The Register4Less.com Blog

Usually, for the weekly blog post we try to write about something informative, about a new service we’re rolling out, etc.  This past Wednesday, though, we had an interesting incident in our support team we’d like to share with you.

Mid afternoon, William Wakely, an relatively new customer for Register4Less, contacted our support via the secure online chat on our website.  He was reporting that overtime he logged our of his account, his password would get reset.  He was able to log back in by using the email that is sent with the Lost Password function.

Passwords of course will not reset themselves.  The only way for a password to get changed is for someone that is already logged in to go to the menu Profile > Change Password and submit a new password.  Once we were able to confirm William was the true domain owner, we asked him to check the Login Security Agent (LSA) page (also under Profile).

Sure enough, William was able to see there was another login session active from a different IP address.  William provided us with the IP address, and we were able to see this was coming from a different internet service provider from his, and not one that he recognized.

William had not yet setup the LSA kill password, so he did that while we were still on our chat session, and once set up, terminated the other person’s login session, and then reset his password.

We don’t actively track how frequently the LSA kill session function is used, though we could if we went through all of our log files.  It was however interesting and rewarding to be chatting with a customer and help them use this function live.  With any other registrar, the customer and true domain owner would not able been able to kick the other person off of their account, so resolving this problem would not have been easy.  LSA saved the integrity of William’s account!

Retail Advanced Hosting Plans

Register4Less.com offers two types of advanced hosting services.  Our regular hosting plans provide web only, email only, and combined web and email hosting on a per domain basis.  These are priced between $1.45/month for our entry level 50MB Agate web hosting plan to $11.95/month for our 25GB web, 100 email (200GB space for mail) Topaz Hosting plan.  All of these plans feature the cPanel (control panel) interface to manage email and web hosting features.  The Trendy Tools web builder is included with all web hosting plans, as is the ability to install WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPbb, PHPList and other applications.

Reseller Advanced Hosting Plans

Our reseller plan allows you to create your own hosting plans, so you can define what disc space is allocation for web and email hosting.  The reseller plans start at $24.95 for our Opal 50GB plan and go up to $79.95 for our Onyx 200GB plan.

With the reseller plan, you can sell web hosting plans directly to your customers, or if you have a lot of domains you want to set up, this allows you to host as many as you wish, provided of course that they fit within the space the plan you have selected allows.

Steps for setting up Reseller Hosting

When you purchase a retail hosting plan, the features this plan has are predefined.  With reseller hosting, you have the freedom of defining different packages you can sell to your customers or assign to your own domains, but you do first have to create these.

WHM vs cPanel

In addition to the cPanel interface to manage the hosting services for your domain, you will have an additional WHM (Web Host Manager) interface to use to manage the other domain you will be setting up to use your hosting service.  To connect to this, log into the domain under which you purchased the reseller hosting package (we’ll call this your reseller domain), and go to Paid Hosting > Web Hosting Manager (WHM).

Defining Packages

The first thing you will want to do once you’ve purchased a reseller hosting plan is to setup your packages.  With WHM open, on the left column click on Packages and then the icon for Add a Package.  You can at any time create, edit or delete a package.  A good example set of features for a hosting package are:

• Disk Quota (MB) – 1,000
• Monthly Bandwidth (MB) – unlimited
• Max FTP Accounts – 10
• Max Email Accounts – 10
• Max Email Lists – 10
• Max Databases – 10
• Max Sub Domains – unlimited
• Max Parked Domains – unlimited
• Max Add-on Domains – 0
• Maximum Hourly Email by Domain Relayed – unlimited
• Maximum percentage of failed or deferred messages a domain may send per hour – unlimited

Under Settings, you’ll want CGI Access selected, and the other options not.  Paper lantern is the recommended theme, and choose default for the Feature List.

Once you have completed your settings, make sure you click the blue Save Settings button.

Setting up DNS

When you are adding a domain to your hosting plan, you will need to make sure the DNS is set correctly.  This will have been done automatically for your reseller domain, so what we want to do is configure the domain your adding to have the same DNS setup as your reseller domain.

To do this, instead of typing in all of the settings in the custom DNS zone editor, you will use the DNS > Point Domain(s) to Zone function.  Once on this page, locate the domain you are adding and check the selection box next to it, and the find the Custom Zone box that has your reseller domain in it.  Click the Point to this Zone button in this custom zone box.  You can point more than one domain at a time.

Creating a New Account

Now that you have your packages created and DNS set, you’re ready to add the domain to WHM.  To do this, click on Account Functions, and then Create a New Account.

You will enter in the name of the domain, the username and password (twice), and an email address for the owner of the domain.  You will choose a package from a drop-down list, and should check the option Use the nameservers specified at the Domain’s Registrar.  Leave the Local Mail Exchanger option selected and click the blue Create buttons.

For your customer, they can then login to their cPAnel by entering in the name of their domain and append /cpanel or :2083

Would you post your full address, email & phone number on your facebook wall?  Of course not.  So why would anyone want that information readily available in your domain’s Whois record?

When a domain name is registered, we are required by ICANN’s policy to collect personal/company contact information for the domain. This consists of the owner’s first & last name, company name (if applicable), postal address, email address, phone number and optional fax number. Without Whois privacy, this information would immediately be published in the domain’s Whois record.  The Whois database is an important part of the structure of how domains are registered, but more often than not, they are scanned using computer programs to put together a database of email addresses to be used by marketers, to send spammers, scammers, even identity thieves.

Without Whois privacy, a domain’s Whois record will look like (of course, not actual contact information):

ExampleDomain.com
John Doe, Doe’s Widget Company Inc.
123 Maplewood Drive, Los Angeles, CA, USA
+1.3105551234

With Whois privacy enabled, this same domain would appear:

ExampleDomain.com
Register4Less Privacy Advocate, 3501256 Canada Inc.
5802 Bob Bullock C1 Unit 328C-195, Laredo, TX, USA
+1.5143941150

Why not just have fake contact info?

Some will ask, why not just provide fake information with the domain registration?  There are a number of reasons why that’s not a good idea.

1. Legally, all domain name owners are bound by the registration agreement between you and your domain’s registrar.  ICANN mandates that this registration agreement must include the clause that you will maintain accurate and up to date contact information for your domain.  Under the registration agreement, if you do not keep your information complete and updated, your domain is subject to suspension.
2. With the update 2013 Registrar Registry Agreement, ICANN is now requiring registrars to confirm the email address of the domain owner.  When a domain is registered or a domain is updated with an email address that’s not already confirmed, we send an email out to that address for confirmation.  If the email bounces or is not replied to, we are required to suspend the domain.
3. The contact information you maintain on account with us is what we use to send you reminders for your domain registration or hosting renewal.  If the address is not working, you’ll miss the reminders and may forget to renew your domain.  That can cause downtime, and the potential for a redemption renewal (much more costly due to higher fees from the registry, or worse, loss of the domain.  If that happens and a domain speculator picks it up, you’re at their mercy to buy the domain back.

Protect Your Identity

Identity theft is a crime that is on the rise.  The best way to not have your personal contact information taken is not to make publicly available.  When you register a new domain, choose to have Whois privacy enabled when you submit your order.

Avoid Unwanted Solicitations

Spammers regularly query the Whois servers of domain registrars in order to build a database of working email addresses.  If your domain is not private, you can expect to receive emails with offers to buy your domain, to congratulate you that you’ve been awarded a $15 Million, life and health insurance offers, etc.  You should also ensure never to put your email address in plain text in a website.

Upgrade Now for Free

Register4Less was one of the first registration providers to introduce Whois privacy back in 2002.  At that time, a number of registrars were sending mail to domain owners with what looked confusingly like an invoice for the renewal of their domains (at rates 3 times higher than our fees).  A number of domain owners were tricked by these solicitations, and sent off their payment to these companies.  While we helped customers cancel these transfers and get their money back, we knew we needed to come up with something to help prevent this abuse.

The Whois privacy service we developed has always been provided free of charge to our customers.  We fully intend to keep this service free of charge for our customers.  It’s part of what makes us the non-evil domain registration and web hosting company!

In addition to connecting to your email account via a mail client on your computer, tablet or smartphone, you have the choice of three webmail programs from the cPanel.  You can connect to the login screen for your webmail in two different ways:

• Go to http://webmail. plus your domain, or
• Login to manage your domain, open the cPanel, and click the Email accounts icon.  Where each email account is listed you’ll see More on the right side.  Click this and then Access Webmail.

Webmail is one of the most commonly used functions of the cPanel interface.

The Horde Project is an open-source development community that is responsible for the creation of many applications.  Based on PHP, Horde developers have created not only a robust webmail interface, but also complementary widgets that range from calendars, notes, message filtering and message flagging, and powerful search tools.

RoundCube is the world’s most popular open source Webmail interface, and is the one the R4L staff recommends setting as your default.  While not as feature rich as Horde, RoundCube features a modern drag-and-drop interface.  RoundCube also features search tools, flagging tools to easily organize your Inbox, Sent, and other folders.

SquirrelMail is the most streamlined of the three available webmail applications.  SquirrelMail does provide an address book feature, mail composition can only be done in plain text, sending email with HTML formatting is not possible with SquirrelMail.