Bluehost support doesn't know what hosts file is - server

Just looking for some opinions on this.
I altered a hosts file on my local machine to try and preview a site hosted with Bluehost (to check everything is working correctly before I point my live domain to their server).
This didn't work and I keep getting a 404 error.
I spoke to 6 people from Bluehost now and only one of them seemed to know what a hosts file was. Everyone else seemed to point out the domain's A records are not pointing to the BH server, which is correct as it is not what I'm trying to do at all. I'm trying to preview the BH site BEFORE I point my live domain to the BH server.
Hosts file is what I always use to preview a site before it goes live. I've done it with hundreds of sites on many different servers and never had an issue... until I came across Bluehost.
Their support just doesn't seem to know what a hosts file is, they keep referring me back to the live DNS A record.
I just don't understand how Bluehost is WordPress #1 recommended hosting when their technical support is so incompetent.
Am I being unreasonable here? How can a hosting company not know what a hosts file is?

Related

favicon.ico through host pointing to server

Odd issue, but one I haven’t been able to solve in years.
I have used my own web servers forever and a day. But I’m always messing with them trying to learn this or that and will occasionally destroy it! lol So for a couple sites, I use a hosting service.
I also use the hosting service for my dns, since it’s a pain for me to set up. So I’ll buy a domain name and point it to my servers via url stealth, and have never had an issue with anything but this.
My favicon.ico never works this way. It works fine with the sites on the hosting service, and it works fine if I go to my server site using the IP address. But it just will not display through the host no matter what I try.
It is a very small issue, but would be nice to have it work.
Thanks!

How do I find out what caused our mail server to get listed in UCEPROTECT-1?

Our IP address recently got listed on UCEPROTECT-1 as a potential spam address, and we aren't able to figure out how to stop this. According to their website, UCEPROTECT-1 listing happens when: IP's get listed in Level 1 automatically if they either try to deliver e-mails to spamtraps or if they are involved in port scans or probes or any kind of attacks against our servers
Some research online suggests that the only way to ensure it doesn't happen again is to find out what is triggering these spam traps and plug them.
Any idea how we can go about looking for what is triggering these automatic listings? Any help would be appreciated!
Some background:
We use GSuite for our email servers, wix.com for our website, and namecheap.com for our DNS.
We'd originally paid to not be listed in the UCEPROTECT-2 and 3 listings but were automatically removed as soon as we got listed under UCEPROTECT-1.
I don't know how G-Suite works but in general check
logfiles of the outgoing e-mail servers for days with "strange" recipients patterns or for more e-mails than on other days
if your domain is listed on other blacklists, maybe that is giving you other hints
The problem is: if you are using the outgoing e-mail servers from Google and some of them are listed on UCEProtect (because other G-Suite customers are sending spam, mostly without knowing it cause they are hacked), you have little chance of fixing this yourselve. This is not really uncommon, me.com/icloud.com (17.58.63.0/24) is listed at UCEProtect right now too.

Wakanda port forwarding/routing 409 conflict

I've got a very large JS app built in Wakanda that I'm working on, and suddenly hit a strange issue.
Our Solution has four main projects in it:
Consumers
Merchants
Funders
Promoters
These projects all have their own functions, and up until recently have had them operating on the same server via different port addresses - 8100, 8101, 8102, 8103. This has worked without a problem, with the localhost as the host in the Settings.waSettings file, and the respective ports set there.
Now, moving to production, we need to have these routing through to the site from subdomains. Because of the way A-records are and not being able to define a port address, we have our .consumer, .merchant etc subdomains all going to the same elastic IP address, and using the Settings.waSettings files in Wakanda to handle the routing of traffic to each project.
We have set all the incoming ports as 80, with it listening for the subdomain name to handle which project to route the user to. This worked yesterday without a hitch for around an hour on the server, before it suddenly stacked itself. For a time, the Wakanda server just stopped each time you attempted to access one of the subdomains. After a while longer it's not crashing each time, but just simply resolving to a '409 Conflict' screen.
My question is, can Wakanda reliably use it's project Settings file to handle requests like this? Or is there a better way to handle this? I know there used to be a thread in the forums on this discussion.
Thanks, let me know if you need any more information.

Server for iPhone; continuous connection

Ok lets say I want to create a connection between my iPhone app and my server (i'd like to try and use GoDaddy servers for this) to server real time location data to users.
I've seen plenty of good stuff online about using sockets, streams, ASIHttpmessage, CFHTTPMessageRef, etc., but what I'm unclear about is how to set up a server that continuously servers real time data to users (I believe you'd need a stream of data going to the user for this, not just a single http request and response). How does one take a host like GoDaddy and run server code on it. I know you can set up a server like this using terminal, but I don't have access to command line or the ability to run this "server program" from my web host as far as I know. Is there software I can download on my cpanel for this? Do I need a virtual private server and different hosting via GoDaddy maybe?
Does anyone know how I can do this or if my understanding of this whole thing is wrong. Please keep in mind I need this real time (or close to). Please, educate me. I really just need a better understanding of how this works.

Transfer old email messages to new server

Novice in the tech aspects of email servers here:
Situation: We have an old hosting (and mail) provider that we're moving away from. They are using Mail Enable Enterprise (it's a microsoft server in case it matters and they don't have cPanel). They have 7 GB of our email messages on their server, we also have those messsages downloaded to a machine via IMAP.
We need to: transfer these messages to a new server / provider. I went ahead and asked HostGator tech.support and they are unable to do the import so I am looking for a different provider who can import the messages (and folders) and then just be a good email provider.
Question: Could you suggest a provider (does Google Apps do that?) that let's me import / upload messages to their server OR maybe suggest another way of solving this.
Well, you have IMAP on both sides, right?
Drag'n'drop in your email client will work just fine. Yes, it's a lot of data, and it might take a bit, but it's the simplest thing that might possibly work. It's hard to go wrong with simple things.
There's also imapsync, but then you'll need to already know the login information on both sides, which is something you might not have for every account on the old server.