Miscellaneous

I’ve forgotten my Control Panel password

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Your Control Panel is where you login to access most aspects of your account with us. This is where you can manage email addresses, website file uploads, install website software, access help articles, retrieve various settings, manage your passwords and more.

If you have forgotten your Control Panel password, simply go to the eXtend site at https://extendcp.co.uk and you will see a ‘Forgotten your password?’ link to reset your password.

You are then asked to enter your domain name and the email address associated with the account so that a reset email can be sent to you.

The domain name should be entered as: yourdomain.com (not www.yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com).

The email address should be the same email address associated with your account, otherwise you won’t receive a reset email. If your email address has changed, please let us know so that we can update your registered address.

Why does access to all files result in ‘500 Internal Server Error’ messages?

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500 Internal Server Error messages on every page are typically an indication of a misconfigured site configuration file – such as a .htaccess or web.config file in your hosting package. If you’ve recently made changes to either of these files, it’s worth trying reverting to a previous version.

Common errors include attempting to use php_value directives in your .htaccess file (this won’t work on our platform as we run PHP as a CGI – use a php.ini file instead), and incorrect cases in web.config directives.

If you’re on Windows hosting, don’t forget to recycle the application pool after making changes to your site or configuration, and as the first action to take if you’re seeing 500 errors – you can do this via Web Hosting Plus > Manage IIS Application Pools. You can also see behind the friendly IIS errors – in Web Hosting Plus > Log File Download, the error message viewer will show you the actual error being generated – this will often point to the location of the error.

It is also worth examining the last few lines of your error logs, as very often, PHP and Apache errors will be logged there. This is to be found in Web Hosting Plus > Log File Download.

Domain DNS Changes

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You can change your domain’s DNS settings for things like A, CNAME and MX records should you want to use your domain with third party services as well as with your web hosting account with us.

The Domain Name System, or DNS, is the means by which computers connected to the Internet get information about each other. The individual pieces of information are known as records; each record is of a certain type. Computers look up records for a domain by asking the name server for the domain about the records relevant to that domain.

IP addresses are the numbers which identify computers to each other.

DNS record types:

A records

These contain a mapping from a name to an IP address. For example, there is an A record set up for “microsoft.co.uk” which points from “www” to “80.176.211.43”. This means that when your web browser is pointed at www.microsoft.co.uk, it is really going to the server address 80.176.211.43.

CNAME records

These contain a mapping from one name (known as an alias) to another name (known as a CNAME, or canonical name). When a computer looks up records for the alias, it is given the records for the cname instead.

For example, if we set up a CNAME record for “yourdomain.co.uk” with alias “web” and cname “www.newdomain.co.uk.” then all queries for “web.yourdomain.co.uk” would be pointed to “www.newdomain.co.uk”. It is important to include a trailing ‘.’ on the end of your CNAME records, this makes them fully qualified domain names.

MX records

These determine where email for a domain is to be delivered. A domain can have several MX records; each one has a priority from 0 to 100. Email is delivered to the one with the lowest number first, and to any others only if the first one cannot accept it. For example, there is an MX record for “bbc.co.uk” pointing to “mail.bbc.co.uk”, with priority 10. This causes our email to be delivered to “mail.bbc.co.uk”.

Please see our support page regarding DNS changes.