Invoices in your Client Area

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Tom

We’ve been working hard to improve coverage of invoices when you make a payment. For some items it’s been necessary to manually request an invoice or VAT receipt following payment. We’re now pleased to announce that the majority of payments made wil be followed up with an automatic VAT receipt – something we know many of you have been waiting for!

We’re still ironing out some kinks with a few of our more complex services, but most items ordered via the Client Area – as well as many renewals processed via your control panel or our website – are all covered by automated invoices.

You can view your invoices by logging in to the Client Area and visiting the Invoices page.

If you have any questions or comments please get in touch!

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New feature: Easily add funds to your account

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Tom

Lately we’ve made a number of small improvements to the usability of the Client Area. The Client Area is slowly absorbing management of services enabling you to keep everything related to your account in one place.

One of the most visible changes you’ll see is our first step of improvements to the payment process. Our aim is to make payments and renewals as simple as possible – we know credit card payments can be troublesome from time to time, especially if you need to make payment for more than one service at a time.

To help reduce that pain we’ve added a new feature to the Client Area which you’ll find in the Billing menu under the Account Balance heading. It’s now possible for you to hold a positive balance in your account and use that balance to pay off invoices as they come up.

Client Area - Account Balance

We expect this to be most useful to those with more than a handful of domain names by making renewals more efficient than the one-transaction-per-domain method we’ve always had previously. If you pay card fees every time you use your card – or every time your bank converts a payment to British Pounds – you’ll be able to save money by making fewer card transactions.

To make use of this simply use the Add funds form on the page to credit your account. There is a minimum credit of £5 and, to make the most of it, you’ll want to add more than you’d usually pay in one invoice. Whenever you come to pay future invoices you’ll be able to make payment from your balance instead of making a card payment.

What’s next?

This is only the first of several changes we have planned for the Client Area. Following directly on from this will be the ability to pay for multiple invoices in one go, allowing you to renew more than one domain name (or other service) at a time. After that we’ll be pulling our affiliate system into the Client Area to allow automated commission payments which will accumulate in your Account Balance – a big improvement on the current process which requires commissions to be manually approved and payouts to be requested and processed by hand.

As always if you have any suggestions or feedback please get in touch and we’ll do our best to assist!

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Manage your account on the move with your iPhone/Android smartphone

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Tom

Did you know the new x3 control panel has a special mobile version for use with many smartphone devices? You can log in to your control panel using the standard web browser on your iPhone or Android phone and manage your account from wherever you are and at any time.

Care has been taken to ensure the mobile control panel works quickly and doesn’t use up enormous amounts of your data allowance – almost all images are hidden when you’re using a smartphone and the interface is simplified to fit on small screens and work well on devices with limited input capabilities.

The control panel examples below show the mobile control panel, as seen on a Samsung Galaxy S2, managing a fictional tom-test.co.uk account:

Our Instant Mobiliser service can automatically make similar changes to your website by automatically translating what’s on your website into a format suitable for most mobile devices.

It cleverly rearranges the layout of a website to limit content to the width of the screen, helping you to avoid unnecessary scrolling. Images are also reduced in size so they fit on the screen and don’t use up too much of your data allowance. The example below is from a portion of the freevirtualservers.mobi website which is a mobilised version of freevirtualservers.com:

Instant Mobiliser is included for free with every .MOBI domain name. At £19.99 per year this is a bargain, saving you development costs and enabling a mobile version of your website with minimal fuss. Get yours here.

(Note: one thing the Instant Mobiliser won’t do is convert Flash, if you have a Flash website some elements may not display on a mobile device!)

If you have any questions or comments about the phone-friendly control panel or the Instant Mobiliser please let me know.

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Introduction to x3, our new cPanel theme

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Tom

If you’ve logged in to your control panel recently you’ll have noticed it has a brand new look to it. The new theme, called x3, is included with cPanel as standard and brings with it a number of usability improvements as well as lots of new features. We’ll be covering some of the features in this and future articles. Click on the image below for a preview:

cPanel x3 theme

cPanel main page (click to enlarge)

New Location

The location of x3 is slightly different to the old theme so if you have any bookmarks that take you directly into your control panel you may now receive a ’404 not found’ error.

Fortunately, the fix is easy: replace your bookmark with a link to http://domain.com/cpanel (replacing domain.com with your domain name) – that address will always reach the correct location of your control panel.

Email

Email facilities have been vastly improved in the new control panel. Managing your email accounts, forwarders and auto-responders is now far easier than it ever has been, with less technical knowledge needed to make use of the advanced options. For instance, you can now put a date limit on your auto-responder, stopping your “I’m on holiday” emails when you forget to disable it!

Filtering email is as easy as can be, allowing you to easily put a stop to emails that aren’t readily caught by the main spam filter. Receiving a newsletter that you can’t unsubscribe from? Simply add a filter to match the subject or the sender and you’ll never see it again.

Setting up DomainKeys or SPF records can now be done directly via your control panel rather than asking us to do it. In the ‘Email Authentication’ page of the control panel you can set them up to your exact configuration with the easy-to-use wizard.

For the BlackBerry users among us, some of our servers support FastMail, allowing you to send and receive email instantly on your BlackBerry with your domain name. For more information see the ‘Email Accounts’ page in your control panel – if you see the ‘BlackBerry FastMail’ link at the bottom it’s enabled and ready for use; follow the link for instructions for setting it up. We’ll be migrating email services to enable FastMail support on all of our servers in due course. Currently only a handful of our servers support FastMail.

File Management

The new file manager will be a breath of fresh air for anybody who used the old one. As useful as it was, navigation wasn’t made easy at all! The new file manager has a modernised interface and is very easy to use. Take a look:

 

cpanel x3 file manager

cPanel x3 File Manager (click to enlarge)

Aside from being easier to use, new features make it easier to manage your account, too, with handling of zip files integrated directly into the menus. It’s now trivial to upload a script in a zip file and extract it on the server – much faster than uploading hundreds of thousands of little files yourself by FTP.

On top of this, the backup manager has been given a facelift making backups as easy as possible. Please make sure you’ve always got an up to date backup of your account!

DNS Management

DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’ and is the facility that enables computers to translate a name such as blog.freevirtualservers.com into its IP address, in this case 78.31.105.202.

When making use of third party services such as Google Docs or an online shop with Shopify you’ll usually need to alter your DNS records to point to the new service. You can now do that yourself via the control panel using the ‘Simple DNS Zone Editor’ (there’s also an Advanced DNS Zone Editor for those requiring more control. Not available on free hosting accounts)

cpanel x3 simple/advanced dns zone editor

cPanel X3 Advanced Zone Editor (click to enlarge)

Databases

The new MySQL database wizard makes creating databases a breeze. It’s not usually something you’ll do very often so when you do create a database you’ll want it to be as easy as possible. The wizard turns a confusing 3-step process into one simple process with an easy to follow workflow.

PHP and Perl

For advanced users it’s now possible to install Perl modules and PHP extensions from the PEAR repository directly within the control panel. Historically you’d have had to ask us to install additional modules for you and wait while they’re evaluated for suitability. Now, you can do it yourself without delay.

cpanel x3 pear module installer

cPanel x3 PEAR module installer (click to enlarge)

That’s about it for our cPanel x3 introduction – be sure to check back as we’ll be taking an in-depth look at many of the new features. Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when new posts are made!

As always if you have any issues specifically with the new control panel please don’t hesitate to submit a ticket to support and we’ll do our best to assist!

Is there something specific you’d like to learn more about? Let us know by posting a comment.

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Custom Facebook Business Page

Posted on May 26, 2011 by David

We are delighted to be able to bring to your attention our new service that will get your website noticed by your potential customers or subscribers instantly. A Facebook Business/Fan Page that shows off your brand image, gets you involved with the conversation and brings you new interest in your products and services.

Your Branded Page – A Catalyst for Conversion

Your uniquely designed Facebook page will create social conversation, add to your marketing arsenal and if used correctly, will be the catalyst for converting your visitors into paying customers or repeat subscribers.

Add an addition to your Social Media Arsenal

Facebook has allowed so much flexibility in what you can and can’t do, that really you are only limited by your own imagination. Let the team work with you to explore new ways to educate your visitors, promote your brand and deliver a new, unrivalled experience for your customers.

Ready. Set. Go?

Simply follow the link to get started… Take a look at our sister company Easy Internet Services website www.123ranking.co.uk/facebook-page-design.html with its gallery of designs that we have done for others already.

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