Singapore Web Hosting Blog

we receive questions on how to make payment to us sometimes. instead of replying emails or support tickets time and time again, let me answer it here so that all clients can refer to this post in the future.

1)first of all, all invoices are posted in helpdesk at:

http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/customer/

when you receive invoice reminder or would like to check past orders or invoices, pls login to helpdesk above. pls refer to our original welcome email (that we sent to you when you signed up for our service) for username and password.

if you forgot your username/password, please email us password reset request from original listed account owner’s email address. pls note, only the listed account owner’s email address will be accepted due to obvious security reasons.

2)after logging in, you will find a summary of your account. go to invoices section by clicking on the Invoices button at the top:

you will then find all invoice, paid, due or overdue, listed on invoices page:

if there’s invoice due or overdue that you would like to make payment for, click on the View Invoice botton next to the invoice itself, see screen capture above.

clicking the View Invoice button will take you to the details page of that invoice. you will find invoiced items, total amount and payment instructions. if you want to pay by cheque or bank transfer, just follow the instructions.

there’s also credit card payment link button with text “PayPal Payments” on it. PayPal is the credit card payment processing service we use:

if you would like to pay by credit card, click on the PayPal payment button and enter your credit card info on PayPal page:

PayPal is an eBay company, so it’s safe to make credit card payment via PayPal. we have been using it for years and are happy with the service.

hope it helps.

1st post in the new year of 2006.

beginning of new year is always a good time to draw up strategic plan for the future. well, i have yet a really solid plan that’s ready to be carried out, just some idea and research that i wanna share with my readers.

1st thing im think of is providing web hosting service for china market.

everyone is talking about china, a booming market for all most all kinds of products and services. singapore has special interests in china market somehow, the most well known project between singapore and china, the suzhou industrial park, is not a very pleasant story though. another interesting story recently is that NTUC is giving up its supermarket joint venture in china. they can’t inject more cash to survive there.

on the other hand, we have heard of many successful stories as well.

in fact, as everyone knows that china is a huge market and therefore promising opportunity, everyone also knows that doing business in china is not easy at all. everything is so much different there. like any business anywhere, we may, or may not make it.

however the most important thing is, we may not be able to afford the price of losing the chance. simple cruel fact.

exploring china web hosting service is a rather natural expansion plan for us. singapore/singtel has very good connection to china hence is a perfect bridge between china and rest of the world. and we can speak the same language.

but after research, there are things that we have to consider further.

how to get payment there? really few people there use credit card. even less people use cheque. bank transfer is also a daunting task to figure out. unlike singapore where we only have seaveral banks and can transfer funds between banks easily via online banking, there’re tons of banks that you cannot do inter-bank transfer online. you have to go to bank counter and deposit cash.

another interesting thing is, china webmasters, web developers seem like much more prefer Windows platform and ASP scripting. we all know that *nix server and PHP scripting is dominating more market share worldwide, for good reasons. looks like it’s another story in china.

china government post sometimes rather strict policies to foreign companies to enter into china in certain market or industry. telecom is one of them. not sure if web hosting service is. i heard that now in china all web sites hosted locally (on servers within china) have to get approval and a license from authority. a plus for us? as our clients do not have to apply for license. or bad sign as there might be legal issues? not clear, as many other things when china is concerned.

all new clients, a warm welcome to Singapore Web Hosting !

by now you should have received order confirmation email which contains important and sensitive information such as account username and password, where to login to control panel, FTP server, helpdesk URL, etc. pls read it carefully.

also, i’d like to address a few more things here that might be useful to all new clients.

1)if you registered the domain name with other provider and host it with us, you need to update domain DNS to our nameservers, click here to see how.

2)click here for instructions on how to set up email accounts.

3)for instructions on FTP/upload web pages, refer to this article on FTP.

4)if you’ve uploaded your web pages but you still see our temporary page at your domain, saying something like “this domain is hosted by Singapore Web Hosting“, refer to this post: why my homepage does not show up?

5)if you can visit your web site but email seems not working properly, most likely it’s something at your end, pls refer to this post: my email is not working!

6)always keep your email address updated in three places:

a)our helpdesk, this is how we send announcement and invoice, and how we identify clients.

b)domain name control panel. no matter where you register domain name, from us or any other provider, always keep domain name registrant/owner contact email updated. this is where domain renewal reminders will be sent to. no, nobody will call you to remind you as this is automatic process.

c)in cpanel, our web hosting control panel. you will receive system warnings when your account is reaching storage or bandwidth quota.

i know it’s troublesome, but…

7)wirte down username and password and keep it in safe place. we cannot retrieve password for you. never mention password to anybody else.

do not keep trying wrong username/password, this includes all users, cpanel, email, FTP, webmail, etc. anything that requires password, do NOT guess password. 5 failed logins due to wrong username/password will get your IP blocked. all people sharing the same IP, for example all people using same LAN network in your office, will be affected. if username/password is wrong, it’s wrong, keeping trying would not make it right.

inform all your email users, if they’re not sure with password, instead of guessing, they should ask administrator to reset password.

9)do NOT use webmail as primary method for email access. webmail is meant for emergency only, for example while travelling. you should always use email client software, usch as Outlook or Outlook Express, to access and download emails to your own computer.

webmail software are all 3rd party software that we have no control over, anything can happen to them, cpanel may stop supporting any of them anytime. again, we have no control over this.

10)download backup from cpanel as often as possible, just in case. this is particularly important if your site is interactive where content is updated by visitors, for instance, a forum. should anything happen, you can simply restore the backup.

we do have backup but it’s used for hardware failure recovery only. we hope we would never use it.

that’s all for now. will add more when necessary.