1- Order not provisioned - You must receive a welcome email that says your order was received and completed. It's possible your order not not completed because we are waiting for payment or other information-contact billing@lowesthosting.com for any order confirmations.

2- Site is a new sign up for a new domain...New domains require 24-48 hours for the thousands of internet routers and name servers to propogate with the new DNS settings. This is normal and the way the internet works.

3- Site is a new signup for an existing domain ...Per your welcome email you were supposed to contact your domain registrar and update your DNS settings to point to our name servers. Do a whois for your domain, the name servers must be listed as ns1.lowesthosting.com and ns2.lowesthosting.com if they are not, contact your registrar and update your domains DNS settings.

4- Domain DNS was recently changed to LH nameservers... DNS changes are not instant and require 24-72 hours for the new settings to propogate to the thousands of internet routers and name servers of the internet. If more than 72 hours has gone by and still not connection, reboot your browser as it may have stored your old webserver ip address.

5- You can view your site but others can't ...If you site is new, then its DNS is still propogating and updates from the central registry have not yet reached your local isp or routers so you must wait some additional time (usually 24-48 hours). If your site was established and working previously, then there is probably a regional outage, or maintenance on the internet preventing you from reaching our server. Do a trace route to confirm.

6- Others can view your site but you can't ...Either DNS has not completed propogating or you are experiencing a regional internet outage. DNS changes spread like a virus and not all parts of the internet receive their updates at the exact same time so it has not spread to your isp routers yet.

7- Site is not reachable from your computer...Just because the site is not viewable from your computer does not mean that the server is down, check LH network status page, if green, then the problem is somewhere between your computer and the server. do a trace route to determine the hop that is down and contact that internet provider for more information.

8- Server outage...check LH networks status page, if your server is red for http, smtp, pop3 or ftp we will have already been notified of your server outage from our monitoring system so it is not necessary to submit a trouble ticket. Instead monitor the "Updates" section of our website at help.lowesthosting.com for news about what our engineers have determined and eta of service.

How To Do A Local Trace Route...If your domains DNS is working (meaning the name resolves to our webserver IP address) then by doing a local traceroute you can view the path that your browser request traverses from your computer to your ISP and then across the many "hops" of differenent service providers to finally arrive at our server. Each hop represents one small leg of the journey. Often in order to get from one geographic point to another there will be a single point of failure that can prevent your request from reaching our server. Keep in mind that just because you can't reach the server does not mean it is not working. By doing a remote trace, you can see how other computers in other locations are able to reach the server using different routes to your website.

Local Trace Route: From any windows computer - Open a Dos window (start, programs, accessories, MS-DOS Prompt) at the C:\Windows> prompt type tracert domain.com and it will show each leg, the carrier , and take 3 time averages and the last line should end in the IP address of the webserver that is hosting your domain. If you see a bunch of *** or very long delay times or it stops in the middle and does not terminate with the last line being an IP address, then the point where it stops is the point of internet outage.

How To Do A Remote Trace Route: If you susspect that the problem is localized you can use the trace route tool located in the client area above to trace from our Atlanta Georgia NOC to your website and show if it is externally available.

1- Cannot Connect To Server - If your trying to ftp upload files using ftp.yourdomain.com then your domain must actually be reachable via it's domain name. If your domain is new or you recently edited your DNS settings, it takes 24-48 hour for your the changes to propagate before your domain will be accessible via yourdomain.com or ftp.yourdomain.com.

If you domain IS working, then your LAN or ISP may have a port block prohibiting your uploading via port 21. Port checks must be done from your local computer in order to confirm the pathway to our server is available. To confirm port 21 is available, open a DOS window (start, programs, accessories, DOS) and type" ftp ftp.yourdomain.com " (without the quotations). You should received a message "Connected to yourdomain.com.220 ProFTPD 1.2.2 Server (ProFTPD) [1002-X.lowesthosting.com] User (yourdomain.com:(none)):" The 1002-X is your web server and this message shows you are connecting to it. If you don't see the above message, contact your site administrator or ISP and have them open port 21.

2- Wrong Password, or Login - Clients often confuse control panel and ftp information. FTP login and password are CASE SENSETIVE, so make sure you did not capitolize one or more letters. Copy and pasting your logins or passwords often creates hidden spaces at the end of your login or password so always enter them individually by hand.


3- Permission Denied- You are attempting to FTP into a directory that you don't have permissions to because you should not be uploading into it. All website files should be uploaded into the httpdocs and scripts into the cgi-bin directories only.

Web Pages Have Missing Parts Or Errors

1- Greyed Out Boxes or X's Appear Where Images Should Be - This means either your link is not pointing to the image location, or the image is not where the link is looking for it, or the image file has become corrupt.

Right click on the greyed out box and goto properties to view the path where browser is looking for the actual file. More than likely you created the page on your computer and did not name the link to the image properly so once uploaded it is looking in the wrong place. correct the link on your computer, re-upload the webpage and make sure to refresh your browser. If the properties view does show the proper path to the image, then check to see if the image is actually in the right locaton. If the image is in the right location, enter the image url directly into the browser to see if it is viewable if not, then the image itself it corrupt. You must upload your images in Binary Mode or they will become corrupted.

2- Links Don't Work Receive "Page Not Found" or 404 Error - Right click and goto properties to view where browser is looking for the actual file. More than likely you did not use a reletive or absolute address for the link and your webpage is therefore looking for a file that is not on the server, or not in a specified directory. When you create a link on your home computer to a file that resides there, the link may look like c://websites/ourfamily/kids/bobby.html but the link should have been a reletive link like "kids/bobby.html" or an absolute link like
<a href="http://www.domain.com/kids/bobby.html">bobby</a> .....Correct the links, re-upload the webpage and remember to hit refresh on your browser so it accepts the updated changes.


3- Images Are Distored - This occurs because you created a webpage with an image of a fixed size, and then changed the resolution or size of the image afterward without relinking the new image. Solution...relink to your new image and re-upload your webpage and remember to hit refresh on your browser so it accepts the updated changes.

Cannot connect to server, authenication errors, error 553 , mail undeliverable.First make sure your website is running because No website means no mail server. Next check for the ability to connect to the running server and if your able to connect we must check If it is up and running check below for possible solutions.

A. Website must be up...if your account is not yet "live" then neither is your email which is part of the hosting account.
B. You must be able to connect to the server without a block from your ISP or regional outage of the internet
C. You must have actually created a mail account and added a mail box to the account on the server
D. Your email software must be configured properly for the email account and authenticate the name & password.
E. Once sent, the receipients server must accept the email.

1- Cannot Connect To Mail Server - If your trying to send or receive email from your email accounts on your mail server,
your primary domain hosting account must be working and accessible. Possible reasons you can't connect to your mail server are:

a. Your domain is new or you recently edited your DNS settings and it is still propagating. (wait 24 hours)
b. There is a regional outage between your local ISP and our mail server preventing the connection from completing (do a trace)
c. The server is off line or not working. (check the server uptime status page)

2- Server Not Configured - You must create each of your pop3 email accounts on the server first and make sure you check the
mail box check box otherwise the mail account does not store email. Make sure to setup all email accounts using lower case letters.

3- Email Client Software Not Properly Configured - Each email client is slightly different and you should check the tutorials in the quick setup guide or your softwares built in help. Confirm that both POP3 and SMTP servers are set to mail.yourdomain.com ,
also make sure you have the "my server requires authentication" box checked, and that the mail ports are set to 110 for POP3
and 25 for SMTP. Also make sure you setup each account name using lower case letters.


4 - Port Block If you domain IS working,and you can received email but can not send or get a message that says "cannot connect to server" then your LAN or ISP may have a firewall or port block prohibiting your use of port 25 to send emails. Further some ISP's permit port 25 but only for their own mail servers. For example if you use mindspring as your isp, they may permit outbound emails from you@mindspring.com but block you@yourdomain.com.

Port checks must be done from your local computer in order to confirm the port 25 pathway to our server is available.
Open a DOS window (start, programs, accessories, DOS) and type "tracert mail.yourdomain.com " (without the quotations).
This will show each hop between routers to the mail server. If you get an error message "cannot find server" you have a port block. If not, the trace will complete and will various hops and hop times and should end in the IP address of the webserver that is hosting your domain. If you see a bunch of *** or very long delay times or it stops in the middle and does not terminate with the last line being an IP address, then the point where it stops is the point of internet outage.

5 - Error 553 that address is not in my list of permitted recipients. - This is caused when email client software configured with multiple email accounts from different domains is used to send email to an account that it has not checked for messages first.

Remedy: Check your email from an account before sending or Set your Email Client to check email every 15 minutes or Close and reopen your Mail Client

Example: If your email address is bob@yourcompany.com and your password is nice When you send an email your mail client (outlook express) says I am an email account "bob" on domain "yourcompany.com" and my password is "nice" Our server then looks up that information on your account, and if correct sends the email through.

The last transparent part is after our server sends it through it sends back a confirmation handshake to your browser that instructs it to move that email into your "sent folder" confirming it was sent and this handshake ID is retained in the browser's identity cache for 10 minutes. The next time you send an email to a different email account, your browser is supposed to have checked it's POP mail on that new account to re-identify itself BEFORE resending out a new SMTP outbound email request. This is called "pop before smtp".

Depending on the mail client, it will retain it's old IP signature so it has the identity of the last email account it sent to, and therefore the first time it tries to send to a different account will fail the authentication process and give you the error you received.