At some point everyone needs a bit of help with their hosting account. Whether you have just UK domain names, a hosting account, or a reseller hosting account, it’s likely that at one point or another you’ll need some assistance from us. We’re a personable and friendly bunch here on the support team at 34SP.com, but there are several steps you can take to ensure that your query is resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible, without too many unnecessary emails back and forth trying to find information out. If you’re contacting the support team regarding an issue you’re experiencing, including the following information will mean we can get straight onto the issue rather than having to come back to you to clarify on any points:

* ALWAYS include your domain name

Mail Issues
* If your problem is regarding email, what email address is the issue in connection with?
* What user name and password are you using?
* Do you receive any error messages?
* If so, what?
* Does the problem occur with any other email addresses on the same domain?
* If you have sent or are expecting to receive a message that has not arrived, provide the following details: the FROM address, the TO address and the timestamp of when the message was sent (must be within the previous 3 days) – we can then check the mail logs for you.

It might also be worthwhile checking out the knowledgebase on our site at: http://support.34sp.com/KB/c3/email.aspx as this includes many of the more common questions, particularly in setting up mailboxes or entering the correct details in your mail program.

Web Hosting Site Issues
* What page are you seeing the problem on?
* What error messages (if any) are you seeing?
* Have you made any changes to the site recently that may have caused this?
* Provide EXACT steps to recreate the error if it’s not immediately obvious.

You can also speed things up by authenticating your support request as soon as you receive the autoresponder email giving your enquiry reference number – there is no need to wait for a support team member to email and ask you for this, as you can authenticate as soon as the confirmation email arrives. To authenticate a ticket, log in to your account management page, located at:

https://www.34sp.com/login

Once the page loads you should enter your registered email address and account password in the fields provided. Your registered email address is the email address you selected when you purchased the account.

Once the account management page has loaded, select ‘authentication’ from the right hand menu. Select the service you wish to authenticate from the drop down. Be sure to choose the service that this ticket is in reference to.

In the ‘Ticket number’ section enter the ticket code of this email in the field provided. The ticket code is located in the subject of this email. The code will look something like ***-********-****. Please be sure to copy it directly from the subject line.

Finally press ‘submit’. The support ticket will then be authenticated and the support team can get straight into addressing your query.

There are also a few outside resources that give hints on getting the best out of tech support – http://www.ehow.com/how_4702982_best-service-tech-support.html or if you just fancy spending a few minutes taking a chuckle at some of the more outrageous gaffs from legend, try – http://www.guy-sports.com/humor/computers/computer_tech_support_calls.htm.

Remember that our goal here at 34SP.com is: Website Hosting with Superior Service and Support. We are always here to help. Our job is to help you succeed, so give us a ring, or shoot us an email or open up a live chat anytime you need help with your 34SP.com accounts or services. At 34SP.com we appreciate the opportunity to earn your ongoing business.

A short time ago we here at 34SP.com advertised for a second level support and systems administrator on our blog. The decisions on who to add to the team are always very important to us – we know you are depending our us to provide the very best talent to support you. Whether you are running a less complex hosting site, reseller hosting or several dedicated servers, our job is to provide excellence in every aspect of our business. We always advertise on our blog first. Any applicants who become aware of employment opportunities there will already know what we do and who we are. Hopefully they’ll also have some experience in the way we like to do business and will know that we always put the customer first. As it happens, a long standing customer saw the post and got in touch with a CV, having just graduated university. He came up to our offices to meet Ian and myself, and we were happy to offer him the job almost immediately.

Tom has been with us for a week now and has slotted right into the team – if your support case requires a little more attention than our front line support team are able to lavish on it, previously you’d probably have been replied to by Ian. Your response might now come from Tom! He’s brought a great wealth of knowledge with him that has enabled him to dive right in and fix things that are broken from day one.

In the slightly longer term, Tom’s arrival gives us more in house technical expertise and capacity and we have some pretty exciting projects lined up that we’re going to use the extra man hours for!

I hope you’ll all join me in giving Tom a big welcome to the 34SP.com team. You can say hello in our IRC channel or just send in some complicated support query

Company

34SP.com is a rapidly growing website hosting and reseller hosting company based in central Manchester. Founded in 2000, the company now employs eleven full time staff and is a Limited, VAT registered company.

Salary

£18,000-22,000 per year.

Salary reviews are conducted every 6 months.

Position

The successful applicant will assist in the maintenance and development of internal systems, such as billing and customer facing interfaces. The position also requires liaison with our web design department to assist in customer web design cases featuring dynamic content.

Hours

8:30am to 5:30pm weekdays.

Required Skills and Experience

Excellent programming skills, specifically in PHP and MySQL.
Experience in Perl, Ajax or other languages and technologies desirable.
Good communication and interpersonal skills.
Knowledge of web hosting related subjects an advantage e.g. DNS, Perl, FTP, POP3/IMAP, SMTP etc.
A customer centric point of view.
Availability out of hours for emergency maintenance essential.

Please submit your application and CV to info@34sp.com with subject ‘Development position’.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Migrating from 34SP.com Personal Hosting to a New Professional Hosting Account

With the popularity of our new Professional Hosting account, many existing users are clamouring to convert over from Personal Hosting. If you are still not convinced that you should upgrade you may want to check out this side-by-side comparison of Personal and Professional Hosting. The most commonly asked question we see regarding the transition is this:

”Exactly how can I switch over to Professional Hosting with the minimum of fuss and downtime?”

Step One
You need to purchase your new Professional Hosting account as a new account: https://www.34sp.com/order-professional.

Personal and Professional run on very different back end systems. The overall process is not a simple upgrade of services, but a complete migration of your account and services to a number of brand new servers. This improves reliability, performance and the services we can offer you.

Step Two
You now need to wait 24 hours and then contact us via email or telephone. We don’t migrate services over as standard and need you to tell us to do this first. If you email us, be sure to do so from a different address to that of the new professional hosting account domain name.

The 24 hours allows us to shorten your DNS records. This means when we migrate your services, downtime should be limited to no more than one hour in total.

Step Three
Sit back and relax. After the one hour or so of downtime passes, we encourage you to look carefully over your account. Whilst the migration process is very robust and has already been tested on many hundreds of domain names, we want you to be 100% sure that everything is to your liking. If you are still happy 24 hours after the move, get back in touch and we will then close down your old Personal Hosting account.

Once we close down your old Personal Hosting, we will convert any remaining paid time into account credit on your new account. This can then be used to offset future Professional Hosting payments and means you don’t lose out for any past fees paid.

Step Four
Welcome to Professional Hosting! A far more powerful hosting solution, with increased security, reliability and resources. We are sure you will love your new hosting account. If there are any more features you would like to see on the account, just get in touch. Happy hosting!

Other Points to Consider

PHP5 and MySQL 5: Professional Hosting uses both of these. Do make sure your scripts are compatible with these latest versions. If they are not you should strongly consider updating your script or switching to a newer alternative. Older software versions are notorious for security holes.

Hard coded paths: If you hard code any paths in your scripts, do check with us for the new paths. For example: /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/DOMAIN becomes /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN.

34SP.com php.cgi script: will need replacing with the phpfastcgi variant. If you tell us before the migration, we can do this on your behalf. You can find this script at: http://scripts.34sp.com/phpfastcgi1/.

Mailbox limits: Do be aware that until you finalise the closure of your personal hosting, you will be limited to the personal account mailbox limit.  The professional limits kick in when the old account goes offline.

Don’t forget that in addition to world class hosting, 34SP.com also offers great prices on UK domains at just £5 per year.