Customer Support

B2B Web provides technical support services to its contract customers during our normal office hours: 9:30 am to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Friday. Support can be provided by email or by telephone.

See our contact page for details of how to contact our technical support team.

The following notes are intended for customers of B2B Web.

Using your control panel

When you open a hosting account with us, we will send you an Owner's Manual. This will contain a basic set of instructions about how to log into your control panel and make changes to the settings for things like email and web hosting.

You will be able to change any of the passwords for email, web access and the log in for your control panel. If you change any passwords you should be careful to make a record. If you loose your password records, you will need to contact our technical support desk and ask for them to be reset.

Account holders are advised to back up their hosting accounts, as and when there is a need to do so. The whole system is backed up once a week on Mondays.

If you make substantial changes to your web site or to your settings in your control panel between Mondays, you should implement a backup procedure. You can do this using your control panel. If you need help with this phone our support desk on our main admin number.

Managing your email

On your DirectAdmin control panel you will see a heading "E-Mail Management".

Use the links on this page to create in-boxes and email addresses.

One important thing to note is the the difference between an e-mail account and an email address.

All hosting accounts have a number of mail boxes (some times called POP3 boxes). These receive incoming e-mails.

All hosting accounts have a number of email addresses (otherwise called FORWARDERS).

So, on DirectAdmin you can create email addresses by selecting FORWARDERS.

These email addresses use the domain name associated with your hosting account.

So, if, for example, your domain name is "mydomain.co.uk", all your email addresses will be something@mydomain.co.uk

You have to tell the system what to do with emails sent to your domain name.

You can either (a) forward them to your inbox or you can forward them to another email address service that you have (for example, you can forward them to an existing hotmail account.)

One important thing to bear in mind is that mail boxes look like email addresses. In fact they are actually user names and not real email addresses.

So if your mailbox is called "mymailbox@mydomainname.co.uk" - that is the user name of your in box and not an email address.

So, you cannot have an email address which is the same as the name of a mailbox.

Example:

If your mail box has the name "mymailbox@mydomainname.co.uk" you cannot then set up an email address which is "mymailbox@mydomainname.co.uk"

To receive your emails and read them you can either use an email client (such as OUTLOOK or OUTLOOK EXPRESS or MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD) or you can use WEBMAIL.

If you want to use webmail, just open your web browser and follow the instructions given in your owner's manual.

Bear in mind that web mail does not delete your emails after you have read them. If you no longer wish to keep an email that you have received, you should manually delete it. Otherwise your email space allocation will fill up with emails and eventually stop working.

if you decide to read your emails with a mail client, emails will be transferred down from your email space allocation when they are "read".

Understand the jargon

In order to help our customers understand some of the technical terms we use (for example, in our web site specifications), here is a description of what some these terms mean:

Domain names

That part of a web address which is unique to each web site. So, the web address

http://www.b2bwebconsultants.co.uk, includes the domain name b2bwebconsultants.co.uk. This can also be used in email addresses. The bit that reads http://www. is not part of the domain name. That tells the web browsers what the whole address is all about.

Every domain name has an extension, such as .co.uk, .com or .ltd.uk. These extensions are country specific. For the uk, most domain names will include uk. Domain names ending in .com were created to indicate a commercial organisation in the USA. Because the rules of registration were and still are fairly unregulated, people all the over the world have registered .com domain names. This has happened to such an extent that .coms have come to be referred to as 'universal domain names'.

If you are a UK company and are thinking of registering a domain name for your web site, we would advise that you register a .co.uk name for your web site. This is particularly important if you want your web site to get the best possible results in search engines. You can if you wish also register a .com but you should point it to your .co.uk web site and not use it for search engine submissions.

Before you register a domain name, we would advise that you talk to our technical support team about the choice of name. They will advise you, based on your business requirements.

Hosting

In order to get a web site to be live on the Internet, it must be placed on a web server - this is a machine that is permanently connected to the Internet. It serves requests for web pages. Hosting is the service of providing web space on a server so that a web site can appear on the Internet.

For help in using your B2B Web hosting account , go to our support page.

Find out more from our resources web site: Webworkers Kitchen

Support for web design trainees

B2B Web has developed a special web site for the people it trains in web design. Our trainees resource centre WebWorkersKitchen has a wide range of help and information to back up our face to face training.

B2B Web provides technical training for in-house web designers. So, if your company maintains its own web site, your staff can receive training from us in how to manage your site to the current standards. All our training includes technical aspects of search engine optimisation at no extra charge.