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2012

Jan

Bulk Domain Management – another great idea

Have you used our Bulk Domain Management tool?

It’s a great way to make changes – from DNS updates to contact details – for multiple domain names at the same time.

We’ve made it easy to manage and group selected domains by type (i.e. .uk or .com) and apply changes to the selected group only. It’s fast and easy to use for all these functions:

Full DNS Management
Easily update A records, CNAMES and MX records for multiple domains at once.

Web Forwarding
We allow both framed and non-framed forwarding, and a single setting can be applied to multiple domain names quickly.

Manage Contact Details
Change the contact details on any number of domains at once – we can even change your contact details on all your domains, should you move house, with just one click.

Catch-all Email Forwarding
Set emails up so that all mail sent to any user at your domains is forwarded to another email address of your choice. Apply the same settings to multiple domains in one click!

Change Nameservers
Change nameserver settings for several domains in your portfolio in one go.

WHOIS Privacy
WHOIS privacy protects you from spam, fraud, stalkers or worse by keeping your public contact details private for all your domains. Enable or disable WHOIS Privacy on multiple domains easily. WHOIS privacy is supplied for free with all .uk domains but for £4.99 p.a you can also enable it for your .com, .net, .org, .info or .biz.

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2012

Jan

Are you cashing in with eShop?

Posted in eShop, Special Offers By Cat

Online sales are always on the rise, and never faster than in January – but are you cashing in?

If you’ve got a business idea, why not get it off the ground with a little help from us? Our eShop and eBooking packages include everything you need to sell products or collect appointments for your service online, from the shop website and hosting to a shop admin area and tie-ins with payment gateways like PayPal and Sage Pay – from just £6.99 per month.

Build your own marketing campaign with voucher codes

Drive more revenue from existing customers with your own newsletter

Insert social media “Like” buttons to easily share your offers

Your store automatically adapts to mobile devices

Short on time? Or just not sure where to begin?

Our Managed Setup service is perfect for you. We’ll happily work with you to get your shop up and running – just drop us a line and we can discuss your requirements.

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2011

Dec

5-step guide to transferring your website

Posted in Hints & Tips, Web Hosting By Cat

Already have a website hosted elsewhere? Here are some tips on making the transfer to new webspace painless:

1) Know your web hosting requirements
First things first – you’ll need to make sure that the hosting account you are going to take out with Daily is at least the same specification as your current one. Pay particular attention to webspace, bandwidth, mailboxes and databases.

2)Make a copy of your website files
You will need to download all your website files from your current website account, as your current host may delete these files when you close your services with them and you’ll need copies if you’re going to transfer your website.

Just download all your files to somewhere safe, like the hard drive of your computer or onto a CD/DVD or external hard drive, so that you can be sure you’ve got copies to upload to your new web hosting account.

3) Make sure your domain name is ready to be transferred
Your domain name must be in the correct state – you do not want to close down any packages and then find your domain is still ‘locked’ or similar.

4) Open your package with Daily
As part of the order process, you’ll have the option of starting the domain transfer at the same time. Remember though, you’ll need to change your nameservers to Daily or the domain name will still resolve to your old host. There is a tickbox you can select in the order process to make sure the nameservers are updated.

5) Start uploading!
It will take about 24 hours for the domain name to update and start pointing to your new Daily webspace, but you can upload your data straight away, so your website will all be ready when the domain name finishes updating.

Points to Remember
Do you have any CGI Scripts or similar on your website (e.g. feedback forms). If so then some of the paths may well change, which means that simply downloading and re-uploading may not work in all cases – you’ll need to double-check these.

Emails or Databases? Remember to get a copy of these as well so you don’t lose the content when you transfer to Daily.

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2011

Nov

Do you need a Virtual Private Server?

Posted in Virtual Private Servers By Cat

We offer a great range of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) – so here’s a little guide to what you can do with a VPS. Don’t forget, though – our virtual private server range comes with a 7 day money back guarantee anyway, so you can still take one out to try.

Who would want a VPS?

A VPS is ideal for someone who has outgrown the shared hosting environment and needs a more dedicated solution. For example, a VPS may be perfect for you if you:

Need a large amount of dedicated resources to run their sites and applications.
Require a unique IP address.
Require root level access to make custom changes to programs.

What do I need to know to use a VPS?

With our Shared Hosting accounts, we look after all the server side components such as installs of things like mail facilities, scripting languages, patches for the operating system, security etc.

With a VPS, however, you’ll have much more access so while this gives you a huge amount of flexibility it does mean that there’s more for you too administer yourself so some system administration experience is essential.

Typical skills needed for administering a VPS are:

Familiarity with maintaining DNS records and nameservers
Familiarity with command line SSH (for Linux VPS) or administering IIS (for Windows VPS)
An understanding of background server processes and daemons
Experience in installing and customising mail facilities (e.g. exim, postfix, sendmail)
Experience in installing and customising other software and applications like databases and scripting languages

Basically, with a VPS you need to maintain your sites from the “ground up”, whereas with a Shared Hosting account the majority is already done for you when you first order the account – you don’t need to manually set up users and hosting space, configure DNS records or re-point domain names.

Do you have some specific examples of tasks I would need to do with a VPS?

Yes, please check out the Getting Started Guides on our Knowledge Base – these contain step-by-step instructions and screenshots for some of the most basic tasks

The Linux VPS contains a Virtualmin Control Panel. Does this mean I don’t need sys-admin skills?

The Virtualmin Control Panel basically gives you a ‘point and click’ interface to save you doing everything by command line in SSH.

This doesn’t mean that you’re not going to need to know the same skills as doing everything by command line though, so please don’t treat this as a substitute for sys-admin skills.

Will Daily set my sites up for me or show me how to do so myself?

This is a service we are unable to offer in the normal support remit, as VPS issues are handled directly by our system administrators

We can of course support any hardware or network issues, but general customer education is unsupported – though we can get a no obligation quote from our system administrators for any particular tasks.

Basically though, if you do need assistance in maintaining a VPS it may well be that you would find a Shared Hosting account preferable.

In Conclusion…

We always recommend that you ask yourself what you actually require in your hosting account – it really is about making sure you get the solution that’s right for you.

A VPS will often have more resources and for a low price (because you, rather than us, are doing the server admin!), but if you don’t have the experience in maintaining a root level server, you may find that a shared hosting package is a better solution for you. If you’re happy with server admin, though, Virtual Private Servers from Daily are an excellent choice for a robust hosting solution.

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2011

Nov

eShop upgraded!

Posted in eShop By Cat

We’ve upgraded our eShop Online Shopping packages with lots of great new features and improvements – here are some tips and tricks to make the most of them.

First things first – the main changes:

Facebook integration to your shop – sell through the world’s largest social network

Use the world’s largest social network in order to increase your sales. Integrate your existing shop with a few click, from your Facebook fan page. Simply connect the Facebook application in the back office with your fan page, select the desired products for the shop and your shop will be ready on Facebook.

Optimized display for mobile devices

Mobile commerce is a force to be reckoned with in retail. That’s why ePages stores have an optimized display for nearly all mobile terminals available.

Without changing your settings, your online shop is automatically displayed on devices like the iPhone or the Galaxy Tab. The optimized display for mobile devices is easy to use for your end-customers and is independent of the resolution of the screen.

Central shop dashboard – find all your relevant information in one place

For any successful business, the ability to keep track of important information is vital – this applies to your eShop too.

That’s why we’ve implemented a new dashboard, where all your key information can be found. You can customize the Dashboard completely to suit your needs. You decide which widgets appear, and where they are placed.

In the near future we will develop more widgets and make them available to you. (We also plan to open the API so that third parties provide their own widgets easily).

Downloadable products are here!

You can now sell virtual products (e.g. pictures or music) using the downloadable product feature. The feature allows you to specify if the virtual product is available for a limited time period, or can be previewed before purchase (e.g. pre-listening to a song before downloading it).

Other top features include:

SEO: Title tag for products
5 new store design templates
Improved Google Adwords Integration
Integration of Google Places
Integration of the Google Translate widget
Manage all social media activities (Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarks) from a central point
The Facebook “Like” box for your shop
New Page Element “last viewed product”
Possibility to export orders in XML format
Improved integration with Moneybookers
Direct access to the “Community” from the MBO
Multiple file uploader – select as many as you wish to upload
Create invoices, delivery notes & credit notes as PDF
Send as many newsletters at once – you’re no longer limited to 1000!

For more information, take a look at our overview of the new eShop features.

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2011

Oct

Help! What do you think of www.daily.co.uk?

Posted in About Daily, Customers By Cat

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, we recently recruited for a new junior web designer to give ourselves more design resource. Well, he’s been with us a month now (he’s called Shaun, he’s in a band, he was born the year your resident Marketing Manager/blogger started secondary school – ouch – and he drinks the appropriate amount of coffee and energy drinks for a web designer), and now that he’s got settled in we’re talking about how we could make a few improvements to the Daily website.

We have a fair few ideas of our own, of course (he’s going to need that coffee…), but we’d really like to hear your suggestions too – it’s you that uses our website, after all!

What do you like about the current website? What drives you up the wall?

Do you like the colourscheme? Loathe orange and love green?

Is there something you can never find? Something you can’t see the point of? Something you’d love to see? Something you’d miss if we got rid of it? What about the customer control panel – think we can organise that better?

I’ll discuss all of your ideas with Shaun and our Head of Marketing, so consider the comments box a suggestion box and have at it! You’re also welcome to tweet your ideas – you’ll find us at www.twitter.com/DailyInternet.

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2011

Oct

20% off Business Email

Posted in Email, Special Offers By Cat

You already know that a reliable email account is essential these days – but did you know what other benefits you get from our newest professional, secure Email Hosting accounts?

Choice of IMAP or POP3 mailboxes

Send and receive emails from anywhere using your smartphone

Fully compatible with well known software like Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird

Massive 30MB file attachment size – send and receive emails of up to 30MB

Free professional grade Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam

Massive 1GB secure mailboxes included with up to 10GB mailboxes available

And until 30th November, we’re giving you an extra 20% off our popular Email Business account – that’s just £1.73 per month with our discount voucher!

Use promo code 20EB1011 when you buy a yearly or two yearly Email Business account to claim your discount.

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2011

Sep

eShop – importing images via .csv

Posted in eShop, Hints & Tips, Online Shops By Cat

If you have lots of products, uploading all the necessary images and adding data to your online shop can seem like a daunting task. Here’s how the Import/Export feature can help make the task much simpler.

The first thing to do is prepare your product images – you’ll need to make sure that they’re no larger than 800 x 600 pixels, though we’ve found that 600 x 600 pixels is optimum. You don’t need to worry about creating separate images for slideshows and thumbnails etc – the system will automatically scale the image you upload. Do make sure you don’t have any spaces or special characters, like umlauts, in the filename.

Once you’ve done this, head to the Content/Categories section of your shop’s back office and open file management. Create a new folder with a meaningful name – we’ll use ‘Import’ by way of example. Now upload the product images you’ve just prepared to this folder – you can upload multiple images at once by marking multiple files in the selection field.

Next, create the products in your shop – you can also use the Import/Export function to save time. Create a test product with all the necessary specifications, and then export the product data. You’ll receive a CSV file which can be used as a template for the remaining products. To create additional products, just fill out the CSV file.

There are two columns in the CSV file that you will need to use to assign the product images you just uploaded to the newly created products: “[ImageLarge]” and “[ImageSlideShowString]“. In the “[ImageLarge]” column, enter the path to the product image that will be used as the main image for the respective product. In our example, this would be: Import/ProductA_Image1.jpg.

In the “[ImageSlideShowString]” column, enter the file path to the images that will be used for the gallery in addition to the main image, separating the file paths using a semicolon. In our example, this would then be: Import/ProductA_Image2.jpg; Import/ProductA_Image3.jpg; Import/ProductA_Image4.jpg.

Once you’re done, save the CSV file and upload it back to your back office. The shop will now integrate the files from the ‘Import’ folder into the database and assign the product images accordingly. After it’s finished, you can delete the ‘Import’ folder in the file administration if you wish – files will no longer be needed.

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2011

Sep

NEW: Search Expiring Domain Names

Posted in Domain Names By Cat

We know (Dailyfolk have a lot of domains between us – believe us, we know!) how irksome it is when you think of the perfect domain name only to find someone else has beaten you to it – which is why we brought out our Domain Backorder service recently.

To make it even easier to snag the ideal domain for your latest project, we’ve now added an Expiring Domain Names service. We provides a full list of domain names that are due to expire during a 24-72 hour period and it’s updated daily. There are thousands, so to make it easy for you to zero in on your domain of choice we’ve developed a comprehensive search facility. Try it out – search expiring domain names now.

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2011

Sep

What makes a good support ticket?

Posted in Customers, Hints & Tips, Support By Ray

If you have a problem with your car and take it to a garage, you’d probably say to the mechanic something along the lines of:

“Hello Mr. Mechanic! That car over there is mine. It started making a knocking noise a couple of days ago, usually happens when I brake. Can I book it in? Here’s the keys.”

What you’d be unlikely to do is walk into the garage and just say:
“Car’s broke. Fix it”

Obviously the mechanic would need to know where your car was for starters and you’d probably want give them a clue as to what was broken so they knew where to look instead of spending hours (for which you’re paying!) randomly testing different components.

Pretty much common sense, really!

That said, you’d be surprised how often our Support team receive emails from customers which really give us very little to go on. While we’ll do our best, if you want your problem to be diagnosed and resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible you do need to try and meet us half way – we’re often very dependent on the information you provide to us. If you omit that information, chances are your next response from us will be various questions to try to narrow down the options, instead of a resolution to your issue.

There are two reasons we need customers to be open with us:
Firstly, if we have the full details of your issue, chances are we’ll know the resolution (or know exactly where to look) and be able to provide a first point resolution. And secondly, if we have the full details, we won’t have to resort to guessing, which at best significantly delays your reply as we try to find out what could be wrong and at worst means we could perform an unwanted action.

So, here’s my guide to exactly what information we need from you in order to assist you as effectively as possible:

1) Raise a Support Ticket instead of sending a general email.
This confirms your identity as it comes from your Control Panel, so there’s no need for us to get back to you with security checks.

2) Be specific about the service to which you’re referring.
Include the relevant domain name or VPS IP address etc. Simple, but if you have multiple services then we need to know what one you’re talking about!

3) Tell us exactly what the problem is.
Provide full details of what isn’t working for you. Is something timing out? Are you getting a login issue etc?

4) Tell us whether it’s permanent or intermittent.
This is an important one. If your problem is intermittent, we’ll need to do multiple tests to get a range of results.

5) Send us any Error Messages.
The single most used feature in diagnosing an issue. Even if you think the error is in a foreign language, there’s a good chance it will mean something to us so just copy and paste it and we’ll see.

6) Let us know if you’ve made any changes recently.
It may be coincidence, but it’s probably best to let us make that call. Had you done anything different around the time your problem started? Over 90% of support tickets we get regarding a VPS suddenly blocking access to a user have resulted in comments along the lines of “I can’t think what would have caused it. I mean, I was only adding some extra firewall rules in and closing ports”.

So there you go, six simple steps that will only take you a couple of minutes, but the end result is getting a resolution back to you and saving yourself a considerable amount of time in the long run.

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