How Do I?

As A&E clients, there are many questions which deal with your hosting account, marketing needs, advertising, etc. Below are a few answers to your questions. This section will grow as we get more frequently asked questions.

How do I access my control panel?
When you need to set up e-mails, check web site statistics, account information, etc. you need to log in to your secured Control Panel. In order to do so, simply go to www.thenameofyourdomain.com/menu. Make sure you replace "thenameofyourdomain" with your actual domain name. This address will be placed on the Address bar (see below) of your browser. A small window will open asking for your user name and password. This information was previously supplied to you. If you do not have this information, please contact us and we will get it for you.

How do I access my e-mail on-line?
In order to access your e-mail, simply go to www.thenameofyourdomain.com/webmail. Once there, you will be prompted for a user name and password. Your user name is the first part of your e-mail address. In other words, if your e-mail address is info@aeadvertising.com, your user name is "info". Make sure that your e-mail has been created through your control panel before trying to access it.

How do I access my e-mail through outlook?
In order to get your e-mail mesages through Outlook, you must set up an outlook account. There are different versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, therefore, I will only cover setting up the latest Outlook Express.

1) Open your Outlook Express.
2) Click on the "Tools" link. (As shown below)

3) From the drop down menu, click on "Accounts".
4) Choose the "Mail" tab from the top of the new window that opens.
5) Choose "Add" then "Mail".
6) Follow the instructions on your screen. Where it asks for Incoming Mail POP3 - Indicate the following: mail.thenameofyourdomain.com. (Insert your domain name between the "mail" and ".com") Where it asks for outgoing mail, SMTP, indicate mail.thenameofyourdomain.com.

Alternatively, you can use your ISPs SMTP information. For instance, if you use Frontier as your ISP, your SMTP is mail.frontiernet.net. If you use Road Runner, your SMTP is mail.hvc.rr.com. If you use Optimum Online, your SMTP is mail.optonline.net. You should contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to find out your SMTP if you choose to use them for outgoing mail instead of our servers.
7) In the next screen, enter your user name and the password you created when you originally created your e-mail address through the control panel. You must only use the first part of your email address here for the account name. For instance, if your e-mail address is info@aeadvertising.com, then your user name is "info".
8) The next screen is the finish screen. Click on Finish and your account has been successfully created.

How do I read my web site statistics?
After login in to your control panel, simply click on the "Statistics" link and follow the instruction on your screen. Once you see the graph, this is what it all means:

The statistics report contains among others the following information:
- the number of hits, 304's, files, pageviews, sessions, data sent (in KB)
- the amount of data requested, transferred, and saved bycache (in KB)
- the number of unique URLs, sites, and sessions per month
- the number of all response codes other than 200 (OK)
- the average hits per weekday and for last week
- the maximum/average hits per day and per hour
- the number of hits, files, 304's, sites, data sent by day
- the top 5 days, 24 hours, 5 minutes and 5 seconds of the summary period.
- the top 30 most commonly accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
- the 10 least frequently accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
- the top 30 client domains accessing your server most often
- the top 30 browser types
- the top 30 referrer hosts
- the overview/detailed list of all files requested
- the overview/detailed list of all sites by domain and reverse domain
- the overview/detailed list of all browser types
- the overview/detailed list of all referrer URLs
- The following table summarizes the meaning of all terms in the statistics report which are not self-explanitory:

Hits: A hit is any response from the server on behalf of a request sent from a browser. This includes any response from the server, not only text files or documents. If, for example, a HTML page has two images embedded, the server generates three hits if this page is requested: one hit for the HTML page itself and two hits for the two inline images.

Files: If the user requests a document and the server successfully sends back a file for this request, this is counted as a Code 200 (OK) response. Any such response is counted for as a file. Again, "file" here means any kind of a file.

Code 304: A Code 304 (Not Modified) response is generated by the server if a document hasn't been updated since the last time it was requested by the user and therefore there was no need to actually send the files for this document. This happens if the browser (or a caching proxy server between the browser and your web server) still has an up-to-date copy of the page in it's local storage (cache) and therefore can display the page without requesting the actual content. This technique is used to reduce network traffic, but it also causes an inaccuracy in the statistics reports regarding the number of visitors, because the browser or proxy usually sends only one such a conditional request per user session if it still holds an up-to-date copy of the file. However, the ratio between files and 304's reflects the efficiency of overall caching mechanisms for at least those hits which made it's way to the server.

Pageviews: Pageviews are all files which either have a text file suffix (.html, .text) or which are directory index files. This number allows to estimate the number of "real" documents transmitted by your server. If defined correctly, the analyzer rates text files (documents) as pageviews. Those pageviews do not include images, CGI scripts, Java applets or any other HTML objects except all files ending with one of the pre-defined pageview suffixes, such as .html or .text.

Other responses: There are much more responses than only Code 200 (OK) and Code 304 (Not Modified) responses, especially in the coming standard, the HTTP 1.1 protocol specification. For example, the server could generate a Code 302 (Redirected) response if a page has moved, a Code 401 (Unauthorized Request) response if access to the document is denied or a Code 404 (Not Found) response if the requested page does not exist on this server. Note that http-analyze does recognize HTTP/1.1 responses according to RFC2068.

KBytes transferred: This is the amount of data sent during the whole summary period as reported by the server. Note that some servers log the size of a document instead of the actual number of bytes transferred. While in most cases this is the same, if a user interrupts the transmission by pressing the browser's stop button before the page has been received completely, some servers (for example all Netscape web servers) do not log the amount of data transferred but the amount of data which would have been transferred if the user would have completely loaded the page.

KBytes requested: This is the amount of data requested during the whole summary period. http-analyze computes this number by summing up the values of KBytes transferred and KBytes saved by cache (see below).

KBytes saved by cache: The amount of data saved by various caching mechanisms such as in proxy servers or in browsers. This value is computed by multiplying the number of Code 304 (Not Modified) requests per file with the size of the corresponding file. Note: Because http-analyze can determine the size of a file only if the file has been requested at least once in the same summary period, the values for KBytes saved by cache and KBytes requested are just approximations of the real values.

Unique URLs: Unique URLs are the number of all different, valid URLs requested in a given summary period. This shows you the number of all different files requested at least once in the corresponding summary period.

Unique sites: This is the sum of all unique hosts accessing the server during a given time-window . The time-window is hardwired to the length of the current month. This means that if a host accesses your server very often, it gets counted only once during the whole month. Only the sum of the unique hosts per month is listed in the statistics report.

Sessions: Similar to unique sites, this is the number of unique hosts accessing the server during a given time-window. This time-window is one day by default for backward compatibility, but it can be changed with the option -u or the Session directive in the configuration file. For example, if the time-window is two hours, all accesses from a certain host in less than 2 hours after the first access from this host are lumped together into one session. All following accesses more than 2 hours apart from the first access will be counted as a new session. This way you may get an estimated number of how many sessions are started on different sites to access your server.