Hosted Services

Email

Use mail.portfast.net as the server name for both receiving email and sending it, also use the complete username@domain.name syntax for your user name. We recommend using IMAP rather than POP as this will let you store your mail on the server and allow it to be synchronised between devices.

We use the following standard TCP ports for receiving email:

We use the following standard TCP ports for sending email:

The security level for these SSL / TLS are equal, but you might find some ports are blocked by some providers. In general, they should all work, but if you have any trouble then try changing to another one.

We will present a valid certificate for our hostname, so if you receive a certificate warning then please get in touch with our support team who will be able to help.

There is webmail available at http://webmail.portfast.net/.

The "Strict spam filtering" option changes how we handle suspected spam. Obvious spam is rejected anyway, this option controls whether we accept borderline spam and flag it with an X-Spam header and a note in the subject, or whether we bounce it.

Web sites

Your site will be set up by default in the public_html directory.

You can upload your files by connecting to the host ftp.portfast.net with FTP or SFTP.

"Disk path" is the directory within your home directory that will be served as the HTTP root directory. An index file placed in here will be the front page of your web site.

HTTPS will make the front end servers try to get a free Let's Encrypt certificate for your site. This will enable the https:// encryption scheme between the user's browser and our servers. If our server can't get a certificate for any reason, perhaps you've not updated your DNS records to point to our servers yet, then it will fall back to the normal http:// system. To retry fetching a certificate, disable and re-enable HTTPS.

OS Image lets you select the operating system version that your site will be processed by. We can be very flexible with this as every site executes inside its own operating system container. This means any site that becomes compromised can't see outside its own environment. It can't read your email or try to read data from another user.

Enable PHP and CGI allows a site to serve dynamic content. You will want to enable PHP if you are using WordPress, for example.

Display PHP errors in browser will send syntax errors and warnings from PHP to your browser. We recommend this while you are setting up your sites, however for production use it is best disabled.

Enable outbound email allows your site to send email. We disable this by default as if a site becomes compromised, usually it will start to send spam. We limit this automatically anyway, however it's always best if it just doesn't start in the first place.

Not all these options will be relevant to all the software images, they will be hidden if not.

Changing an option rebuilds your site's enviromnent on the hosting platform, so you may have to wait a minute or two for changes to become apparent.

MySQL

To connect to the database from your code, use the hostname mysql and the standard port 3306. Nothing else is required, the container you are in will contain a hosts entry that will do the right thing.

You might be able to connect to your database using other hostnames that you will see, however if we move your database in the future then we can update the container hosts file accordingly, so you should only refer to it by the mysql hostname.

We provide a PHPMyAdmin instance to make administering your database easier. You will have direct links to it beside each configured database.

It will take a few seconds for a new database to be synchronised out to the database servers so the PHPMyAdmin link won't work instantly, but should be working after less than a minute.