ISPs
We use two ISPs to provide our internet services, Nildram and LWDInternet.
Nildram provide our broadband connection, and LWDInternet host our website and mail server.
Nildram
We have a product called "Broadband 2" from Nildram, which provides 8Mbps download speed and 448kbps upload speed.
We pay extra to get fixed a IP address (62.3.234.1).
Nildram also provide DNS servers at IP 213.208.106.212 and 213.208.106.213.
There is a "control page"
for our account, which allows us to view, and in some cases edit,
details of our account with them. Login as user
"wingpath@gotadsl.co.uk". One thing that we are allowed to edit is the
"reverse DNS" entry for our fixed IP address. I've set it to
'sage.wingpath.co.uk' - see Wingpath DNS for more details.
There is also a "status page", which would tell you when the system is down if only you could get to it, and a "support" page, with the usual troubleshooting help, FAQ, etc.
Nildram also provide an email service,
which I have never used. There is a mailbox called
wingpath@gotadsl.co.uk already set up, but we can add mailboxes with
names of the form NAME@wingpath.gotadsl.co.uk. I've just noticed that
the URL for the email configuration page has "legacy" in it, so maybe
Nildram also think it's not very useful.
LWDInternet
In addition to hosting our website and mail server, LWDInternet also
handle the registration of our domain names (wingpath.co.uk and
wingpath.com) and provide the DNS service for them.
They provide a control panel (login as "wingpath.co.uk"), which allows us to view and edit details of our website and mailboxes. There is the usual support page,
which provides basic information on how to use the control panel, and
other information about the web hosting. We have "Linux Hosting
(Plesk)", so the "Cobalt" and "Windows 2000" pages are not relevant to
us.
The email server provided by LWDInternet is a POP3 server. All email
addressed to wingpath.co.uk arrives at this server, but I have
configured it (via the control panel) to only accept mail for the users
that I have defined. Normally, any mail that is accepted will be
quickly transferred (by fetchmail running on sage) to the IMAP server
on sage. If, for some reason, this doesn't happen then there is a web page that allows to access the mail in the POP3 server (login with the mailbox name, e.g. "frank", "monica", "sales", etc.).
The DNS server maps the hostnames "wingpath.co.uk" and
"www.wingpath.co.uk" to the IP address of the machine hosting our
website (this IP address has changed at least once in the past,
presumably when LWDInternet decided to move our website to a different
machine). The DNS server also maps the email domain "wingpath.co.uk" to
the POP3 email server. We can't normally edit the DNS settings, but I
did manage to once, and the changes I made seem to have stayed - see Wingpath DNS
for more details. The DNS server maps the hostnames "wingpath.com" and
"www.wingpath.com" to a dummy website, which simply re-directs to
"wingpath.co.uk". The email domain "wingpath.com" gets mapped to a
dummy mail server, which rejects the mail. The "wingpath.com" domain is
handled like this simply because LWDInternet aren't hosting
"wingpath.com" (we don't pay them to) - they are simply handling the
domain name itself.