- Checking your SMTP Server operation with Telnet
- Can you help me with the design of my site?
- How to predict the right time to move to a VPS or Dedicated Server
- How to recover the username and password to the BCP Script Admin Area
- Members cannot login when using IE (may effect other browsers too)
- One page is blank but others are OK, what's the cause?
- Transferring ownership of your script
- 404 Error Document Redirection
- Can you help with me with an HTML question?

Checking your SMTP Server operation with Telnet

Open your mail server with Telnet, in Windows open a cmd (Start/Run/cmd) and type something like the following, note the actual replies will be different too.

telnet yourdomain.com 25 [Enter]

And you will see some text preceded with 220 like this:-

220-bigbay.webs.com ESMTP Exim 4.68 #1 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:24:19 -0600
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited,
220 and/or bulk e-mail.

Type helo me [Enter] and you will see something like:-

250 bigbay.ventrino.com Hello dsl-111-121-141.telkomadsl.co.za [41.141.121.111]

Type mail from:you@yourdomain.com [Enter] and it should reply with:-

250 OK

Type rcpt to:you@destination.com [Enter] and it should reply with:-

250 Accepted

Type Data [Enter]

354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself

Type the following:

Subject:This is a test [Enter]
This is the example message text [Enter]
[Enter]
.
[Enter]

Note the period.  That must appearwith at least one line between it and the message and must be followed by [Enter], after that you will see something like:-

250 OK id=1JW6yF-0003V7-WD

Now type quit and you should see:-

221 bigbay.ventrino.com closing connection

Connection to host lost.

Can you help me with the design of my site?

We can't no, but many professional designers are familiar with Ventrino/Walker scripts.  Listed below are a few, you can also check the Third Party Products & Services forum at http://forum.ventrino.com

http://www.cheapminisite.com/index.html

http://www.designrampage.com/

http://procomdesigns.com/

http://www.trafficexchangedesign.com/

http://www.leondediosdesignstudio.com/

How do I order a design, do you have any tips?

Designers are often busy, if you find a designer you would like to work with check his lead time before starting on your project and make sure you can work with his time estimates.  It's not unusual for them to say you may have to wait 3 to 6 months before they can start.  A typical Ventrino Traffic Exchange script design will be done in a weak once you have agreed the design/layout etc.

Prices range from around $300 to $600 but some non full time designers will do it for less and of course there's always designers who will charge more!  

Anything I should consider when ordering my design?

I prefer a fixed price quote and request a written statement (by email is fine) that details the work they are going to do for you.  This can be a simple list such as:-

* Cost $300
* Design logo
* Design site templates
* Integrate design

This makes it clear what you can expect from your designer.  If there's something you don't understand then ask before placing the order.  Also if you know diddly about HTML and the Interweb then be honest and let them know that you expect them to deliver a fully integrated web design (ok, going over this one too much but recently someone had a great design prepared but the designer failed to stand by their work and integrate it which lead to an additional cost they had not expected).  Integration is easy but it takes time and thus costs.

How to predict the right time to move to a VPS or Dedicated Server

Calculating the right time to move to a vps or dedicated server is dependent on so many factors it becomes difficult to predict accurately.  However if you are making a business plan it is important to at least have a rough idea and this article will try and help with a few ideas.   Here are a few points to consider:

So if concurrent users is the issue rather than bandwidth how do you work that out?

Login to your BCP and run the following SQL statement in the SQL Viewer

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT credit_members_id) FROM vtp_tracking WHERE action_date>=date_sub(NOW(),interval 7 day) 

This will return the total number of surfers in the past 7 days, here's another version that will report the total number of surfers in the past day:-

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT credit_members_id) FROM vtp_tracking WHERE action_date>=date_sub(NOW(),interval 1 day)

The maximum number of concurrent users will depend on how your host has set the server up and the demand from other scripts it hosts.

However you can take these figures and do a little math to get an idea of what's going on, by keeping a record of the results you can monitor growth.

If you judge performance is sufficient and you currently have 400 distinct members surfing a week out of 3,500 today then you have a ratio of about 12% (400 / 3500 * 100).  If you to 25,000 members you can expect 3,000 members per week to surf (12% of 25,000).

Using Awstats you can check the number of pages surfed for the busiest hour and compare that to the slowest and make a rough calculation of the number of people surfing during peak periods:-

Pages at 00 (midnight CET) 47,000
Pages at 11 (11am CET) 5,500
Total pages surfed (all hours) 525,000

This means the average surfer visits 1,312 pages per week (525,000/400) so divide the peak by 1,312 to get an idea of the maximum concurrent users which in this case is 36.

By default hosts usually allow 400 concurrent connections to the database.  Professional hosting companies will adjust this depending on the number of cpu's and the power of the server. 

You can use a wet thumb approach to estimate how much more you can handle before looking at a dedicated server.  If performance is good and the server is powerful it's save to multiply this figure by 2, 3, or even 4.

Let's increase it to 100 concurrent database connections (this is a safe figure, remember a connection is open only for microseconds so you could have 500 or 600 people surfing at the same time but only 100 of them actually making a request to the database).   Now we work the figures backwards:

if 36 concurrent database connections can handle 525,000 pages per week on a site with 3,500 members then how much can we do with 100?

Your site will be able to handle 1,458,333 pages per week (525,000/36*100) and nearly 10,000 members (3,500/36*100).

There are several factors that can impact this.  What if a new site on the shared hosting operates just under their allowable limits?  What if two sites do this and have peak periods around the time of your own?

There is no easy answer to this but instead of worrying about it you can create a plan using the above examples and monitor progress.  On many hosting plans you will be able to safely calculate up to 400 concurrent database connections (giving you roughly 40,000 accounts).  If your hosting is good then you should expect at least 25,000 members, if your host has put you on a server with 2,000 TE's then you can expect significantly lower figures!

How to recover the username and password to the BCP Script Admin Area

If you have forgotton your username or password for the BCP you can use FTP to retrieve it:

1. Use FTP to download the config.inc.php from your /data folder

2. Open with notepad or your favourite text editor

3. Search for $gAdmin and $gPass, the values assigned to these will be your username and password respectively

Also make sure $gWebsiteName is not empty, for example it should be something like:-

$gWebsiteName = "yourdomain.com";

Members cannot login when using IE (may effect other browsers too)

If members complain they cannot login switch GZIP compression off in the BCP and ask them to try again.

BCP --> Configuration --> General  Configuration --> GZIP Compression -->  Enable Compression --> No

One page is blank but others are OK, what's the cause?

>>Suddenly<< a page goes blank, often the front or home page, yet this sudden change is rarely reported along with the change made just before that sudden blank page occurs!  A little diagnosis on the alteration will save a lot of time so if you must report this problem here's the best thing to do before you post the topic on the forum.

1.  Restore the configuration file (/data/config.inc.php) from a backup.  If that fixes it use a comparison program to compare the two (examDiff is popular and offers a lite version free of charge, Beyond Compare is shareware and my preference).

2.  If you cannot remember what you changed before this happened checkout a few of the most common culprits:

3.  The next step is to report the problem on the forum.  Make sure you provide a link to the page that is experiencing the problem along with a step by step description of how to get there if it is not obvious (for example if it occurs on the websites page but only after adding a new site).

Transferring ownership of your script

Ask the new owner to create a hosting account here and then tell us you want the hosting and domain transferred to it. 

Also if you are transferring the script license make sure you do the same at http://www.ventrino.com/client.

404 Error Document Redirection

Your script uses 404 errors to redirect visitors to the correct location.  Most hosting control panels offer a way to set a page for handling 404 errors and in those cases just redirect to /404.php

However if you are using a control panel that forces you to redirect to a static page or requires complex coding to achieve the same thing you can usually modify the .htaccess file to handle the problem for you.

To do that open your site using FTP or you can use the built in file manager if your control panel has one.  Locate the web root folder (usually /public_html or wwwroot) and edit the .htaccess file (create one if it doesn't exist ).

Append the following line:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Can you help with me with an HTML question?

With so many excellent articles covering HTML for beginners already available it would be pointless to go into any detail here.  If what's shown below is too rudementary for you and you would like to checkout some more in depth articles for beginners click here.

To use the above open notepad or a similar text editing program and enter some text, if you want to make text bold surround the text with the bold tags like this: <b>this will be bold</b>.  Use the same syntac to make text italic, make it a header etc.