The Plesk Migration Manager does not migrate any stored SSL certificates, you will need to perform this task manually.

/usr/local/psa/var/certificates

In the event of server failure or migration, you can backup the SSL certificates in their raw format and transfer them to the new server.

Google Chrome:

Navigate to chrome://net-internals/#dns and press the “Clear host cache” button

Internet Explorer:

1) Launch Internet Explorer.
2) Click “Tools” then “Delete Browsing History.”
3) Uncheck “Preserve Favorites website data,” and ensure that “Cookies,” “History” and “Temporary Internet Files” are checked, and then click “Delete.”

Flush your DNS cache on Windows PCs:

Click “Start,” “Run,” type “cmd” into the run text box and then click “OK.”
Type “ipconfig /flushdns” into the command prompt and press “Enter.”

Increasing your web site performance usually involves a number of small changes to your web page. Some of Google’s PageSpeed suggestions are easier to resolve than others.

The Message:

Google’s PageSpeed reports “The following resources have no character set specified in their HTTP headers. Specifying a character set in HTTP headers can speed up browser rendering.”

The Issue:

Specifying a character set in the HTTP response headers of your HTML documents allows the browser to begin parsing HTML and executing scripts immediately.

The solution:

This is easy if your pages are PHP encoded. Simply add the following line of code to the top of your PHP page:

header(‘Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1′);

The Result:

Re-run Google PageSpeed and see the warning message vanish!

Which domains are automatically parked?

If you register a domain name and have not purchased a web hosting service for that domain name during the checkout process then your domain name is considered parked.

What does this mean? It means that your domain name has not been pointed to any specific hosting server and so it is connected to the domain parking server MICROLITE1.COM thus enabling all the services that we provide with all customer parked domain names.

Troubleshooting non-working parked domains

There are situations where your parked domain name may have stopped working or where your domain name was previously hosted and now you want it parked. In these cases there are a number of steps to the process to ensure that your domain name is parked properly.

Has your domain name expired?

If you domain name has suddenly stopped working and you have not made any changes to the domain name servers or DNS records recently then your domain name may have expired. Check the expiry date in the Public WHOIS or contact Live Support and ask them to check for you. Renew your domain if necessary.

Is your domain name connected to the parking server?

For your domain name to be parked it must be pointing to the parking name server using the correct name servers. Again, view your name server settings by viewing the the Public WHOIS record, you should see the name servers set as follows:

Name servers:
ns.microlite1.com
ns2.microlite1.com

If your name servers are not set to MICROLITE1.COM as above then your domain name is not pointing to the parking server. Login to your Domain Control Panel or ask Live Support to modify your name servers accordingly. Note that any name server change that you make are subject to a 24 hours propagation delay.

Has your domain name been registered for more than 24 hours?

If you domain name is a recent registration then you must allow time for the domain to register and for the new DNS zone to fully propagate the global internet. For .uk domain names you can expect results within 24 hours however for global .tlds such as .com you need to allow up to 72 hours.

Is your DNS zone present and active?

The fact that you have reached this far means that it probably is not active. There are a few reasons that this may be the case. The most common is that you have pointed your domain name to the parking name servers but the DNS zone has not been created for this domain.

To confirm whetjer your DNS Zone is active visit IntoDNS and run a report on your  domain name.

Ask Live Support to create/recreate your domain DNS zone. The only other problem is that your DNS zone is not valid – possibly after a recent change to your records. Again, ask Live Support to reset your DNS zone as new and re-apply your DNS record modifications carefully. 24 hour Propagation delay rules apply.

DNS can be tricky – let us help you

Remember you can ask Live Support to apply your DNS changes, simply copy+paste the instructions you received from your new host and our support teams will assist with the modifications.

Even with today’s high performance web servers and mega bandwidth broadband to the home that web site page load speed is a massively important issue – yet many webmasters spend little time on the issue.

Would you be surprised to hear that 40% of users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load?

We are way past the days of modems and 128k ADSL so you would think all websites would load in an instant. Well, that is not the case. To compensate for the increase in bandwidth many webmasters have bloated their web sites with unneccessarily large images, slow plugin-ins and javascripts that simply are not used. Basically there does not seem to be a need to optimise page load time any more – or is there?

Ten years ago people expected pages to load within 30 seconds. Any slower than that and you would start losing users. Time is short and people demand more these days. Your target today has got to be 2 seconds or less.

Here’s five big reasons you need to increase your page load speed

• A one second delay can reduce conversions by 7%
• Faster web site is great for user experience
• Conversion rates and ROI will increase
• Site speed is incorporated in search rankings
• Faster pages encourages users to view more pages

Even looking beyond the user experience you will find that page load time is also a factor for search engine rankings, conversion and perception of your brand. So for many reasons, all important reasons, you need to get your page load time in check.

How to accurately check your page load times

There are a number of tools to help you squeeze the most of your web pages. If you have never optimised your pages before then there are lots of small things you can do increase the speed – you could get 300% with little effort.

The Google Developers are always quick to release super useful tools and PageSpeed is no exception, this should be your first port of call, a simply browser plugin and you’ll get a full report on what is slowing your page speed down and tips on fixing the issues.

My favourite online page speed tester is provided by Pingdom.com, you can compare your site over time and also against other sites. You get a performance grade and a page load comparison against all other tested websites.

Our result: We get a performance grade of 99/100 and our site is faster than 98% of all tested website.

Go to Pingdom now and start to increase your page load speeds as part of your regular webmaster tasks.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

You will need to ensure that PHP is running as Apache, to check  this in Plesk you will need to login to your client account, select the domain name and go to Web hosting settings.

Re: validity period of domain, validity period is prolonged, extend the validity period

If you get this message then do not worry about the expiry of your domain name or hosting account. This message relates to the period you applied when you added the domain name to your Plesk panel.

The messages usually contain:

• validity period of domain
• validity period is prolonged
• extend the validity period

This problem occurs if you missed out Step 12 in “How to add a domain to multi-domain hosting“.

To resolve, simply log in to your Plesk control panel, select the appropriate domain name, go to Resource Usage and ensure that the “Expiration date” is set to “Never Expires“.

Re: Search doesn’t work in AtMail, AtMail search returns no results

AtMail is a great webmail application that has a high level of functionality, an attractive looking interface and many useful integrated features.

One of these feature includes a bug that causes the “Search” function to return no results for any search!

To fix it, you need SSH Root access to your dedicated server console. If you want to get down and dirty, edit the following two lines:

Change Line 364: $before = "$BeforeDay-$BeforeMonth-$BeforeYear";
Change Line 369: $after = "$AfterDay-$AfterMonth-$AfterYear";


Alternatively, run the following two SED commands and the lines containing the bugs will be automatically fixed.

# sed 's/20$BeforeYear/$BeforeYear/g' /var/www/atmail/search.php > /var/www/atmail/search.php.new
# sed 's/20$AfterYear/$AfterYear/g' /var/www/atmail/search.php.new > /var/www/atmail/search.php
# rm -f /var/www/atmail/search.php.new


Happy searching!

Re: Installation of CA, Install SSL CA Certificates

If you are using a shared or managed hosting service (such as Plesk) then the installation of SSL certificates is straightforward and can be done through the control panel interface. However, when you need to install on a server level with no panel things are a little more involved.

To install certificate authority (CA) certs in your Centos server:

• Copy the certificates to /etc/pki/tls/certs
• Edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf
• Add “SSLCACertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/YourCAFile.crt”
• Test with “service httpd configtest”

If all ok, “service httpd restart”

Re: Insufficient storage for Plesk  9.5.4 Migration Manager (even though there is)

If you are having problems using the Plesk Migration Manager, one of the first problems you need to solve is the insufficient space problem. There are many problems with the PMM but that’s another story, you’re probably here because you really need to get it working.

You may get a failed migration due to this issue, or a constant hang at 50% completion without any error.

Even though you get the opportunity to set a data dump location (default within /var) and you have likely carefully ensured that there is another psace storage on that device, what you don’t know is an intermediate storage space is also required in /usr/local/psa/PMM.

Luckily this problem is easily dealt with by creating a symbolic link for the PMM directory.

The examples below move the PMM directory to a secondary drive namely /backup.

1. Let’s create the new PMM directory on a drive with plenty of free space.

# mkdir /backup/PMM

2. Now we will copy the PMM directory and its contents to the new PMM directory whilst preserving the ownership and permissions.

# cp -Rp /usr/local/psa/PMM/* .

3. Set the current PMM directory aside

# mv /usr/local/psa/PMM /usr/local/psa/PMM.old

4. Now we create the symbolic link

# ln -s /backup/PMM /usr/local/psa/PMM

The PMM directory is now symbolically mapped to a drive with suffienct space for your migration to complete. You may need to abort any previous migrations and restart as often they do not restart once stopped due to an insufficient storage space problem.

See this entry on Parallels KB: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=100327

Re: Upgrade Plesk 9.5.4, Install micro-updates Plesk 9.5.x

If you are still running Linux Plesk 9.5.4 you may think that because 9.5.4 is the latest (and last) 9.5.x version that there are no new patches or upgrades available. If so, you are dangerously wrong.

Parallels regularly release “Micro Updates” which resolve recently discovered vulnerabilities, and there are plenty of them. The latest update is 9.5.4 MU 18.

You can find which version you are running like this:

# cat /root/.autoinstaller/microupdates.xml

You can see here that “patch version=18″ which means micro updates up to  (MU) 18 are installed.

Upgrading to Plesk 9.5.4 and installing the Micro Updates

We recommend that you install any new micro updates as soon as possible, it takes only a few minutes and can be run from the command line:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/autoinstaller –select-product-id plesk –select-release-current –reinstall-patch –install-component base

If you are not running Plesk 9.5.4, use the following command to upgrade to latest 9.5.4:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/autoinstaller –select-release-id=PLESK_9_5_4 –upgrade-installed-components –ignore-key-errors –notify-email=your@emailaddress.com

If you haven’t already, go to Parallels and subscribe for the panel update notifications:

http://kb.parallels.com/

For further information see Parallels KB Article http://kb.parallels.com/en/9294

Re: Preparing for a Plesk server migration, Bulk change TTL on Plesk

Occasionally you need to move all your clients to a new server. The hardware becomes aged (or slow) but the thought of moving all those clients (hundreds) and the DNS propagation time delay, not something that makes you feel great.

However, you can minimise the DNS propagation times by changing the TTL (Time To Live) on the Plesk domain DNS records. Usually the refresh rate is between daily and weekly. In preparation for a server migration, around a week before, change all domains to update ‘hourly’. You can do this in the panel for each domain name, or you can use this nifty shortcut.

First, change all the TTL’s to 3600 seconds (1 hour)

# mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa
 UPDATE psa.dns_zone SET ttl = '3600', ttl_unit = '60' WHERE id >1;

Now you need to dump the new SOA records to zone files for bind to us:

# mysql -Ns -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -D psa -e 'select name from domains' | awk '{print "/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/dnsmng update " $1 }' | sh

You can test with:

# dig yourdomnain.co.uk SOA

When you have completed the migration and everything is fine, you can change the records back to the default which was 86400.

Nominet explain the (sometimes confusing) status as follows: “This status is used after first registration but before the initial registration fee has been received.  Please note that we (Nominet) issue monthly invoices, so it is possible that if this status is displayed your registrar has not yet been invoiced for the domain name.”.

For more information, see Renewal request being processed at Nominet.

Nominet explain the (sometimes confusing) status as follows: “This status is used after first registration but before the initial registration fee has been received.  Please note that we (Nominet) issue monthly invoices, so it is possible that if this status is displayed your registrar has not yet been invoiced for the domain name.”.

For more information, see Registration request being processed at Nominet.

To increase your change of being able to send through the AOL network please check the following:

1. Ensure that your forwarding email addresses are added to your AOL Safe Senders List.
2. Check that you have a valid SPF DNS record. This is a DNS entry looking something familiar to:
   “@ IN TXT v=spf1 a:microlite1.com ~all”
3. Ensure that your mail server IP has a reverse DNS pointer set. AOL will not allow connections from IPs that do not contain a reverse pointer. You can test this by entering the IP address or domain name here: Check Reverse DNS Pointer
4. If you forward email to AOL from email aliases then be aware that any spam you forward to your AOL address will be marked as originating from your forwarding address and not the original address. This may result in AOL blocking your domain name in the error of assuming that it is sending SPAM into the AOL network.
5. If you receive SPAM in your AOL inbox that is forwarded from one of your own domain names DO NOT MARK IT AS SPAM. This will result in your own domain name being blocked on the AOL network. AOL will then not allow and connections from your domain name to the AOL network.

External resources:

• Issues forwarding email to AOL
• AOL Postmaster Official Support

It is EASY to block your own domain name from sending email through the AOL mail network. If you get “Deferred: Connection refused by yourdomain.com” with your domain name in the message, you are blocked.

If you suspect that you have blocked your own domain name through the AOL network then simply await for the block to expire or contact AOL and attempt an early unblock of your domain name through the AOL support network.