Positive Internet

Some possible reasons:

A) You need to replace our holding page with your own home page, or remove our holding page if your home page is not named index.html. By default, we place a page called index.html in your public_html directory. You should either replace this with your own index.html page, or delete it if you are using a different name for your home page (such as index.htm, default.htm, main.html, home.html etc).

B) You published your files to the wrong place or don't have a home page file with an appropriate name. You must upload all your content to your public_html directory and sub directories thereof. You home page (the initial page displayed on your site) must be called one of the following: 

index.html index.htm default.html default.htm main.html main.htm home.html home.htm index.cgi index.php index.jsp

C) Your ISP's proxy server may be caching our holding page and not displaying the latest version of your site. This can happen if you have only just uploaded your site for the first time and your ISP's proxy server is malfunctioning. Try clicking CTRL-REFRESH in your browser (hold down the CTRL key and click Refresh). This forces a reload of the page and may purge the proxy server of its old contents.

Back to top

We do not provide a telephone technical support service for Z account clients for several good reasons:

1. Your Internet Service Provider must provide telephone support in order to communicate with you on the occasions that you may have difficulty connecting to the Internet but in our case support issues do not relate to connectivity. You should always be able to e-mail us or use our online support system without trouble.
2. E-mail is a much more efficient means of support - everything is in writing and available for reference, it is monitored and recorded (no arguments about when things were dealt with and who dealt with them) and can be added to a pool of knowledge. More importantly, the e-mail can easily be forwarded to exactly the person who needs to deal with it without having to transcribe the phone conversation. All e-mails are read by our whole team and assigned to the most suitable person. Support e-mail is read by management and a feel for our clients' needs and problems is propagated throughout the company.
3. With telephone support you can spend much of your time waiting on hold to be told that you'll be got back to. With Positive, we PROMISE you that your e-mail will receive a reply (from a human, not a machine!) within three working hours. We believe this will be far more important to you than if you can have the 'privilege' of dialling a national-rate number to speak to some out-sourced frontline support droid!
4. We believe that the costs and complexity involved in providing you with a telephone support service are better put back into the quality of the servers and service we provide.

Of course, we do have a contact phone number for accounts, sales and general information about our services and company, but we do not usually provide technical support on this number.

Back to top

We do support ApacheASP which uses the same objects as Microsoft ASP but doesn't support programming in Visual Basic. Since most commonly available ASP applications are programmed in Visual Basic it does mean they aren't supported by our service. The reason we don't support Microsoft's ASP is that it requires Microsoft NT or Windows 2000 hosting. All our hosting solutions are Unix (Linux) based because of the distinct and well-documented advantages this offers over NT / Windows 2000 in terms of performance, reliability, stability and most importantly (and ever increasingly) security. We offer powerful alternatives to ASP, many of which are superior in terms of robustness, performance and security - for example, the widely acclaimed PHP and Java Servlets / JSP.

Back to top

If you are using our shared Z web hosting service then your site is as secure as we can possibly make it within a shared environment. This may sound glib, but no shared web hosting account can ever be 100% secure. However, we take all possible steps to ensure the maximum security. These include use of the Unix (Linux) operating system, widely renowned in the industry to be significantly more secure than Windows NT or 2000 as a hosting platform, plus application of the latest firewall and security measures. We always apply the latest security patches to all our servers as soon as they are released and we constantly monitor for any suspicious activity. Additionally we run the SuExec system for CGI scripts running on our servers, which sandboxes scripts and ensures they can only be run by the owner, not by anyone with access to the server, as is the case with some other hosting services. We also provide SSL secure server facilities with industrial strength encryption for customers who wish to transmit sensitive data to and from their web site.

As with any security setup, any shared server is ultimately only as secure as the weakest password on the system. So, we always set passwords for our customers which are very hard to hack, and we ask that customers only change these passwords to something equally secure if they feel they must change them.

Ultimately, if security is of paramount importance on your web site we would recommend getting a dedicated or managed server solution as this offers the maximum protection it is possible to give. If you would like further information, see here for details of our dedicated and managed server range.

Back to top

For publishing your site we provide full access via FTP. This means you can use any FTP client of your choice to upload your files (see here for our FTP guide) or any web editor / publishing software that supports FTP (such as Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Homesite etc.

We also fully support Secure FTP (sFTP) for data transfer to and from our systems.

As well as FTP access, we also provide full Unix Shell access via SSH (secure telnet). Please see our SSH FAQ for further information on SSH.

Back to top

You should ensure that you follow PCI compliance levels closely when doing so. Our shared Z hosting platform does offer the option to use SSL certificate security for your web pages, however, we strongly recommend the use of a managed or dedicated server if you wish to ensure you meet the highest levels of security and PCI compliance. Please contact us for more information.

Back to top

We have a web-based support tracking system which allows you to view any support tickets you have submitted to us via support@positive-internet.com and see the current status of any oustanding enquiries. This tracking system is accessed through the "My Account" link at the top menu of this web site. You have a unique "contact" username and "contact" password for this area, which is different to your shared Z account login details. If you are unsure or have not been allocated your contact username and password, you can request these to be sent directly to your registered e-mail address or mobile telephone number.

Back to top

Our bandwidth policy is that we do not impose fixed data transfer limits. This doesn't mean we have an unlimited data transfer policy - no provider can feasibly offer this within a shared web hosting environment.

Our data transfer limits are designed to be flexible, to allow for fluctuations in site traffic, for example as a result of publicity, marketing or advertising etc. What cannot be accommodated within a shared web hosting environment is a consistently high data data transfer from month to month. As a rule of thumb, once your data transfer gets into double figures of Gigaybytes per month of transfer, then it is likely to be a problem within a shared hosting environment.

It is not just an issue of data transfer - we find that a site consuming consistently large amounts of bandwidth usually also has a high number of hits and therefore will be using up a large number of server connections at any given moment in time. Since simultaneous server connections on any server is a finite number, sites using a disproporionate number of connections will have a detrimental impact on other customers on the same box and this is something which cannot be sustained within a shared hosting environment.

When bandwidth consumption gets to these sorts of levels we will usually want to discuss a higher level of service with you, such as one of our dedicated server options. All our dedicated servers come with a large and very generous bandwidth allowance and have significantly higher resource and connection limits.
We will always endevour to keep your site up and running whilst we are discussing options and we would never land you with an unexpected bandwidth bill out of the blue!

Back to top