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Table of Contents
We Do WebHosting Right!WebHosting at first glance appears very straight-forward: upload your pages, set up your email accounts, and let it run. And to a degree, this is true. However, as you will see in the remainder of this page, there are many subtleties that can make the difference between a hassle-free experience, and an inconvenience. One little example: all of our websites are accessible without having to prefix the domain with "www.". We hate advertising, and will never force a "Powered by..." link or banner on any paid website. We believe that if you are paying for it, you should control the content (as long as the content follows our acceptable use policy, of course!). Hacking activities are increasing on a daily basis. We do our best to keep up with the latest updates and patches to protect our servers and our customers from these attempts, as well as outages. We also have an announcement email program whereby our customers are notified of any scheduled maintenance, new features, etc... We do support FrontPage with the server-side FrontPage 2000 extensions, but also promote use of other tools such as Flash, DreamWeaver, etc... You can also have your own custom "404 Page not found" page. Back to Top
We Do Customer Support Right!How many times have you called a company, only to be on hold for 20 minutes before "the next available operator" can help you? Most of the time we are aware of any problems before our customers even see them. When you do call, you talk to a live person (or leave a voicemail to be returned by a live person within 24 hours). While we encourage email dialog, we don't force customer support to be email-only. We like talking to you, and we'll do our best to provide a smooth transition to our services, and give you the service and support you need when you need it. Because we're small, every account matters to us. You're not just a number! Back to Top
We Do Internet Connections Right!With the plethora of "Business DSL and Cable" services available, you will see many people offering extremely low-cost services. The truth is, these people are running their websites off this single connection. Their limited upstream bandwidth may be sufficient for very low-usage sites, but what happens when the line goes down? Typical repair times for Cable and DSL are measured in DAYS, not hours. Do you want your site being down for days? Truely dependable, fast network connections cost money. We pay those higher rates to get dependable service. As the saying goes, "You get what you pay for." While many hosting services have "redundant connections to the internet", the truth is that if the link to your allocated IP address goes down (such as a router failure), your site is down. That IP address is only routed through one box. We face the same issue, except that we have can move all our domains to alternate IP addresses and systems, with a maximum propagation down-time of 2 hours. While no system is totally fool-proof and without its drawbacks, we feel our system gives us yet another way to keep our sites up even when faults outside our control would dictate otherwise. Back to Top
We Do Email Right!We hate SPAM with a passion! SPAM is unsolicited commercial email targeted at thousands, if not millions of people by individuals trying to use email as free advertising. We are a proud member of both the ORDB and ORBZ systems, which are filtering services that each incoming email is tested against. We also have our own filter set based on subject lines. These policies does not catch all spam, but help to significantly reduce the unwanted messages that are received. Some ISPs restrict you to a 1 megabyte maximum message size. We allow single messages up to 10 megabytes in length, and a total mailbox size of 15 megabytes. So if you go away on an "unconnected" vacation, you can rest assured that your mail will be waiting for you when you return. We also have a web-based email client, so that you can acces your mail from any browser anywhere. Many of the large ISPs use a few mail servers to handle the thousands of emails that come in to their users. Because these get so busy, many times messages are not always accepted right away. Due to the design of the Internet mail system, mail delivery is reattempted on a fewquent basis, because this happens so often. NOT SO WITH OUR SERVERS! Mail is accepted the first time, 99% of the time. This means less delay for your mail. We also maintain RFC-compliant "Abuse@" addresses for all of our domains, regardless of configuration type. Back to Top
We Do DNS Right!Many, many WebHosting companies do not set up the Domain Naming System records up correctly. These errors may not be immediately apparent, until something breaks down. Have you ever clicked on a link to a website, only to find that your browser just hangs? There's a good chance you may have experienced the results of a DNS error. Our mail server's error logs are loaded with errors in communication with other DNS servers. Many times these errors are simply because the system administrator of the site overlooked something, or simply didn't know the correct syntax and structure. See this link and this one. We know how to set up your DNS so that even if one of our network lines fail, your websites remain alive. (For an excellent freeware DNS analysis tool, check menandmice.com.) Back to Top
We Do Streaming Media Right!Multimedia clips are becoming extremely popular. We provide access to our RealNetworks server for streaming RealAudio files. We also provide a streaming MP3 server for on-demand MP3 content. Want to broadcast live events online? We can help! We support both live streaming RealAudio/RealMedia, as well as ShoutCast's Streaming MP3 server. Contact us for more information. Back to Top
We Do Mailing Lists Right!One-way email broadcast lists and email discussion groups can add to the interactive experience of your website. We can help with these tools, and even custom-design solutions for your exact needs. We support only opt-in lists, and encourage active participation. Our list software handles automatic unsubscriptions, bounce handling, online archives, and lots more! We also provide tools such as HTML filtering, and attachment blocking, so you won't have to worry about someone sending a virus to your list. If you have a list of 10 or 10,000, we can help! Back to Top
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