1. Log into your cPanel.  (The login information should have been sent to you when you signed up for Blue Pixel Design Hosting, but you can contact us to have it resent to you.)
    
2. Follow the link to Web/FTP Stats.
   
3. Choose any of the options on the list to view different reports and statistics for your website.

My favourite option from the list is Awstats as it seems the most straightforward and simple to understand.  For an explanation of Awstats, see our blog post "What do all the numbers in Awstats mean?"

So you found Awstats in your cPanel, but what do all those numbers mean?  Hopefully this will clear things up a bit…
 

Unique Visitors – These are the total number of visits by a unique IP address. This can be a bit misleading because dial-up visitors get a new IP each time they log on so you can have the same person visit different times and give a unique hit.

Number of Visits – The number of visits are the total number of visits by all visitors over a given period of time. If I visit your site and then come back 4 more times you should see one Unique visit and 5 visits from me.

Pages – This is the total number of pages viewed by visitors. This does not include images, java script or CSS and the like. Just HTML and CGI type files.

Hits – This is every file requested by the visitor. This includes pages and images together. If you have a page with 2 images calling a java script file, the page will generate a total of 4 hits. The most common referenced stat used and one that is virtually meaningless (and useless). The more appropriate numbers to consider are both ‘number of visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ (see above).

Bandwidth – The total number of bytes downloaded. If you have a page that has 50 KB of text, 2 images at 24 and 32 KB then each visitor to that page will take 106 KB of your bandwidth.

AWStats then gives you this information for the year so far, as well as a 30 and 7 day perspective. Finally it gives it to you by the hour.

Next is Countries (Top 25). This shows you what countries your visitors are coming from, starting with the most and working its way down.  (All categories with a Top 10 or 25 have a link to the right of the category that can give you an entire list if there are more than 10 or 25).

Following this is the Hosts (Top 25). This gives you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site.

Next is a popular category, Robots/Spider visitors (Top 25). Here is a great way to see when your favorite search engine has last visited your site as well as how many hits it has made (again, ‘hit’ can be misleading here).

Although not as popular a category, the Visits Duration is an important one. Here you can tell how long visitors are staying on your site. Are a vast majority leaving in the first 30 seconds? Maybe it’s time to rethink your site’s design or content.

File type lets you see what files are generating the most hits.

Pages – URL (Top 25) gives you the most visited pages on your site.

Operating Systems (Top 10) shows what Operating Systems your visitors are using in order of popularity.

Next is Browsers (Top 10). Like the OS category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in order of popularity.

Connect to site from is a multi-part category.

It starts with Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email… This is the number of visitors that either know the name of your site or have it bookmarked.

Links from an Internet Search Engine gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming from each search engine.

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) shows what pages your visitors are coming from. This does not mean there is a link to your site on the listed page, it just registers where the visitor was coming from.

Search Keyphrases (Top 10) and Search Keywords (Top 25) are next and tell us what phrases and keywords people are using to find our site.

The last two are Miscellaneous and HTTP Status codes. These give miscellaneous information and what HTTP codes are given to your visitors.

1. Log into your cPanel.  (The login information should have been sent to you when you signed up for Blue Pixel Design Hosting, but you can contact us to have it resent to you.)
    
2. Follow the link to MailScanner at the bottom of the page.
   
    
3. The box under Current Settings on the MailScanner page shows what your filters are set at now.  To change these levels, switch some of the settings in the box labeled Change All Domain Settings and click Change.
   

   
   Mail Scanning Options
   

   Spam Scanning
   If you would like all your email for this domain scanned for spam, select yes. If you don’t want your mail scanned for spam, select no.

   Low Scoring and High Scoring Spam
   MailScanner assigns a score to each email based on various attributes and triggers. The higher the score, the more likely the mail is to be spam. There are two levels of spam, low scoring and high scoring. High scoring spam is almost certainly spam, and low scoring spam is probably spam but it’s possible to have false positives. You can also change the level of the low and high scoring spam; Normally low scoring spam must have a score of at least 5 but less than 20, and high scoring spam is email that has a score of at least 20. These score settings can be changed on a server wide basis by your hosting provider, and you can also change these scores for your own email (see Other Settings below).

   When SpamX determines that an email is low or high scoring spam, you can configure whether this email is delivered as usual with a tag to let you know it is spam, deleted so you do not see it at all, or forwarded to a different email address which you can check on a regular basis.

   If you choose to have the spam forwarded to an alternate email address you must create this email address in cPanel — either the default "spam@yourdomain.com" or a different email address (see Other Settings below.)

   Virus Scanning
   If you would like all your email for this domain to be scanned for viruses, select yes. If you don’t want your email scanned for viruses, select no.

   Deliver Cleaned Emails
   Most email viruses are sent by infected "zombie PCs" and have no valid content. If you want to receive notifications of each virus that was sent to you, select yes. If you do not want to receive these notifications, select no.
    

   Blacklist and Whitelist Settings

   Spam whitelist
   You can add email addresses or domains to this list that you never want marked as spam. Please note that emails sent to you from these email addresses or domains will still be scanned for viruses and dangerous file attachments but they will not be marked as spam.

   Spam blacklist
   You can add to this list any email addresses or domains that you want always marked as high scoring spam. The action you have specified for High Scoring Spam in the Mail scanning options will be applied to any emails sent from domains or addresses on this list (i.e. marked and delivered, deleted, or forwarded).
    

   Other Settings

   Low scoring spam setting
   You can change the level at which MailScanner will identify an email as low-scoring spam (probably spam) by changing this setting. If you change it to a higher number you may receive more spams that have not been identified as spam by MailScanner. If you change it to a lower number you may find that MailScanner is identifying non-spam emails as spam, i.e. there will be more false-positives.

   High scoring spam setting
   You can change the level at which MailScanner will identify an email as high scoring spam (almost certainly spam) by changing this setting. The default is 20 and this setting works well in most cases. If you find you are getting excessive amounts of low scoring spam with a score just below 20, you may want to change this setting to a lower number, such as 15. If you change it to a lower number we would recommend NOT setting high scoring spam to Delete until you’ve tested it for a while to be sure the new scoring is working well for you.

   Additional email address
   If you’d like to have spam forwarded to a different email address than "spam@yourdomain.com", for instance an email address on another domain, you can specify that email address here. It will then be listed as one of the options for Low and High Scoring Spam in the Mail Scanning Options so you can select it.

The following article was written by Mark Rushworth, self proclamined web design, SEO and internet marketing guru.

Reduce Spam – 10 Top Tips to Stop Spam

Here are 10 top tips to reduce spam in your email in-box.

1. Delete/turn off your catch-all.

   Catch-all’s are generic mail boxes that collect all email not being sent to a named account. The up-side of catch-alls is that if someone spells an email address correctly then you still have a chance to access the message. The down side is that automated mailers send emails to randomuser@yourdomain.com. So by removing your catch-all email account you will stop a majority of junk messages.

   [Blue Pixel Design Hosting accounts have the Default Address set to ":fail: No Such User Here" by default.  This can be set to forward to your main email address instead, but of course, as mentioned above, might increase your spam levels.]

2. Make sure that you don’t publish personal email addresses on your website.

   Automated systems ‘trawl’ websites looking for email addresses, adding them to lists without your permission. If you do want to publish a personal email address disguise it using javascript or as an image (these will be inaccessible and stop some disabled viewers from emailing you), or even better, replace the email address with a contact form allowing you to pre-qualify enquiries by asking detailed questions or giving a choice of specific variables.
    

3. Set up a generic email address for use on forums, registration pages and other situations where you know that you may be opening yourself up to receiving spam email.
    
4. Don’t use single names i.e. fred@ for your email address.

   Again, these addresses can be guessed and within a few minutes a flood of spam begins to arrive. Instead opt for firstname.surname@. An added benefit is that it makes sure your contacts really know who you are.

   [I'm not sure how much difference this is going to make, and use my own name in my email.]

5. Don’t use sales@ support@ or any other guessable addresses for the same reason as above.

   Instead come up with your own codes for online contact forms etc. As they’re being accessed through a form and don’t need to be entered manually – you can really go wild with these.
    

6. Register a dedicated email domain.

   It may be a bit extreme, but if spam becomes so unmanageable, it may be worthwhile registering a completely different address to email from. This could be name@emailcompanyname.com.
    

7. Use an email program with integrated spam filtering.

   Outlook (not express) has limited in-built spam filtering. A better option would be to use Mozilla’s free email program Thunderbird, which automatically tags possible spam for you. A great feature of Thunderbird is you can set the default view to show all messages marked as not-spam, which dramatically reduces the amount of clutter and enables you to toggle between spammy and non spammy views.

   [The link to download Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/  or visit their main site at http://www.mozilla.com and download Firefox as well and rid yourself of the evil that is Internet Explorer!]

8. Ask your host what spam filtering packages they offer.

   [Included in your cPanel is the MailScanner.  It's here that you can set the filters higher to catch more spam.  See our post on how to increase your spam filter levels for instructions on how to do this.]
    

9. Subscribe to a mailing preference service.

   There are a number of mailing preference services out there that operate as closed email networks. In order to send a message to a member of these systems, you have to register on the website and provide proof that you are who you say you are. As someone who wants to send a simple message, this can be pretty hard going, with lots of forms to fill in; but as a recipient, you know that all messages being delivered are from authentic sources.
    

10. Don’t send bulk emails using TO or CC.

    If you’re sending the latest Friday Funny, or a quick promotional offer to friends and/or colleagues, don’t use TO or CC. These types of email have tendancy to be passed on to persons unknown, the result is that everyone you’ve listed as an original recipient could be easily added to a list by an unscrupulous individual. What makes this worse is that not only are the original recipients easily visible, but also the subsequent chain(s) of people.

Original post by Mark Rushworth can be found at http://www.markrushworth.com/template_permalink.asp?id=102.

You can go through cPanel, but you don’t have to.

This is the fastest way to get into your Webmail account:

http://yourdomain.com/webmail/ (obviously replace “yourdomain.com” with your domain URL, e.g. my webmail address would be http://www.bluepixeldesign.com/webmail/).

When the prompt box comes up, enter the following:

Username:  your full email address (myemail@domain.com, e.g. raielene@bluepixeldesign.com)

Password:  the password for the email account entered above