Archive | March, 2011

Exim Queue Management Tutorial

Posted on March 19, 2011 in Linux

So, you have got yourself a shiney new dedicated or VPS server with cPanel or DirectAdmin or some such installed. It probably won’t be long before you have to start checking the exim mail logs and the exim mail queue to trace problems being encountered by customers.

I have put this article here more as an aide-memoir than anything. If anyone finds it useful, I’d love to hear from you!

Respect the exim queue

One of worst things you could ever do as an admin, when finding a mail queue with hundreds or thousands of frozen or delayed messages in it, is to simply clear the queue. DONT DO THIS! You might just as well not run a mail server at all. The messages you remove in this way will just vanish without a trace – your customers and the people they communicate with won’t have a clue what happened, and your service will soon be viewed as unreliable.

Sadly, many inexperienced admins use the graphical UI to do just that – because it’s easy. However, with just a few simple commands, it can become possible to inspect and manage the queue with much greater elegance.

So, read on to find out how Exim queue management can be done from the command line. Read More…

Website Uptime Monitors Review – Choosing the Right One

Posted on March 14, 2011 in Web Hosting

For my sins, I work part-time for other hosting companies, and one of the most common misunderstandings I encounter is when someone will swear blind their website is down when the truth is that their ISP is just suffering some temporary routing problems.

Customers come in all shapes and sizes, and degrees of ability and understanding of how the internet works, and the more savy website owners now use some form of website monitoring to make sure that us naughty dishonest web hosting companies are playing our part in their success.

Some folks spend more on the website monitoring than the hundred quid a year they are prepared to spend on the website hosting itself – hosting that enables their business to rake in a small fortune (but that’ a rant for another day!). So read on to understand more about uptime and availability. Read More…

Seven common SEO myths busted

Posted on March 13, 2011 in Web Design

Listening to some folks, you’d swear the tooth fairy really did exist. However painful the truth might be, she doesn’t.As much as it would be lovely if she did, she just doesn’t.

Party pooping aside, it’s amazing how some myths just refuse to die. Case in point – there are still dozens of common myths that still float around regarding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Only recently a customer felt that unless he had keywords added to his site using meta tags that the sky would fall down and nobody would ever find him on Google.

Lets have a look at the seven most common SEO myths that simply refuse to die, bought to me by my customers. Read More…

How to Move WordPress – Essentials tutorial

Posted on March 12, 2011 in Web Design

OK, I should probably qualify the title. This guide should give you all you need to know to be able to move a standard WordPress (i.e. NOT WordPress MU edition)  site from one location to another. What I’m not going to discuss here are the SEO redirects that you will need to do to prevent rank loss, or what you will need to do if you also want to alter your permalink structure at the same time.

Moving WordPress strikes fear into many a web developer, but it doesn’t have to be such a nightmare. There are a few possibilities when you move wordpress:

  • You may be moving the installation path e.g. from http://yourdomain.com/wordpress/ to http://yourdomain.com/
  • You may be moving to a new domain e.g. from http://olddomain.com to http://newdomain.com
  • You may be moving hosts, from one server to another.

Or, if you are a real blog-warrior, you’ll be attempting to do two or more of the above! Read More…