Category: Web Hosting

How do I use traceroute?

Traceroute is a tool used for diagnosing network-related issues. It does this by displaying the route to the destination specified – a domain name or an IP address – and records how long it takes packets to reach that destination. Occasionally we may ask you to perform a traceroute. Here’s how to do it on our 3 hosting platforms:

Windows

  • Click ‘Start’
  • Type in ​Run and then click on the icon that appears (a box should open)
  • Type cmd and then press OK to open command prompt
  • In the window that appears, type in: tracert yourdomain.com (or the IP address depending on the issue) and then press ‘Enter’.

macOS

  • Browse to Applications -> Utilities -> Network Utility -> Traceroute
  • Enter the domain or IP address you need to diagnose, then select Trace

Linux

  • Open a Terminal window
  • Type: traceroute yourdomain.com (or replace ‘yourdomain.com’ with an IP address if requested to do so)

What is DNS Propagation?

When you make a change to your DNS records or update your domain(s) nameservers, you need to wait a certain amount of time before these changes are fully reflected across the internet.

This is because DNS records are cached by what’s known as a DNS resolver.

The job of a resolver is to help speed up browsing and reduce overall traffic by reducing the number of DNS lookups that are made to translate domain names to IP addresses.

The time it takes for a resolver’s cache to expire and a new lookup to be made is called DNS propagation.

The maximum amount of time a resolver will cache a lookup for is known as the record’s ‘Time to Live‘ (TTL) value. There are two key cases to remember when it comes to propagation and TTL values:

1. Changes to DNS Records 

If you’re not changing your domain(s) nameservers but just updating records on existing nameservers, the time taken for propagation should be relatively quick. This is because the TTL for the records is being controlled by the operator of the nameserver, and it’s very rare you will see a provider offering TTLs of more than 4 hours.

The TTL given out by our nameservers is 3600 seconds (1 hour). So if you’re making a change to your records on our nameservers it won’t take long to propagate.

2. Changes to your Domain(s) Nameservers

Nameserver changes are the slowest propagating, and can take up to 48 hours to propagate worldwide. This is because nameservers’ records are retrieved from the root nameservers, which most commonly give out a large TTL value of 2 days (172800 seconds) – or more – causing DNS resolvers to cache these lookups for a long time.

Can I speed this up?

Firstly, it’s good to remember that it’s very rare that the resolvers you’re using have just cached the record you are requesting, so in very few cases will you need to wait the full time specified by the records TTL.

The DNS resolvers most likely impacting you are those operated by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Although rare, some ISPs ignore TTL settings, and will only update their cached records every one or two days. There’s a chance a simple reboot of your Internet Router will get you another set of DNS resolvers that are yet to cache your records upon reconnection. If you’re regularly waiting for DNS propagation and believe your ISP is not obeying TTL values from nameservers you may wish to consider switching to Google Public DNS . This is a free, global DNS resolution service that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

What about the WHOIS?

Checking the WHOIS record for your domain name is a good way of confirming that your nameserver change has completed successfully at the registry. However, WHOIS records are not directly related to DNS propagation. At most, a change in the WHOIS record confirms the root nameservers should now answer with your new nameservers. The TTL value is still in effect and DNS resolvers around the world may only ask the root nameservers for any updates once the original TTL has expired.

What is DNS? Our Simple Guide to DNS

What is DNS?

Computers love numbers, but humans like names. It is far easier for you to keep someone in your phonebook as John Smith rather than his number 07999333456. DNS is just the Internet’s versions of this.

DNS means ‘Domain Name System’. It sounds very technical, but it is actually quite simple. It’s a way for your browser (eg Firefox or Chrome) or mail client (eg Outlook or Mac Mail) to find websites and services on the internet.

You have probably heard of IP addresses, they are those things you occasionally see that look like 192.168.100.2 or 4.4.4.4. They’re the ‘phone numbers’ of the internet, and you have definitely seen a website or an email address: www.google.com or john.smith@hotmail.com. DNS is the ‘phonebook’ of the internet, matching-up website and email domain names to the actual IP addresses of the servers on the Internet.

What DNS can I manage with QuantaTec?

If you register (or transfer) your domains with QuantaTec, we’ will take care of all the DNS you need for your website and email. If for any reason you need to get your ‘hands dirty’ and add, modify or remove any DNS records, you can do also this with the domain control panel.

There are many types of DNS records that exist, but not all are relevant to hosting. What follows is an explanation of each record type you can manage for your domains.

‘A’ records

A records allow a DNS name (e.g., www.quantatec.uk) to be pointed to one or more IPv4 addresses (quad – AAAA – records are used for pointing a DNS name to IPv6 addresses). These are the most common kinds of records you will see. The DNS name “www.quantatec.uk” is an A record and it points to 185.151.28.20 which is an IPv4 address. Google has “www.google.com” which is both an A and AAAA record which point to “216.58.210.36” (IPv4) and “2a00:1450:4009:800::2004” (IPv6) respectively.

‘CNAME’ records

This stands for “canonical name” and you can only have one of these per name in a DNS zone (DNS zone basically means the domain name).

A CNAME record does not point to an IP address but points to another DNS name. It is a handy way of pointing multiple names to one place, and then only managing one set of IP addresses.

‘MX’ records

MX stands for ‘mail exchanger’. It tells a ‘sending’ mail server how to find the ‘receiving’ mail server, given in order of priority, with the lowest numbers given highest priority. The MX record for QuantaTec is ‘mx.stackmail.com’.

‘TXT’ records

TXT (or text) records are not generally used to locate servers on the internet, but to prove to external systems that the domain is yours, or, that mail from certain hosts can originate from that domain (they’re called SPF records).

It is very unlikely that you will need to ever manually create a TXT record, but we offer the flexibility just in case.

‘SRV’ records

SRV (or service) records are similar to A (and CNAME and MX) records in that they are used to look up the IP addresses of servers on the Internet, but also include port and protocol information.

It is very unlikely you will ever need to modify these for your hosting, but we provide the facility in case you may want to operate your own offsite services under your hosted domains.

Secure Web Hosting

Security breaches and exposure to malware are an ever-present threat on today’s web. Our secure UK hosting keeps you safe against harmful web attacks.

Automatic malware scanning

We scan all websites on our WordPress and Linux hosting platforms every day for common malware. Using commercial tools and systems developed in-house, we discover all sorts of nasties.

What makes our malware scanning special is that you can also run our scanner on-demand.

Wildcard SSL Encryption

SSL-TLS certificates are an integral part of secure web browsing and data transfer. Our SSLs are ‘wildcard’ certificates. So you can secure subdomains as well as your primary domain using one certificate.

Key Features:

  • Our Linux/WordPress platforms run Redhat Enterprise Operating Systems.
  • PCI compliant UK hosting
  • Email scans: All emails and forwarders sent and received are subject to advanced antivirus and anti-spam protection.
  • 1 Tbps+ DDoS protection: This enterprise-level protection covers you against most attacks. It only filters-out malicious traffic, so you can carry on working without noticing any interruption.
  • Web application firewall: Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps protect your data and software by blocking suspicious activity. The WAF inspects every HTTP request for SQL injection, trojans, cross-site scripting, path traversal and many other types of attack. It performs each inspection in less than a millisecond.

Powerful control

  • Block visitors to your site by IP address or country
  • Brute force login protection
  • FTP security lock
  • File Permissions Checker
  • Daily Backups

Platforms & Technologies

Built for incredible performance

Learn more about our unique approach to hosting your websites.

Key features

  • Our two powerful platforms: Linux and WordPress
  • Autoscaling and load-balanced
  • Enhanced speed and security
  • 100% SSD (solid state drive) storage
  • IPv6 enabled
  • Secure, state-of-the-art UK data centre
  • Friendly UK support

Hosting with a difference

Unlike with other web hosts, your website isn’t tied to one single server but makes use of a whole platform, meaning that you get incredible reliability and speed at an unbelievably low price.

Traditional hosting performance is subject to how much traffic you get and what other users are doing, but our platforms are load-balanced and automatically scale to meet resource demands at no extra cost to you. Your website stays online and runs fast so you can concentrate on your business.

What is Autoscaling?

Autoscaling literally means that our resources scale automatically. Bandwidth, memory and processing power is scaled up or down instantly – depending on demand. This is what makes them ‘true elastic cloud’. If there’s a surge in traffic, your website will continue to offer the same fast experience for every user.

This is because a site isn’t hosted on one or two servers. Instead, it can access the whole platform’s resources: multiple servers. And we always keep dedicated resources in reserve to cope with traffic.

Data centre & hardware

Our advanced UK data centre is kitted out with premium hardware and the latest and greatest security and environmental technologies. With technicians onsite 24/7 every day of the year and a resilient national network for ultimate reliability, you can rest assured that your websites are safe with us.

We’ve invested heavily in our hardware to ensure optimal performance and a faultless design with no single point of failure. Each server has Dual Intel Xeon Scalable 12-core processors with hyper-threading, presenting 48 logical cores and 64GB DDR4 RAM. All MySQL databases are hosted on the same type of Intel Xeon servers, but with 192GB RAM and SSD storage.

We’ve developed an incredibly resilient high performance storage platform utilising 100% SSD storage arrays in a RAID 10 configuration, with battery-backed hardware RAID cards. Storage arrays are then replicated across multiple servers so in the highly unlikely event that disks, arrays or entire servers fail there will be no downtime or impact to your site. We take daily data backups, which are stored at a secured offsite facility.

OS and Security?

We also run our own bespoke Web Application Firewall that continually monitors and filters out threatening requests before they can even target your website.

Our Linux/WordPress platforms run Redhat Enterprise Operating Systems.

WordPress-specific features

If you run WordPress, you’ll want to take advantage of our bespoke WordPress platform. We don’t repackage standard hosting as ‘WordPress Hosting’; we’ve gone above and beyond to create a completely separate managed platform. It’s optimised specifically for WordPress speed and security with lightning fast StackCache caching, MySQL resource handling, and automatic WordPress core updates all backed by fantastic hardware and support.

Automatic WordPress updates: always forget to update WordPress or simply have too many installs? Don’t worry, we automatically update your core WordPress installs with the latest security fixes and new features as soon as they’re released.

Built-in plugin monitoring: our systems are always running checks to identify any potentially abusive plugins and automatically block any that may put your website at risk or have a significant impact on performance.

StackCache: this unique plugin enhances your website caching for consistently quick loading speeds. It works automatically, but you can manage it yourself directly from your WordPress Dashboard if you prefer.

WordPress Tools: create WordPress staging sites in one click and manage your common WordPress tasks from your account dashboard.

Linux-specific features

Our high-powered Linux platform is ideal for running everything from Joomla! to Magento, so if you like your software you’ll love this platform. If you’re not sure what kind of hosting you need or what kind of website you want, Linux is the best choice. It’s fantastic out of the box, but we’ve made it even better.

Optimised Apache with NGINX Edge Cache: we’ve fine-tuned Linux’s Apache and created our own superfast caching system so your website always runs at its best. It’s the perfect foundation to grow your website.

Multiple Programming Languages: our Linux platform allows you to make use of 6 different versions of PHP, ensuring, greater flexibility for your website, frameworks, and scripts.