Getting a Website, etc.

[RogerS]

The only factor not mentioned that I can see is website response time. Some of the cheaper hosting sites make your website run like molasses on a winter's day in the Arctic.

Excellent opening post, dibs, by the way.

 

[DrPhill]

Yes apparently talk talk got blacklisted at one point. People discovered it when they were trying to email documents to themselves at work and the work place filters were deleting them.

Interesting; understandable, but irritating.

The best thing you can do is if you have a domain name you should have access to a [email protected] email address. Set this up and use it. There is always the possibility of your email ending up in spam depending on what people have there settings on.

I am not sure what you mean here. I have sent the emails with 'from' and 'reply to' as [email protected]. Is there something else that I should do?

Thanks for rreplying.

Phill

 

[Dibs-h]

Putting a different domain name in the "reply to" field in you email client and hence it appearing different in the email header can be (and is by some) spam filters tagged as spam.

Phil - you say you have hosting, does the host offer you email, i.e. SMTP & POP3 mailboxes? Or if it's budget hosting - just redirects? Worth asking?

If they offer SMTP and POP3 - you will need to ask them if they offer SMTP on ports other than the standard port 25. A lot of ISP's block outgoing SMTP traffic on port 25 -forcing you to use their mail servers (reduces folk spamming off their networks.)

HIH

Dibs

 

[Dibs-h]

The only factor not mentioned that I can see is website response time. Some of the cheaper hosting sites make your website run like molasses on a winter's day in the Arctic.

Many factors can affect that Rog. Shared hosting with the host having oversold (i.e. too many customers on their reseller account\VPS\Server), whilst the bandwidth may not be an issue - the CPU\memory can be overloaded.

Other things like if they are non-UK and too many hops (or one with bandwidth restrictions) can make the user experience slow.

Whilst some may disagree, because they haven't experienced it, picking a host with a UK presence (i.e. their own racks) in a major UK datacentre (i.e. Telehouse or Redbus) can help in not having such issues.

Regards

Dibs

 

[DrPhill]

Putting a different domain name in the "reply to" field in you email client and hence it appearing different in the email header can be (and is by some) spam filters tagged as spam.

Hmm, I use Mozilla Thunderbird, and maybe need to examine my headers a bit more closely.

Phil - you say you have hosting, does the host offer you email, i.e. SMTP & POP3 mailboxes? Or if it's budget hosting - just redirects? Worth asking?

If they offer SMTP and POP3 - you will need to ask them if they offer SMTP on ports other than the standard port 25. A lot of ISP's block outgoing SMTP traffic on port 25 -forcing you to use their mail servers (reduces folk spamming off their networks.)

HIH

Dibs

I only use talk-talk as an email 'provider' as they are my (current) ISP; I want my email solution to be 'portable' - in as much as if/when I leave TalkTalk I just have to adjust a couple of settings (forwarding from my domain, outgoing settings from Thunderbird) and 'Robert the long distance truck driver is your mothers live in lover' as they say.

I admit to being a little confused over the details of the email world, and thought I had a good solution. It seems though that the number of my emails automatically winding up in spamboxes has increased of late. Eg, my wife's yahoo account. I am sure my wife has not chosen to mark my mail as spam. Well, pretty sure....... hmmmm

 

[Dibs-h]

I only use talk-talk as an email 'provider' as they are my (current) ISP; I want my email solution to be 'portable' - in as much as if/when I leave TalkTalk I just have to adjust a couple of settings (forwarding from my domain, outgoing settings from Thunderbird) and 'Robert the long distance truck driver is your mothers live in lover' as they say.

I admit to being a little confused over the details of the email world, and thought I had a good solution. It seems though that the number of my emails automatically winding up in spamboxes has increased of late. Eg, my wife's yahoo account. I am sure my wife has not chosen to mark my mail as spam. Well, pretty sure....... hmmmm

Phil

I assume you have a domain - http://www.whatever.com - that is registered to you. It sounds like you have a website "on" it?

Email the hosting provider who hosts your website and ask if your hosting package comes with SMPT\POP3 mailboxes? Or just POP3 for inbound? Or redirects?

Once you have the answer to these questions you'll be more informed to decide how to progress.

As an example - a truly portable email setup, is one where your email is hosting externally to your ISP and your email address will always be [email protected] no matter who your ISP is.

Your mail client (Thunderbird) is configured such that,

Incoming Mail - is retrieved via POP3 from mail.whatever.com (i.e. your domain) on port 110
Outgoing Mail - is sent via SMTP-AUTH (authenticated SMTP) from mail.whatever.com on port 225 (or 2225 as most ISPs will block outgoing mail on port 25).

Both incoming and outgoing mail require a username (most likely your email address) and a password - this will be set using the web hosting control panel.

You can then retrieve and send email - regardless of who your ISP is.

HIH

Dibs

 

[DrPhill]

I only use talk-talk as an email 'provider' as they are my (current) ISP; I want my email solution to be 'portable' - in as much as if/when I leave TalkTalk I just have to adjust a couple of settings (forwarding from my domain, outgoing settings from Thunderbird) and 'Robert the long distance truck driver is your mothers live in lover' as they say.

I admit to being a little confused over the details of the email world, and thought I had a good solution. It seems though that the number of my emails automatically winding up in spamboxes has increased of late. Eg, my wife's yahoo account. I am sure my wife has not chosen to mark my mail as spam. Well, pretty sure....... hmmmm

Phil

I assume you have a domain - http://www.whatever.com - that is registered to you. It sounds like you have a website "on" it?

Email the hosting provider who hosts your website and ask if your hosting package comes with SMPT\POP3 mailboxes? Or just POP3 for inbound? Or redirects?

Once you have the answer to these questions you'll be more informed to decide how to progress.

As an example - a truly portable email setup, is one where your email is hosting externally to your ISP and your email address will always be [email protected] no matter who your ISP is.

Your mail client (Thunderbird) is configured such that,

Incoming Mail - is retrieved via POP3 from mail.whatever.com (i.e. your domain) on port 110
Outgoing Mail - is sent via SMTP-AUTH (authenticated SMTP) from mail.whatever.com on port 225 (or 2225 as most ISPs will block outgoing mail on port 25).

Both incoming and outgoing mail require a username (most likely your email address) and a password - this will be set using the web hosting control panel.

You can then retrieve and send email - regardless of who your ISP is.

HIH

Dibs

That does help quite a bit - being a skinflint I was trying to avoid paying for email hosting. Perhaps I ought to look at paying a bit more money to build a reliable system.

I use 1&1 as a domain manager. Should I use them for email service? Or do people here have recommendations?

Phill

 

[Dibs-h]

Phill

Domain - who is it registered via? These will be the people you are paying some pounds per year.
Hosting - who is your web hosting with? I assume you have a domain?

Cheers

Dibs

 

[DrPhill]

Domain is registered through 1&1.

My website is hosted by SourceForge - I have free site hosting because I have open-source projects on their site, but they do not provide email services. Their web-hosting suits my very simple purposes.

I use TalkTalk as ISP. I am using their email services currently. I pay them for broadband, and email services are part of thee package.

My domain redirects HTTP requests to my SourceForge website, and mail posts to TalkTalk.

My apologies if I seem vague, or seem not to be answering your questions, I am not familiar with the terminology, nor the thrust of your questions.

 

[Dibs-h]

Phill

Ok. Domain registration thru 1&1 is fine. Mine is too.

You don't actually have "real" web hosting - i.e. with a host that offers - X MB of disk space & Y GB of bandwidth per month for £Z.

So if you want to have a truly portable email setup that isn't dependant upon your ISP - you need to get some real hosting. Read Post #1 of this thread - this should fill in most blanks.

The only differences are you

1. already have the domain,
2. would like to continue to re-direct your http requests to SourceForge (I assume you want this to remain as is & not host your own website somewhere else?)

On 1&1's control panel - you leave the A record alone and change the MX (mail record) to point to the Hosting provider.

At that point - your mail is received by the mail server at your hosting provider & your mail client (irrespective of which ISP you are on) sends and receives, assuming you change the outgoing\incoming mail settings in Thunderbird.

You could host the website [the main page] as is, on your hosting provider & not Sourceforge and the links on your homepage will still take the user to Sourceforge - in this case you would download the homepage and upload it to your hsoting account - via FTP, remembering to change links in the HTML that relate to the domain - i.e. change links from http://phillvanleersum.users.sourceforge.net/ to http://www.whatever.com and then upload. To make this live - you would change the A record on 1&1's control panel to point to the nameserver\s given to you by the hosting provider.

That way your website is on your hosting - but has links thru to Sourceforge where the stuff you have created is held.

HIH

Dibs

p.s. The thrust of my questions was to ascertain what your setup actually is, no point in giving you advice that doesn't work for you.

 

[DrPhill]

Thanks Dibs,

I think I understand it a bit more. (BTW - I knew the overall reason you were asking the questions, but not the detailed reasons, so had to try to make sure I included the info you wanted. Trying to be both clear and concise in text is a challenge.).

The interesting bit to me at the momment is

change the MX (mail record) to point to the Hosting provider.

. I currently just redirect the mail to me@talktalk - is that the mechanism you mean or is there a different better way to redirect that I missed.

Also, is there a way (a cheap way!) to get my web pages to display the domain address correctly. Currently if you go to myDomain the web-addresses show their address as sourceforgeDomain/somepage instead of myDomain/somepage. I could believe that there is a better solution, though there may be technical reasons that this is not possible. The files do reside on sourceforge servers, so the address displayed is entirely correct, but this page displays a ukworkshop domain name, for example.

 

[Dibs-h]

Phill

You are using a Redirect to redirect all mail to you@talktalk - MX records relate to mail servers.

Any decent hosting package comes with web space, bandwidth and SMTP & POP3 mailboxes (along with FTP, MySQL, and so forth). The bandwidth will be the sum of http, FTP and Email (send & receive). As you don't have any hosting provision - the only choice is a Mail Redirect, which you have.

Web page - you are on a sub domain of sourceforge, so the webpage will always say what it does. That may not be a technical limitation but most likely the policy of SoureForge.

Once you have you own hosting - you can do what you like.

Drop me a PM if you want some advice\etc. with getting hosting etc.

Dibs

 

[DrPhill]

Thanks again for your advice. It seems as if a full hosting service is what I really need, and not my cheapskate solution.

Drop me a PM if you want some advice\etc. with getting hosting etc.

I will do that for sure. Although I am technically savvy in some areas, this bit always seems hard to grasp. It may be a few days as we are dealing with a bereavement at present.

 

[henton49er]

Louise and others,

Following up from an earlier part of the thread, I have just published the latest version of my web site (http://www.pointfarmcrafts.co.uk). Note that the shopping pages are either blank or under development (or both), and that I have linked the site to Facebook (nudge, nudge: :wink: :wink: ; say no more!!). I also have this forum on the "Links" page.

Any comments would be welcome either on the open forum or by PM.

 

[Louise-Paisley]

very nice

I would suggest that you make the 'contact us' a main heading in the menu rather than having it as a sub item in extras - contact information is quite a vital part and should be clearly visible I think

I also wonder if maybe the menu could be a touch more 'Obvious' - not that I found it hard to see but maybe some would, just food for thought.

 

[henton49er]

very nice

I would suggest that you make the 'contact us' a main heading in the menu rather than having it as a sub item in extras - contact information is quite a vital part and should be clearly visible I think

I also wonder if maybe the menu could be a touch more 'Obvious' - not that I found it hard to see but maybe some would, just food for thought.

Louise,

Thanks for your reply ( and for "liking" the site on Facebook!!).

I thought long and hard about the location of the Contact Us page. I have put links within many of the other pages direct to the Contact Us site, and tucked it away under Extras as a web designer advised that people would look for and find it there if interested enough.

I would love to make the menu headers a bit more "obvious", but that seems to be one of the things on Weebly that I cannot alter, and I'm not in to doing it by playing about with the page coding. I would have liked a larger font size and a different colour but cannot change either.

 

[Louise-Paisley]

The menu bar is not a huge issue I don't think, I would question the advice that people would go looking for a contact page though..

If you check most websites you will find contact us links positioned in the top level menu or header/ footer of every page - If someone feels they need to contact you then really you want them to be able to do that quickly and easily, while links on various pages helps of course I think having the contact us link in the same place on every page would be a much better and cleaner solution.

 

[henton49er]

The menu bar is not a huge issue I don't think, I would question the advice that people would go looking for a contact page though..

If you check most websites you will find contact us links positioned in the top level menu or header/ footer of every page - If someone feels they need to contact you then really you want them to be able to do that quickly and easily, while links on various pages helps of course I think having the contact us link in the same place on every page would be a much better and cleaner solution.

OK, you've convinced me ... I have re-published with the Contact Us page on the top menu (there is just room without it tripping onto a second line of main tabs, which I wanted to avoid at all costs!!).

 

[Louise-Paisley]

The menu bar is not a huge issue I don't think, I would question the advice that people would go looking for a contact page though..

If you check most websites you will find contact us links positioned in the top level menu or header/ footer of every page - If someone feels they need to contact you then really you want them to be able to do that quickly and easily, while links on various pages helps of course I think having the contact us link in the same place on every page would be a much better and cleaner solution.

OK, you've convinced me ... I have re-published with the Contact Us page on the top menu (there is just room without it tripping onto a second line of main tabs, which I wanted to avoid at all costs!!).

LOL yes I could see that problem but thought I would just leave that for you to discover/ worry about