Small Packages: Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ's and "how-to's" related to running your own web site at Small Packages

04 March 2005

Dealing With Referrer Spam

Site Management

In the last year referrer spam has been increasingly common. The target of the spammers are those people who publish their stats and/or referrers on their web sites, the spammers hope that by getting their links on those pages they will increase their visibility on search engines. Regardless of whether we do or don't publish our referrers we all get hit by referrer spam.

There is a way of combatting referrer spam using the .htaccess file. Basically what you need to do is create a list of referrers that are banned from your site. You can edit your .htaccess file using the File Manager in cPanel.

Continue reading "Dealing With Referrer Spam"

Posted by ShelaghG at 11:40 AM | Comments (1)

28 December 2004

Managing Your E-Mail

Email

It's very important to keep on top of your e-mail. Many people don't seem to realise that the spaced used for mailboxes is part of their disk allocation. I've seen people use up their whole hosting account on e-mail! There are a few things to remember :
1. There is no ceiling on the size of your default mailbox. If you don't clear down your e-mail, either by downloading it or logging in via webmail and deleting it, your mailbox grows and grows until you run out of disk space. When you run out of disk space you don't get any more mail messages, instead they hang around on the server, slowing it down. In addition every time a message doesn't get delivered to you a return message is generated to the sender telling them your mailbox is full. If the message is from a legitimate address this isn't such a big problem but if you are getting a lot of spam the chances are the sender's address is spoofed meaing that the server is unable to deliver the reply. This also sits on the mail queue, slowing down the server even more. The server will try to deliver messages in the mail queue for about a week before it discards them.

2. Enable SpamAssassin via cPanel. It's very good at weeding out spam. Do bear in mind though that you need to clear down your spam folder (viewable via Horde or Neomail) otherwise it will grow and grow until it uses up all the space in your account, or your mailbox if you have set up a named mailbox with a finite space limit.

3. If you use webmail to send mail clear down your Sent Mail folders. This sits on the server using part of your space allocation until you delete it.

4. As well as using SpamAssassin you can dump a lot of spam by setting the default mail address, as outlined in this tutorial

Posted by ShelaghG at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

26 December 2004

Backups

General

Backups are taken every night. We save a daily backup, a weekly backup and a monthly backup. These backups are NOT guaranteed, your data is YOUR responsibility. It is very important that you back up your own files, particularly if you use a MySQL database as you will not have an original copy of this on your own computer.

Posted by ShelaghG at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

Refunds

General

30 Day Money Back Guarantee/Refunds:
Should you become unsatisfied with our services within the first 30 days of your account activation, Small Packages will refund your hosting fee.

Cancellation Refunds:
We DO NOT refund partial annual/quarterly fees to accounts canceling after their 30 day initial account activation period.

Posted by ShelaghG at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

Bandwidth

General

Bandwidth is allocated on a ration of 20:1 (bandwidth:disk space). Overusage of bandwidth is billed at $1/Gb. Bandwidth is calculated on a monthly basis.

Posted by ShelaghG at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)