Thursday July 22nd 2010 by Ollie Armstrong

Pointing an External Domain to Your vCluster

Welcome to a short guide on how to point an external domain at your vCluster. After following these steps you will be able to use an externally registered domain to point to your vCluster.

Firstly, make sure you have an external domain and a CatN vCluster. An external domain is one you have registered seperately like a .co.uk address or a .com one. For example…

www.olliearmstrong.co.uk

…is an external domain. There are many places to register one of these domains and a Google search will reveal multiple registrars that you may use. You will probably want to choose the cheapest one that offers the best service and value for money, and for that I can recommend:

livetodot.com

Visit them and buy a domain if you don’t already own one. This will also be the registrar I will provide screenshots for.

Getting the Required Settings

You need to be able to tell the domain where to actually point to, so you need the address of your vCluster. This can be found in the settings page. So, login to the vCluster Control Panel and look on the settings page. You can click any of the images on this post to show the full size image.

What we need from this page is the Public IP Address. This address is the IP address that the domain registrar can use to point to your vCluster. So, go ahead and copy or save the Public IP and we will use it later.

Setting up DNS Records

Domain registrars use something called DNS Records to track where to point the domain to. It is the more advanced version of Nameservers. We need to set something called the A Record. But this may be different for your registrar, so I will show you how to do it using the one I use, but it should be pretty obvious where the options are for yours.

You need to log into the Control Panel of your domain registrar, there will probably be a link on the homepage of the registrar or it will have been emailed to you. Now, find your way to the settings of your registered domain. For Livetodot, you need to click My Domains and then click on the domain.

Then choose something similar to Nameservers or DNS or Advanced DNS. Here I click DNS and it brings me to this page.

On here there should be an option to set different types of records and a load of other stuff we don’t need. We are only interested in the A Record. So click on the link for ‘Address (A) Record’, and that takes us to a page with a few boxes.

On the page it will probably ask for a hostname – and as you can see, on Livetodot it has multiple hostnames. We are only interested in the first one (the blank one) and the IP Address of the first one. This is where we put in the Public IP we copied earlier. Once that’s done you can click save changes and it will update the DNS settings.

Often it can take up to 48 hours to update them, but mine was instantaneous.  When it has finished updating you will then be able to access your vCluster at this new registered domain instead of the one that we give you!

Any problems trying to do this? Leave a comment and I will try and help.

Friday July 16th 2010 by Joe Gardiner

Cloud provider sign up check list

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With a plethora of cloud hosting services available to the market it is becoming more difficult to find a provider that suits your specific needs.

I decided to put together a list of questions to help you analyse exactly the service a cloud provider can offer you, to help your move to a cloud platform go as smoothly as possible.


1. Which languages does their platform support?

This may seem like an obvious one, but dig a little deeper. You need to know if your app will run on a providers system, and in some cases even when a platform claims to run any php application for example, certain configurations, such as database, may prevent this from being the case.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday July 14th 2010 by Joe Gardiner

How do large web sites benefit from cloud provisioning?

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A cloud hosting platform offers many benefits. These are often reduced to four main categories, Cost, Stability, Security, and Scalability. You can read about these categories in more detail in a previous blog post…

For large websites arguably the two most important benefits are scalability and cost, and in a cloud environment they are closely linked. The nature of a cloud platform allows resources to be allocated and removed as a sites demand scales, which is reflected in the expenditure required from the business as quantities of resources are consumed. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday July 6th 2010 by Joe Gardiner

How to switch between passport groups in the CatN Control Panel

At CatN all services are related to a group in the Fubra Passport System. This enables us to centralize payments, support, and any other subscriptions under a common account.

When you sign up we create a personal account and give you the option to create a business account as well. When you first login to the CatN Control Panel you will be in the context of your personal account. If your service subscription is associated with you business account then you will need to switch to this account in oder to view your CatN services.

You can switch accounts in the Control Panel using the drop down menu in the top right hand corner, next to the logout link.

Thursday July 1st 2010 by Ollie Armstrong

Getting to Grips With SSH – Part 4

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Welcome to the fourth blog in the series of posts teaching you basic SSH commands.

In this part, we will be building on what you learnt last time to improve your directory navigating, and also going over some more advanced switches.

Once again you will need to connect to your vCluster, and once again I will refer you to the tutorial on connecting to your vCluster. If you haven’t read the third part yet, then you can find it in Getting to grips with SSH part 3.
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