Bloch - A closer look at Cloch Internet

In the coming months, you will most likely have some dealings with a member of the TSG team. When you do, I am sure you will find them competent and professional, and fully trained to deal with the requirements of current Cloch Internet customers.

As a result of this change, I will be taking a step back from front line support to concentrate further on the web development area of the business and I would therefore encourage you to send support enquiries directly to support@cloch.com or call us on our lo-call number, 1890 924 154 (+353.14403629 outside Ireland). If however, at any time you are concerned about any aspect of this changeover or you have any future issues, then please feel free to contact me directly by email: ronan@cloch.com or phone: 085 149 9867.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our existing customers for their support to date and we at TSG look forward to serving you in the future.

Sincerely,

Ronan Quirke

Some further details on this development have been included below:

What will happen as a result of this changeover?
From March 21st, all existing Cloch Internet customers will become customers of TSG Ltd and renewal invoices will be in the name of TSG Ltd. This is the only material change at this point.

As a customer, is there anything that I need to do?
Absolutely not. You need only be aware that cheque payments should now be made out to TSG Ltd. If you pay via bank transfer, please see your next renewal invoice for updated bank details or contact support@cloch.com for these new details.

Where can I access my invoices, billing information and account settings?
If you have any more questions regarding your account with us, please check our online account manager for an overview of all active services created on your account.

php5 has recently been installed on hosting accounts.

While the php5 scripting language has a lot of improvements over php4, using php5 exclusively would cause a number of existing php applications and scripts to stop working.

We have therefore provided both. Naming a script with a .php5 extension will cause it to run as a php5 file, while files with a .php or .php4 extension will be run as php4 scripts.

You can also have .php files run under php5 on a directory-wide basis by creating a .htaccess file in your chosen directory with the following line:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

In effect this is tellng the server to interpet .php scripts under php5 rather than the default, php4.

If you need any help, please drop a line to support@cloch.com.

Thanks!

Further reading: the php website: ie.php.net 

Happy Christmas!

To celebrate, we are offering 50% off our domain name and hosting charges until January 4th.
All you have to do is enter the coupon code XMAS06 into the coupon field when registering your domain name or ordering hosting.

This promotion ends January 4th, so order now!

Enjoy!

Over the course of the coming months, a number of tools and applications that we in Cloch Internet have found useful during 2006 will be released for use by customers.

The first service in this group is Cloch WAPmail. WAPmail, available at wapmail.cloch.com, is a handy way to view your email messages over your mobile phone. No point in entering this url into your browser as WAP pages most likely will not display on normal desktops. Any mobile phone that has a wap enabled browser can be used. Simply enter the url wapmail.cloch.com into your phone and you will be presented with a login screen where you should enter your email address and password to access messages.

The function of the WAPmail service is limited to viewing messages. It is not a practical method of sending, sorting or deleting messages at this time, but handy to keep up with what is arriving to your inbox before you get back to the office or arrive at a place where you can check your mail via our webmail.

NB: This notice relates to .ie domain names only

As you may be aware, .ie domains require manual processing by the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) for the purpose of new registrations, transfers and some other related issues.

The IEDR offices will close for Christmas at 5.30pm on Friday, 22nd December and reopen for business at 9am on Tuesday, 2rd January 2007.

While Cloch Internet will be available during this period, we will be unable to process transfers, register new .ie domains and/or re-activate suspended domains that have not been renewed.

We will however be able to make nameserver changes as this is now an automated procedure.

If you wish to register a new .ie domain or transfer one to Cloch Internet, we recommend that you do so by 12 noon on Thursday December 21st to ensure it is processed by the IEDR before the Christmas break.

If you have any queries, please contact support@cloch.com.

Cloch Internet are delighted to announce the launch of Blathanna Forist’s new website at www.mullingarflowers.com. Blathanna, run by Caroline Kelly, is based just outside Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and Caroline serves a wide area throughout the midlands providing flowers and floral arrangements.

The new website allows visitors to securely place and pay for orders online, and allows Caroline to tap into a much wider market than just local business.

In addition to creating a great looking website that enables Blathanna to sell on-line, another key aim of the project was to ensure that the site was optimised for search engine rankings so that prospective customers could find the site. To this end, the X-Cart shopping cart system installed on the site has been modified to get the best possible positioning for the site, and although it is early days, the site is achieving good positions on search engines for key search terms.

As part of the project, there will be monitoring of the website SEO performance over the coming months to ensure that the newly built site gets the orders it deserves.

In some cases, domains may require a backup or secondary MX record to ensure their mail system is constantly available for others to send messages to them.

An mx record is the instruction on where email is routed for a particular domain name.
If email is routed to a server or location that does not have an ISP class infrastructure, such as an office LAN server etc, then it is a good idea to have a secondary or backup mx record. This will hold email messages on the backup mail server until the main server is available in the event of downtime through a hardware or software error, internet access or power outage etc.

Once the main server comes back online, mail is then automatically routed from the backup mail server.  If this were not in place, users trying to send email to the server that was down would get an “Undeliverable message” bounce back - not a good idea!

Configuring a backup MX record via our Cpanel system is very straightforward to do for our server admins (just add an entry in /etc/secondarymx). If you have a hosting account with Cloch, it is most likely included in your service plan.

If it is not and it is something you would like to have, it can be purchased as an add-on. Just ask!

Some users have difficulty with accessing the standard hosting control panel as it is run on a port that can be disabled by default on some firewalls (port number 2082). This is particularly the case in corporate networks etc.

This means that trying to access the control panel at www.yourdomain.com/admin results in a “cannot connect to server” type error in your browser.

As a workaround, we now have available an alternate url which will work within networks where access to port 2082 is blocked.

The new location is http://cpanel.cloch.com. Use the same username and password that has been provided to you previously to access your account.

A link to the above location is also provided within the the customer billing system located at www.cloch.com/modernbill. The billing system also has details such as your username and password for each hosting account associated with your login should you ever forget or lose these details.

While the alternate location should work perfectly well, it will be a little slower than the standard location as the data must be proxied from port 2082 to port 80.

I found this very useful post on dealing with image spam, whereby the spam is contained in an attached image file rather than as text. This is supposed to be able to bypass the content filtering that stops spam.

I’ve found the imageinfo Spamassassin plugin to be highly effective in flagging almost all of those insidious imagespam emails.

For those who may be unfamiliar, here’s how to install it.

- Shell into your Spamassassin directory (mine is located here: /etc/mail/spamassassin)
- type: wget http://www.rulesemporium.com/plugins/ImageInfo.pm
- type: wget http://www.rulesemporium.com/plugins/imageinfo.cf

(This downloads the ImageInfo.pm and imageinfo.cf files from the excellent Rules Emporium site.)

- Next, you’ll need to edit the Spamassassin initialization file, init.pre, located in your spamasassin directory, so:

type: edit init.pre (or use your editor of choice) and add the following:

loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::ImageInfo /etc/mail/spamassassin/ImageInfo.pm

You’ll need to change the path to ImageInfo.pm if yours is located somewhere else, and be sure this statement is on a single line.

To finish, you’ll want to restart EXIM. (If you run the fine MailScanner software from the ConfigServer folks, be sure to restart it as well.)

Further info: Depending on your particular SpamAssassin scoring scheme, you may wish to tweak some of the imageinfo scores. I bumped up the score for DC_IMG_HTML_RATIO and DC_IMG_TEXT_RATIO to 1.25 from their default 1.0

To add a custom score like this, you simply add the following to your local.cf file

score DC_IMG_HTML_RATIO 1.25
score DC_IMG_TEXT_RATIO 1.25

Oh, and I gather you’re already running one of more RBLs … but you’ll also want to use RAZOR (http://razor.sourceforge.net/) which is already part of the MailScanner package available here: http://www.configserver.com/

Original post is locate at: http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=57034

The maximum length of a domain name that can be registered is 63 characters.

This applies to .com, .ie, .net, .org domains etc.

However, it is advisable that you do not go anywhere near this length. Long domain names such as this are particularly ugly, for example:thisiswhatsixtythreecharacterdomainnameslooklikeitisreallylong.ie (that one is still free if anyone feels like registering it).
One technique that can be used to break up long domain names, or domain names containing a number of distinct words is the hyphenation, such as bacon-forklift-truck-parts.com.
Ok, that is a lot more readable than the first example above, but there are two issues with hyphenation. The first is that inevitably, some people won’t type in the address correctly. They will miss a hyphen or not enter any at all, or somewhere in between!

The second issue is that there is a belief among some of those in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) community that an excessive number of hyphens in a domain name may be penalised by some search engines such as Google.
As nobody can ever say for certain as Google doesn’t tell anyone exactly how they rank websites -it is always a bit pie in the sky- but a safe rule of thumb is no more than 4 hyphens.

The best approach is to find something reasonably short, and just as important, something memorable. The average length of a domain name is 11 characters. This is about what you should be aiming for, but if your product or company name is a little longer, that is fine too.

If your web page address includes part of a keyword a user is searching for, there is evidence that your site will achieve a higher ranking on search engines. For example, if you have a page name with the address: www.forklifts.ie/trucks.html, this is a lot better for search engine rankings than something such as www.fls.ie/products.html.