Differences Between Legacy and VIP Hosting from Freeola

Last updated on by Freeola Support

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Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages.

This guide was offered with the initial launch of VIP Hosting. As this now references two services that are no longer available, due to the launch of our SSD Hosting packages, this guide will no longer be updated but will be kept for posterity and reference purposes.

This guide is designed to help make the migration of web sites from Freeola's legacy hosting packages to our, now also legacy, VIP Hosting packages.

Your New Username

The most obvious difference when you switch from our legacy servers will be that you are assigned a new username and a new ftp server address to upload to. Freeola Web Hosting accounts have a user name that starts with the prefix 'vip' whereas our legacy servers use the prefix 'sr'.

Similarly you will have an FTP server address which will be in the format of 'vip1.freeola.net' whereas our legacy servers have an address along the lines of 'freeolaweb1.freeola.net'.

Both the VIP and Legacy servers use standard FTP to upload to, and are compatible with a wide range of FTP clients such as Filezilla and CuteFTP. Some Web design software that has FTP built-in, for example Frontpage or Dreamweaver, can also be used.

Changes to server file structure

The Freeola Web Hosting servers are designed to be as backwardly compatible as possible with the legacy servers, however there are some areas where the servers are set up slightly differently.

The first example of this is the file structure where websites are located. On the legacy servers this was in the following format “/freeola/users/last digit of sr number/second last digit of srnumber/srnumber/htdocs”. So, for example, the user sr9865441 would have the path to their webfolder on the actual server as “/freeola/users/1/4/sr9865441/htdocs”.

The VIP Web Hosting servers are set-up in a less complex way, the path to your website on the server would simply be “/var/www/vipserver/sites/vipnumber/httpd/htdocs”. For example, for vip12345678 the path would be "/var/www/vip5/sites/vip12345678/httpd/htdocs".

Changes to Scripting Languages

Perl

The situation is changed slightly when you are using Perl however, due to the different security model for this language. When you are using Perl, your files will be held in a 'jail' where they will not be allowed to interact with other users.

In this case the path to your files is '/httpd/htdocs'. If you wish to access files in the same folder as your Perl files, then you can use the . character to signify your current folder and again, you should not need the 'real' path on the server.

All folders used for running Perl scripts and all Perl scripts themselves should have their permissions set to 755 (the same as on Freeola's legacy servers).

PHP

The main difference with PHP on the VIP Web Hosting servers is that you will have control of which version of PHP your website operates via your MyFreeola Control Panel.

A helpful step-by-step guide on making this change can be seen by clicking here.

Changes to MySQL

Our MySQL Web Hosting service offers the option of having MySQL attached to your webspace rather than as a standalone option. Because each Freeola Web Hosting server is hosting its own MySQL server locally, connections between your tables and your website will be quicker as they are able to connect via a socket on the server rather than to a remote location.

If you do switch your MySQL site to use the MySQL Web Hosting package, then there are a few differences. The first difference is that you will select the name of your database yourself via your MyFreeola account, rather than having one assigned to you automatically. The name you create will be prefixed with a unique code designed to prevent customers from clashing with each other over the name of their databases.

So, for example, if you want to create a database to store your WordPress tables, you could name it 'A345_wordpressdb' (or any other name starting with the A345 prefix). Your database name and user name will be the same (as with the standalone MySQL database), and you can specify which password you require on a per database basis.

The other thing to note is that when you are specifying the host, you need to specify localhost as the address rather than 'mysql.freeola.net' as you would when using the standalone MySQL package.


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