Hosting FAQs
DNS FAQs
Email FAQs
Ecommerce FAQs
Support FAQs
Have a question we haven't answered? Send us an e-mail at support@digitalwest.net.
What forms of payment does Digital West accept?
Digital West accepts personal or business checks. Contact our accounts payable department at (805)781-9378 to discuss current options for payment by Credit Card.
Top
How long will it take to set up my account?
Account creation takes only a few minutes. Your account can be ready for you to upload your site right away. Domain registration and/or transfer takes a minimum of 24 hours, so having your site live using your domain will take at least a day.
Top
What is the difference between a POP box and an email alias?
A POP box is the actual mail account that's created on a mail server to accept mail. It's similar to a Post Office Box at the USPS. You can receive your e-mail there and pick it up when you need to. An Alias is a variation of @yourdomain.com that can point a POP box. You may specify additional POP accounts and specify which aliases you'd like pointed to those accounts, as well as manage other email features via the mail administration page for your domain.
Top
What is FTP?
File Transfer Protocol is a protocol that is used to transfer your web files from your computer to an Internet Web server. FTP is included as a tool in many popular web development applications including DreamWeaver and Microsoft FrontPage.
Top
What are Active Server Pages?
Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server side scripting environment which allows you to dynamically create web pages. The scripts can perform a server side function, interact with COM components, perform database queries and generate HTML which is sent to the client's browser.
Top
What version of Microsoft FrontPage do you support?
Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Extensions are available for Windows 2003 servers. These are backwards compatible with older versions of FrontPage. If your site is currently hosted on one of the Linux servers and you wish to use FrontPage server features, contact support to make arrangements to move the site to a Windows server. If you do not use any of the features requiring FrontPage server extensions then you can continue to host on a Linux server and use the FrontPage Publish with FTP option to upload your pages.
Top
What if I don't like FrontPage?
We configure Microsoft FrontPage server extensions on our Windows servers a site as a courtesy only if the site owner wishes them. You can use any web development tools to which you have access.
Top
What is LiveStats?
LiveStats is the web server activity reporting utility. LiveStats provides a browser based interface for you to get your site statistics whenever you want them. You can also make some or parts of the information available to others of your choosing, have reports emailed to you on a regular basis and fine tune some of the reports for the kind of data you need to know about your site's traffic.
Top
How often are my site usage statistics updated?
Once a day.
Top
I found a third party component I want to use. Can I do this with my Digital West account?
We will acquire and install third party components on a case by case basis after engineering review. Generally the cost for any license will be invoiced to the account requesting the component and a server (physical box, not virtual hosted domain) license will be required. We cannot install third party components which restrict license to a single domain/virtual server and do not include thier own mechanism to enforce the license. Components for credit card payment gateways and similar functions are generally not a problem. Here is a list of components already installed on the server.
Top
The application I want to use says it needs an EXE or a DLL file. Can I do this with my Digital West account?
CGI is available for sites hosted on Linux servers. On the Windows platform these are not allowed. This is due to the performance and security issues associated with these types of applications on the Windows platform. Often there are equivalent ASP or ASP.NET applications which will be more compatible with the operating platform.
Top
Can I use PHP or PERL to develop my site?
For our Linux hosted sites, PHP or PERL support is implemented via CGI. For sites hosted on the Windows platforms, PHP or PERL is done as an ISAPI application (similar to ASP).
Top
Can I use something other than instead of VBScript to develop my ASP site?
ASP supports VBScript and JScript natively. Other script engines are possible. PerlScript and Python from ActiveState are installed on the Windows servers as alternative scripting engines.
Top
How do I set up Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver to be able to syncronize files on my website?
Instructions are available here for Microsoft FrontPage, and here for Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Top
