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Customers -- Try to find the answers to your questions here. If you do not find what you need here, feel free to call us at 410-788-1148, or to email us at support@maiatech.com.

Control Panel

The new server provides all hosting clients with a web-based Control Panel. The Control Panel will let you manage email accounts, set up spam controls, check web site traffic stats, and much more. You can reach your control panel by logging in at https://maiatech.com/cpanel with your FTP username and password.

Email

Your web hosting account may come with one or more email accounts. You can create and manage email accounts under your domain using the Control Panel. If you have trouble using the control panel, please email us a request to set up and email account. Tell us the address you want and the password you'd like the account to have. We can usually set up mail accounts within a few business hours.

Email addresses can be of two types:

A full mail account has it's own mailbox file on our server, and you can retrieve that mail using any POP or IMAP mail client software. You can both send and receive mail with this email address.

Aliases or "Forwarders" are email addresses that forward to other real mail accounts, either on our server or anywhere else. For example, you might have a generic account like "info@yourdomain.com" forward to a specific user at your domain, or you might forward an address from your domain to your regular email account, such as AOL, EarthLink, ComCast, etc.

Setting up your mail program: POP Mail program settings vary from program to program, so we do not offer step by step instructions for all email programs. The basic information is the same, and you'll need to figure out where these settings go in your own email program:

Account Name or Username: Your username is your complete email address, for example, "yourname@yourdomain.com".... it is NOT just the the part before "@".

Incoming or POP Server: The same as your domain name, with "mail." added to the front. For example, "mail.yourdomain.com".

Outgoing or SMTP Server: The same as the incoming mail server (see important notes about Server Port Numbers below.)

SMTP Auth: This feature, which should be turned ON, is called different things in different programs. In Outlook, it is the checkbox "Server requires authentication" in the Outgoing Servers section of the settings. In NetScape/Mozilla, it is set by checking "use name and password" in the Outgoing Server settings. In OSX Mail, it is set by selecting "password" on the Authentication pull-down in the Outgoing Settings.

"SSL" or "TLS" Encryption: Do NOT turn these on, since we do not have SSL certificates for every client's mail server domain name.

Port Numbers: In most cases, the default port numbers of 110 for incoming and 25 for outgoing will be fine. However, if you are having trouble sending, your ISP may be blocking port 25. You can try using port 26 for the SMTP outgoing mail server.

Getting your mail when you are away from your computer: WebMail:
You can access your full email account from anywhere in the world using any web browser, simply by going to http://yourdomain.com/webmail/ and logging in with your complete email address as the username.

Mailbox Quota:

The new server strictly enforces disk space quotas, including Mailbox size limits. The default size for mailboxes is 10MB. It is very important that you set up your mail program so that it removes messages from the server after retrieving them to your computer. In some programs this is a checkbox "Leave Messages on Server" that should be UNCHECKED. In other programs, this is a checkbox "Remove Messages from Server" that must be CHECKED.

When your mailbox quota is almost full, you will receive an email warning you to clean out your mailbox. After you have exceeded your mailbox quota, then your mail will be held in a queue for up to four hours, giving you a chance to collect your mail and clear your mailbox. If you do not clear your mailbox, them mail will start to bounce if it is held in queue for too long.

Web Site Stats:

Web site stats are now part of your Control Panel. You will see several options under the Statistics section. Webalizer Stats and AW Stats are probably the best analized and most clearly presented choices there.

Counters:

The control panel has a feature under the CGI Scripts section, that will make HTML code that you can copy and paste into your page whereever you want a count of the number of hits on that page.

Form Mail CGI-Script:

There is a Perl Script in the public CGI directory called FormMail.cgi which is a very flexible tool for taking the results of HTML forms, formatting and sorting them, and emailing them to you. It has a lot of features, and this link takes you to the author's intructions for all those features.

For those who want a quick overview, the action of your form needs to be "http://yourdomain.com/cgi-sys/FormMail.cgi", and then you need to insert several hidden fields into your HTML form, to control how your form is sorted and who it is emailed to. Read the author's instructions, and it should be clear. If it is not, I will set up any form to work with FormMail for $25 and up, depending on the number and type of fields on the form.

General CGI-Scripting Tips:

Everyone has access to the FormMail script mentioned above.
If you have paid for custom CGI access, then you also have a directory in your public_html directory called "cgi-bin". Put all your CGI scripts there, and reference them at the URL http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/. For backward compatability with sites set up on the old server, that directory is also aliased to http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/.
The location of Perl is "/usr/bin/perl"
The location of Sendmail is "/usr/lib/sendmail"
Set permissions on scripts to "755"
For security reasons, all web user accounts are limited to FTP only in their home directories. All directory levels above that are hidden from you. For some scripts you may need to know the actual path to a file or script. The actual path to your home directory is "/home/yourusername/", so that a file called "data.txt" in the home directory of a user named "foobar" would have a full path of "/home/foobar/data.txt".

PHP Scripting Tips

If you have CGI access, then you also have PHP scripting privileges as well. PHP files will run in any of your HTML directories under the "public_html" directory, if they are named with and extension of .php, .php3, or .phtml. Your default PHP "include" directory is the "phpinc" directory located outside the public_html directory. This is a good place to put pieces of code that contain MySQL database passwords and other sensitive data. It is also a good place to put PHP code that you don't want the designer to mess up when they edit pages.

Password Protected Areas:

The new Control Panel has a feature called Web Protect under the Site Management section, which makes it easy to create password protected folders and manage the usernames and passwords for them.

You can also create and manage these areas manually, if you prefer. Click Here for detailed instructions on manually setting up password protected areas.

Securing Credit Card Info and Other Sensitive Data:

Although we take great pains to make our servers secure from hacker intrusion, there are several things that you need to do to make sure that any any sensitive data that is part of your web site or is collected by forms on your website is really safe.

The safest method is to never store sensitive data, such as credit cards, on the server at all. For example, have your SSL pages which collect credit cards post them directly to secure payment gateways, such as Authorize.net, Signio.com, LinkPoint.Com, etc. The second safest is to encrypt any sensitive data that is going to remain on the server.

An SSL "Secure Server" only protects the data as is passes from client's browser to the server or back. It does not protect the data while it resides on the server. It is important to understand that the SSL web serving protocol is not some "magic sheild" that protects everything on your site. It specifically guards the communications between browser and server from digital "evesdroppers" and nothing more.

For more ideas on how to guard sensitive data Click Here.

Also understand that MaiaTech accepts NO LIABILITY for any damages or losses of ANY KIND resulting from information on our servers being taken, viewed, or destroyed by unauthorized persons.

Basic Hosting comes with an SSL server area sharing the MaiaTech SSL certificate. To use this, any page on website can be viewed at a secure URL similar to this https://secure.maiatech.com/~yourusername/pagename.html
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