UKC

How to check that a parked domain name is working

All domain names parked with UK Cheapest have free access to many resources such as email forwarding, web redirection, DNS management and much more. So there are many reasons why you should park your domain names with us.

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.

Categories DNS

How to speed up your web page load time

Why speeding up your web pages is more important than you think

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
For statistics lovers, here is some data from Kissmetrics
  • 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less
  • 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
  • 79% of shoppers are less likely to make repeat purchases from slow sites
  • 52% state quick page loads are more important then site loyalty
  • A 1 seconds delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%
  • 44% of shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience

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.

How do I extend the ‘validity period of domain’ in Plesk?

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“.

Plesk: AtMail search does not work

AtMailRe: 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!

How to: Installing CA [root] Certificates

Install CA CertificatesRe: 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”