/website name that your application is installed to in the list
6. Enter the path to the application. Tip: do not include httpdocs or httpsdocs.
7. If you have more files saved in the domain than just your web application, then change the directory contents dropdown to tell the application manager which files are part of your application. If you don’t know anything about this, leave it at its default.
8. Specify the version of the application you have installed
9. Provide the applications installer your database username and password
10. Choose the “Import” button and after a few seconds, you’ll be all set! You can start upgrading your application through the installer and making backups whenever you like.

Not sure about how to do some or all of this?

No problem, we can take care of importing your application into the web apps installer for you! If you have our support plus web hosting package, this is completely free of charge. If you have a do-it-yourself WordPress hosting package, like the Ultimate or Extreme plan, you can either upgrade to the Support Plus plan, or pay a one-time fee of $49.99 and we will import your application to the apps installer, back it up and update it for you! Simply open up a support ticket with your request.

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1. Login to the Client Centre and choose the Login to Plesk button
2. Choose Mail in the sidebar and, if provided the option of domains to choose, select the domain under which you are adjusting your mail account
3. Select your mail account in the list
4. Choose the Spam Filter button
5. Select the option to “Switch on Spamassassin spam filtering”
6. We suggest entering a score of 5 as we have found it to be optimal for most of our servers. More info on this to come.
7. Click OK and your spam filter will now be enabled.

How does it work?

When an incoming email is believed to be spam, the subject of the email will be prepended with “*****SPAM*****” or whatever text you specify under the second field of Spamassassin settings when enabling your spam filter. Unfortunately it does not automatically move your spam to a Junk or Spam folder, so you will need to create a rule in your email program (like Outlook) specifying that any email with *****SPAM***** in the subject line be moved to the correct junk folder.

The spam filter will check all your incoming emails and check them against a massive database of common attributes often found in spam emails. Each attribute is paired with a weight indicating roughly how often that attribute is found in spam emails. For example, if an email with the word ‘viagra’ is found to be spam 98% of the time, but an email with the phrase ‘weight loss’ is only confirmed to be spam 40% of the time, the word ‘viagra’ will carry a higher weight. This also works in reverse – if there are positive attributes to your email, that are rarely (or never) found in confirmed spam, then those attributes will be a negative weight.

All of these scores are added up at the end of the checks to give you your final score. The lower the score, the less likely the new email is spam. The score you entered in Plesk in step 6 (above) is the threshold that must be reached for Spamassassin to mark your email as spam. In other words, a variety of different (normally spammy) attributes must be found within the new email that make your email look like spam for it to be marked as spam.

The clever spammers can get around this: here’s how

This is all well and good, but there’s one major problem with it – since the spammy attributes are public knowledge, all a spammer must do is avoid those attributes when sending out emails. As an example, let’s say that most of your spam emails trying to sell you premium software like Microsoft Office for Businesses, but because the spammer is so clever about avoiding spammy attributes, they only score a 1.0 when your threshold is 5. Thus every time they send you an email, it’s never marked as spam and your premium software spam starts collecting in your inbox. How do we fix this?

Training to the rescue!

By training Spamassassin, you’re giving it information about what kinds of spam and what kinds of non-spam email you normally receive. This way it can start to detect patterns specific to your spam (and non-spam) rather than simply using attributes that are common in all the world’s spam. If you’re receiving tons of spam about software but you rarely discuss software in your emails, then Spamassassin can accurately assume that all incoming email discussing software is spam and mark it as such. So, let’s get on with it and start your training!

1. As above, head on over to the Spam Filter option for your email account in Plesk
2. Choose the “Training” tab

In the list you will see all emails found within your inbox. You must leave email in your inbox until you have trained them for this to work. Once you have completed training, you can delete them or move them to another mail folder as you normally would.

Simply check off all emails that are spam, then click the “It’s spam” option at the bottom. That’s it! Keep repeating this as often as possible until you have at least 100 spam emails and 100 non-spam emails trained. The more you train, the better it will be at correctly categorizing your email.

Happy training!

We’d love to hear your results. Use the comments below to let us know how effective this was for you, but please be sure you’ve training at least 100 of both spam and non-spam emails before commenting.

***Please note that each of your email accounts have their own login to Plesk, so you can send your email users to your server’s Plesk URL and have them login with their email address and email password so they can train their own spam.

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Carbon Credits

Let’s start with carbon credits. This is what I consider one of the more frustrating reasoning to call a company green. While it’s true that buying carbon credits does go to fund green initiatives, such as erecting wind turbines and solar arrays (or generating green energy with them), it hardly makes a company environmentally friendly in any way. The company can continue to waste energy, paper, and pollute its environment as much as it wants, as long as it continues to pay for carbon credits that offset its likely massive fossil fuel powered electricity usage. In the short term, this is an effective strategy, since more funding for the growing number of green initiatives means more green energy output to hopefully take over from fossil fuel generated energy. From a long-term perspective, if the purchase of carbon credits is supported in perpetuity, there will always be companies that are continuing to pollute the environment and we (as a society) will never overcome that thanks to these ‘dirty’ tricks we put in place to avoid real green business practices. At the very least, this should not be a valid reasoning to brand or market a company as a green company — the companies that pursue this route are not green.

Other Ridiculous Reasoning

I stumbled across a website the other day that included the use of an old version of RedHat as a reason for their green hosting solution. They said that because they’re using Redhat 5.2, they are a green web hosting provider. Firstly let me put it out there that, yes, there have been great improvements in operating system technology that reduces unnecessary power consumption and that on a massive scale these miniscule improvements are going to add up to some power savings. But let’s be honest here, the real benefit of this is to save money at the datacentre level. If the company were truly committed to green energy to the extent that they are marketing it, they would switch their power source to a green power source like wind, hydro, or solar. They would not be simply reducing their non-renewable energy source consumption by tiny little amounts at a time while stating how green they are all over their website.

How They Should be Doing it

The attempts at green hosting solutions above are most certainly good first steps, but none of them are what I would consider a true green hosting provider. I believe the extent to which these companies are advertising their green initiatives are blown way out of proportion compared to their actual involvement in green hosting. In the case of many of these providers, they have changed the entire colour scheme of their site to green and inserted tidbits about how green they are all over the place; header images, footer text, sidebars, etc. To the casual observer they are lying about their commitment by making it appear that they are actually green. They make it seem as if they are sourcing energy from a renewable power company, using little-to-no paper, have energy efficient lighting, recycle water, and of course investing in hardware and software that is energy efficient and non pollutant to the environment upon disposal (among other great tactics). However, a more curious viewer will find their green commitment somewhere on their website (not often front-and-centre) and realize they aren’t actually doing very much at all to be a green company. I highly doubt many people actually look further than the green colour themed homepage with “Green Hosting” written everywhere.

Instead, I believe these companies should advertise their green commitment with the same amount of force as they’ve put in to actually being a green company. If they’ve bought energy efficient hardware and software, then great! Advertise it on your servers page perhaps with a small green box. If you’ve purchased green credits, that’s also good for now; put a “We buy green credits” link in bright green at the top of your homepage. Don’t use your truthfully tiny involvement in the green energy movement to call your entire company and all your hosting service green: in doing so, you’re lying to your customers.

What impact do we have on the environment?

While we are not a 100% green provider, we also don’t advertise anywhere that we are. We don’t have a massive amount of income to be able to afford the purchase of carbon credits and since we don’t run our own datacentres, we can’t guarantee renewable energy sources for our servers. That said, here is what we are doing:

1. We make use of virtualized environments running on the very latest Intel power managed, low voltage, multi-core CPUs
2. We keep our operating systems at the very latest kernel releases to ensure they take advantage of the power savings available in current generation CPUs
3. We make absolutely sure to keep our virtual machines within datacentres that support great power efficiency. Sure the datacentres save money by doing this, but we choose to use them, after researching dozens of providers, for their lower environmental impact.
4. Our primary datacentre provider contributes to reforestation projects at levels exceeding the overall draw of their infrastructure by at least 10 percent. Although similar to purchasing green credits, this has a considerably more specific goal in-mind: we like it!
5. We use only part-time offices so there is no off-hours power usage.
6. We use energy efficient laptops for all of our monitoring machines (rather than power hungry desktops).
7. We have requested emailed documents wherever paper would normally be required. For those items that must be printed and mailed, we scan them in, shred, and recycle the paper copies.

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Although the MobileMe server will reportedly no longer be available for this functionality, this doesn’t mean those with iWeb created websites are out of luck! If you have an iWeb created site, simply sign up for any of our canadian web hosting plans and we will transition your iWeb web site to our servers at no extra charge! All of our web hosting packages support the use of iWeb.

If you’d rather update your Apple iWeb site to a more modern or professional look, check out our Web Design packages! We’ll get you set up with a brand new site that is easily updated and integrated with all your social media services. Best of all? You only need to pay a single monthly amount rather than thousands of dollars up front like most web designs.

Despite Apple’s decision to cut off MobileMe hosting for iWeb, you can rest easy knowing that we will continue to host your website even though Apple has left you in the lurch. We’ll even give your site a proper name, like www.yourname.com rather than web.me.com/yourname!

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In order to configure your email account you will also need to have already created your email account in Plesk. If you can login to webmail at webmail.yourdomain.com (eg: webmail.websavers.ca), then your account is created and you’re ready to proceed.

Let’s get started!

1. Open the Settings app on your homescreen
2. Choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then select Add Account
3. Choose Other to add a non-branded email account
4. Choose Add Mail Account
5. Enter your name and email address and password as it has been set up in your hosting control panel (typically Plesk).
6. Choose Next and leave it on the default selection (IMAP)
7. Under Incoming Mail Server AND Outgoing Mail Server enter the same details:

Host Name: mail.yourdomain.com (eg: mail.websavers.ca)
User Name: your full email address (eg: email@websavers.ca)
Password: The password you specified for the account in your hosting panel

These are identical for both incoming and outgoing servers.

8. Choose Next. It will Verify the account details. You will likely receive a notification about being unable to verify the server identity, this is OK, choose Continue.
9. Choose Save
10. Choose the account you just set up in the list of accounts, then tap the account name
11. Scroll to the bottom and choose Advanced
12. Under IMAP Path Prefix, enter “INBOX” without the quotes, and all in capital letters.
13. Go back by clicking “Account” in the upper left corner, then choose Done twice.

If you are unable to send or receive email after completing these steps, then try restarting your iPad or iPhone. If you are still unable to send or receive email after completing these steps, or if you are unable to complete these steps successfully, please try on a different wireless connection. You may unknowingly have a firewall blocking the setup from succeeding.

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If you happen to be coding your own web apps or plugins, then monitoring the error log is even more important since it will help you follow good coding practices. The less errors and warnings in your code, the more likely it is to be compatible with up and coming releases of PHP (and other languages as well).

Alternatively, if you’re using applications built by others, the error log will inform you of any incompatibilities, outdated apps or plugins, and clues to resolving a variety of other issues.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Login to Plesk via the client centre: clients.websavers.ca
2. Choose “Logs” and click on the file named error_log with no extension after it to see the latest entries.

Look for warnings and errors and even notices to see if there’s anything you can do to quash them. Entries like those containing a missing favicon.ico can be ignored. A few good techniques to working with your error log:

1. If you have a reproducible problem, follow your steps to reproduce, then watch the error_log for a description of the problem occurring at exactly the time you reproduced the issue
2. Use Google to look up the errors. Copy and paste an error in to Google and you will likely see many websites describing what they are and how to fix them. Just make sure you `sanitize` them first by removing anything unique to your website or server, such as names, web address, and IP addresses. Also remove timestamps as they will be useless as keywords

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