This offer expires Midnight, Thursday 30th September so don’t miss out!

Timeframe: Thursday 2nd September 2010 between 06:00 and 08:00.

Expected Impact: Web and FTP services will be unavailable for brief periods of time whilst updating and the servers rebooting.

What you need to do: All customers are advised to check their sites availability and functionality after this maintenance window. While we will endeavour to check all sites, this is a time consuming task and user reported issues will be dealt with as the highest priority.

As ever, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions via the control panel support system.

Price comparison is based on the lowest priced monthly hosting package with inclusive MS SQL databases excluding VAT and are accurate as of 24th August 2010 and do not include special offers.

Setup your Hosting

1. Add the domain to your hosting control panel via ‘Domain Settings’ > ‘Add New Domain’. For the purposes of this tutorial we will use the third level domain ‘perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk’.

2. Under ‘Domain Settings > Domain Info > ‘perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk’ > Web Service > Edit

3. Turn OFF ‘PHP’ service by clicking the ON button.

1. Turn ON ‘PHP Advanced’ service by clicking the OFF button.
2. Click ADD next to ‘PHP Mode’.
3. Select PHP Mode ‘PHP version 5. Mode fastcgi’.
4. Set ‘Indexes’ to ‘Disabled’.
5. Set ‘Symbolic Links’ to ‘Owner’s Only’.
6. Click ‘Apply’ link next to ‘Server Configuration’.
7. These settings may take 5 minutes to apply.

4. Create your database for Joomla:

1. Within the hosting control panel go to ‘Databases’ > ‘MySQL’ > ‘MySQL DB Wizard’.
2. Turn ON the MySQL service by clicking the OFF button.
3. Enter your database name (in this case we use ‘mysite’ giving us a database name of joomla_mysite) and continue.
4. Create a user for your database ensuring you choose a ‘User role’ of ‘dba’ and click ‘Add’.
5. Click finish and you should see the database and user has been created. Make a note of these details for later use.

Install Joomla

5. Download the latest Joomla ‘Full Package’ from http://www.joomla.org/download.html to your computer.

6. Extract the Joomla .zip file to your computer and open the extracted file ‘htaccess.txt’ in a text editor. Add the following lines to the top of the htaccess.txt file and save.

1. php_flag register_globals 0
2. php_value mbstring.language neutral

7. Open your FTP program. If you are not familiar with using FTP please see our FileZilla tutorial.

1. Connect to the FTP server using the details found under ‘FTP/User Account’ > ‘FTP User’.
2. Find the ‘perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk’ directory on the server (right window) and remove all the default files and directories. These include ‘index.html’, ‘login.html’, ‘cp/’, ‘cgi-bin/’, ‘images/’, etc.
3. Find the extracted ‘Joomla_1.x.x-Stable-Full_Package’ on your local computer (left window).
4. Move/Upload the contents of ‘Joomla_1.x.x-Stable-Full_Package’ (left window) to ‘perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk’ (right window).
5. Wait for all files to successfully complete uploading before you continue.
6. Find the file ‘htaccess.txt’ on the FTP server and rename it to ‘.htaccess’.

8. Visit your website address/the location to which you uploaded Joomla in your Web Browser (eg Firefox). For us this was http://perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk/ which should automatically redirect to http://perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk/installation/index.php

Configure Joomla

9. You can now configure Joomla using the Web Installer:

1. Choose your local language and continue.
2. Your installation should pass all Pre-installation Checks and you may continue. If not please revisit steps above (especially htaccess.txt/.htaccess)
3. Read and Accept the Joomla GNU license terms.
4. Enter the database details chosen when creating your database in step 4 above and continue.
5. If you choose to enable the Joomla FTP layer then your FTP root should be auto-detected as ‘/perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk’.
6. Enter your Joomla site information under ‘Main Configuration’.

Back within your FTP client locate the ‘installation’ file on the FTP server and delete it (in our example this was /perfectjoomla.pipeten.co.uk/installation/’.

You should now be able to visit http://yoursite.co.uk/administrator/index.php for the Joomla administration and http://yoursite.co.uk/ for your website.

Start your Joomla website today with a Pipe Ten Joomla Optimised or Advanced Hosting Package.

Supported Servers:

web10.pipeten.co.uk

• PHP4 fastcgi (default) or cgi
• PHP5 libphp5 (default), fastcgi or cgi

dweb4.pipeten.co.uk

• PHP4 fastcgi (default) or cgi
• PHP5 libphp5 (default), fastcgi or cgi

dweb16.pipeten.co.uk

• PHP4 fastcgi (default) or cgi
• PHP5 libphp5 (default), fastcgi or cgi

Customers using our Integrated Cloud or Physical Servers should contact support if this functionality is required.

Mode configuration:

For customers wanting speed and simplicity with PHP5 should choose mode libphp5. libphp5 runs as the web server user httpd.httpd and as such you may need to reset the ownership on uploaded files occasionally or chown/chgrp them after upload.

For customers wanting improved security but with a trade-off of slightly reduced performance should choose PHP4 or PHP5 mode fastcgi. fastcgi runs as your own user.group which improves the security of writeable files and directories.

For customers with application specific needs should only choose mode cgi as performance can highly be degraded during periods of high load.

Additional configuration:

If you are looking to further tweak PHP then all PHP versions and modes now support .htaccess based over-ride. Some common examples of these are below, other items may be restricted due to nature of shared hosting.

Hide all PHP errors

php_flag display_startup_errors off
php_flag display_errors off

Display all PHP errors

php_flag display_startup_errors on
php_flag display_errors on
php_value error_reporting 2147483647

Logging PHP errors to file

# you will need to create the ‘sessions’ directory in your accounts FTP root with appropriate permissions.
php_flag  log_errors on
php_value error_log  /hsphere/local/home/username/PHP_errors.log

Turn on register_globals (not generally recommened):

php_flag register_globals 1

Store PHP session data in target directory:

# you will need to create the ‘sessions’ directory in your accounts FTP root with appropriate permissions.
php_flag session.save_path /hsphere/local/home/username/sessions/

Turn on zlib/gzip compression:

php_flag zlib.output_compression On
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 8
php_flag display_errors 1

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A300
ExpiresByType image/x-icon A2592000
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A3600
ExpiresByType text/css A3600
ExpiresByType image/gif A604800
ExpiresByType image/png A604800
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A604800
ExpiresByType text/plain A300
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A604800
ExpiresByType video/x-flv A604800
ExpiresByType application/pdf A604800
ExpiresByType text/html A300

If you think of any other handy PHP related .htaccess tricks our customers might benefit from, please let us know add we’ll and them here.

Otherwise you can find more general .htaccess tricks in our .htaccess cheat sheet post.

Don’t leave it too late though, the offer expires Midnight, Tuesday 31st August!

Google has also announced that .CO domains will be “Google-National” which means they will have the same geo-targeting options available as the other generic TLDs, such as .com, .net, .biz and .org. This is great news as .CO websites can be targeted to meet your requirements anywhere around the world!

There are still plenty of good keyword rich .CO domains available, so if you’ve not yet added any to your portfolio you can check the availability and place your registrations via our domain registration facility.

Timeframe: Thursday 05th August 2010 between 21:50 and 22:15

Expected Impact: During this work there is a risk of a short outage below 30 seconds in duration.

As ever, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions via the control panel support system.

We apologise for the late notice of this maintenance.

04:48: We have been alerted to an outage at our Sheffield PoP (Point of Presence), an engineer has been dispatched.

05:15: Engineer has identified issues with power to the data center, relevant upstream suppliers have been notified.

06:15 We are awaiting further information from the facility operator.

07:15 We are awaiting further updates from the facility operator.

08:35 Services restoring, further updates pending.

09:54 – All services have been confirmed and tested as fully restored. We do not expect this issue to occur again and we are also working towards preventing this from occuring again. Customers wishing to receive an RFO should contact the support team through the normal means.