Archive for October, 2009

Mini Howto: Email Client Setup

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Question: What is my pop3 Server?
Answer:   domain.com

To connect to your pop3 server via an email client such as thunderbird, check your settings.  The incoming mail server, or pop3 server, should be set to your domain without any specific host names attached.  So, if your domain was example-fishing.com, then your pop3 server name would simple be:

example-fishing.com  (not pop3.example-fishing.com).

Question: What is my smtp server?
Answer: domain.com or your ISP

You can send email from your domain hosted at M3Server.com by checking your settings.  The outgoing mail server, or smtp server, should be set to your domain without any specific host names attached like the above example:

example-fishing.com (not smtp.example-fishing.com)

You also need to select, “my server requires authentication”.  Do not select  SSL.  Use the same user name and password as your email account.

If your ISP blocks port 25, like AT&T (which is a good thing, it controls spam and viruses from dsl attached computer networks), you can instruct your email client to use port 587, the alternate sendmail port.

Of course, we recommend using your ISP’s smtp server to send email.   Since you are connected to the ISP, you have authorization to email via their smtp servers and local smtp servers to your computer is probably faster than sending through a remote server on a remote network.

Happy Emailing :)



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Shared Hosting and VPS Servers – What’s the difference?

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

To lower your operating costs, several customers are placed on the same server.  This allows them to “share” the cost of a server.  With shared hosting, you not only share the physical hardware, but also the operating system.  This can sometimes limit what software you can install.

VPS Servers are also known as the industry buzz word – “Cloud Hosting”.  VPS Servers do share the same hardware with other customers.  The difference is much improved service:

  • Dedicated Disk space
  • Dedicated Memory
  • Dedicated CPU
  • Dedicated Operating System
  • Host as many domains as you wish
  • M3′s Control panel to add/remove domains/emails/mysql db

As you can see, its the next best thing to real dedicated server hosting.  If another server maxes out its CPU, your CPU is calm, processing only requests for your server.  You need a specific PHP module or apache configration?  No problem, with your dedicated operating system, you have further possibilities with software offerings.

So, while shared hosting is fine for small informational sites that need only the basic configuration, VPS servers give you much more service options and scalability.



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Mini Howto: FileZilla sftp connection

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Question: How to setup FileZilla for a sftp connection

So, you want to connect to your ftp account securely huh?  Outstanding! Evey security measure you take, keeps your site that much safer.

If you haven’t already done so, download FileZilla (link opens a new window so you don’t lose your blog,  here:

Install and launch FileZilla.

At the top of the window are 4 entry boxes and a quick connect button.  Let’s get connected shall we?

In the example below, we are going to pretend that our domain we want to connect to is domain.com, to keep things simple, just leave off the www.  The text box starts with [ and ends with ], please don’t enter them :)

Host: [domain.com]
Username: [bob99]
Password: [**********]
Port: [22]

Port 22 indicates secure port.

Click “Quickconnect”

A warning message is displayed the first time you connect.  This  security warning simply states that you haven’t connected to this server before and reports the finger print.  Click the check box to save the connection for future sessions.  Future connections will only display this message if your site changes servers, you connect FROM a different computer, or there is a security issue with your connection.

Now, not only was the hostname, user name, and password encrypted durring your session, but so is all your data being sent to the server.

If you have a dedicated server with us are using SFTP, please notify us so we can disable basic FTP on your server for further protection.  Dreamweaver also support SFTP, as does other FTP clients.

We hope you have enjoyed the Mini Howto: FileZilla sftp connection



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