GENERAL FEATURES
Our servers are built from the ground up to be reliable, super-fast, flexible, and fault-tolerant. We use Intel Pentium Pro & Pentium II CPUs. BEST-HOST™Unix servers run the Red Hat Linux™ operating system. Unix web server software is the latest release of the Apache web server software (see www.apache.org), the #1 choice of servers world-wide (see Survey Results). BEST-HOST™ Windows NT™ servers run Microsoft® Windows NT Server 4.0™ with Internet Information Server 4.0™ & Service Patch 4. Our connections to the Internet include multiple redundant T3 connectivity . Our Network Operations Center (NOC) is monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to maintain near-zero down times.
A static IP address means the IP address (the number of your site) never changes. Most ISP providers use virtual IP addressing, which means the IP number is shared amongst all users on the server. Your site is only browseable via the domain name in such cases. A static IP address provides your site with a never-changing solid address, which allows you to use it when FTPing files, pinging your site, etc. Once in awhile, your static IP may change, but this will not happen unless we are moving your accounts to another server, or during network upgrades. Please review the hosting packages to see which BEST-HOST™ hosting packages come with Static Ip addresses.
Most hosting providers give you a limit on how many visitors can come to your site every month. If your visitors go above this limit, you would be charged a fee for each visitor hit above this. BEST-HOST™ does not believe in punishing our customers for their site's success, especially when it's not really within their control. We keep our connections to the Internet wide enough to handle almost any web site, no matter how popular. We hope every customer has the 'problem' of too many hits to their site, as this is usually the measure of success! If our pipe to the Internet becomes near capacity because of successful busy sites, we just open it wider, as needed. Bandwidth to your site will never be a concern you have to worry about! BEST-HOST allows generous portions of bandwidth with your site every month. Please review the hosting packages to see how much bandwidth is available with each BEST-HOST™ hosting package. Accounts that go over that usage level will be charged a rate of $12 per Gigabyte over their monthly allocation.
An Email alias means if you send mail to webmaster@yourname.com, that address is aliased to whomever needs to receive it. It can be one person or multiple people, however you need it structured. Email forwarding is when you have an email account on another server, like your dial-up ISP. In this case, an address like 'sales@yourname.com' is directed out (forwarded) to another server, so you receive it like your other email.
BEST-HOST™ gives you direct control of your email aliases, forwarding and auto responders. All email can be configured with the click of a few buttons thru your BEST-HOST™ Browser Control Panel. And don't forget, you have unlimited aliases and forwarding, unlike almost every other hosting provider. BEST-HOST™ does not charge you anything, no matter how many you need!
An auto responder is similar to an alias, but it also will send an automatic reply back to the sender. So, when you send email to 'sales@yourname.com', our email server will send an email back to you automatically, containing the text you specified. It also sends the message to sales@yourname.com, so you can respond if it looks like I need to. This is controlled via the BEST-HOST™ Browser Control Panel as well. And again, unlike most of our competition, it's free, and unlimited.
CGI scripts (Common Gateway Interface) are used to provide things like counters, form responses, guest books, and many other things. The difference at BEST-HOST™ is we give you full CGI access, you don't have to wait around for us to 'approve' your scripts, and we don't charge you for installing them! You can write your own, install someone else's, or use one of our pre-installed CGI scripts. And if you create a 'bad' script that uses too much system resources, don't worry, we have a system monitor that will keep your CGI under control. We offer the standard pre-installed CGIs like counters, form processors, and more. You can also install any other CGI script to do things like banner rotators, mailing list managers and anything else you want. You have unlimited use of the CGI bin and you can do as you wish on it. Pre-installed scripts are easily set up with the click of a few buttons thru your BEST-HOST™ Browser Control Panel
When Real Audio first came out, it required an audio server to be installed on the web server. This was because Real Audio wanted to charge for each 'stream', or visitor, that wanted to hear some cool music. Well, the Internet community didn't like that too much, and people started writing competing audio streaming technology that didn't require a server! Well, to compete, Real Audio now does not require a server, and even you can use their tools to create streaming audio over the Internet. It is now more resaonably priced than ever. This is an Add-On feature.
Encryption is very important when taking credit card numbers, or posting personal or confidential information over the Internet. Although it's way more likely for someone to steal your credit card number when you order over the telephone, we still offer you full, unlimited access to our secure server. By using our server's certificate, you save hundreds of dollars because you don't need a certificate of your own. And, we don't charge extra for this, because we're not getting charged for the transactions! We also offer the option to install you own personalized SSL Certificate. Visit other hosting sites and see how much they charge if you want full SSL secure server access! A lot!
Every web site has a telnet/FTP account included, so you can log in with your user name and password, and update your site anytime you like, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can even setup additional FTP accounts for your site if you have multiple people updating subdirectories and you need control over who has access to what. You can telnet in to create and test CGI scripts, or use FTP to transfer your web site files. Individual email (POP3) users can telnet in and use "pine" to check their email.
We setup an anonymous FTP server for your site, so you can publish files or other information, and even accept incoming files anonymously. While other providers may charge for this service, we provide it as a standard feature! This features comes pre-set up, but can be disabled if you require such.
Some providers give you access to your raw log files. Some providers create
a text report that summarizes this information showing how many people visited
you site this week or month, and what the most popular pages were. And some
providers charge you for a graphical representation of these log files, which
is much easier to understand. BEST-HOST™ provides you with full text
and graphical stats, for free! The stats provide a up-to-the-minute statistics
in heavy detail of all the access to your site. BEST-HOST™ also provides
you with access to your actual log file upon request.
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We offer Microsoft® Frontpage™ support, and have had Microsoft® visit our site to verify our Frontpage™ Extension support! We offer Frontpage™ to you, with zero setup fees or monthly storage fees, as a service that helps differentiate us from our competitors. While Frontpage™ does take up additional space and we must configure Frontpage™ for you to use on our server, we believe it's worth the trouble, because Frontpage™ makes designing a full-featured web site pretty easy compared to hand-coding this stuff! Which means our customer's that want to use Frontpage will probably value this feature a lot. Lastest versions editions supported. Don't forget, we offer Frontpage™ extensions at no extra charge upon request!
We again give you full control over setting up password protected directories, and what kind of error messages it displays. You can set up a password protected directory that only you or your family can view, like family photos! This is an important feature if you are setting up a membership site, and only want to allow visitors with valid passwords to enter a specific part of your site. Once again, this feature is easily set up thru the BEST-HOST™ Browser Control Panel.
We support various languages for CGI and database development. Perl is the dominant language for writing CGI scripts (Version 5.04x installed), MySQL is a relational database system. BEST-HOST™ supports most standard languages, like HTML, VRML, Java, C++, TCL,Python, JavaScript, PHP3.
Server Side Includes are special HTML files that get read and processed by the server before being transmitted to your browser. They usually have an extension of .shtml instead of .html. When the file is read in, the server searches for any commands it recognizes, and does things like search-and-replace, file insertion, or execute a CGI. The output of any SSI command is merged into the HTML page, and then delivered to your browser. It is similar to including Javascript, but is not browser dependant, and can do many things that are specific to server functions.
You have all the control over your website and features right in front of you. You do not have to wait for our Support Team to set up an email account or auto responder for you. Just log in to your Control Panel thru any browser, with your current username and password, and manipulate your entire account. Setup password protected directories, check your stats, create a user FTP login, utilize the preinstalled CGI scripts, change your password, and even block out mail from another place this is spamming you :)
We are proud to announce the availability off Web-Store 4.0 to the BEST-HOST™ package. Web-Store 4.0™ is available upon request at a low additional charge.
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The Internic is the official keeper of domain names in the .com, .net, .org,
.gov, and .edu top level domains. They process, approve, and deny the
registration of these domains, and they started charging a small fee for
doing so, in a futile attempt to slow down the 'gobbling' up of every cool
domain name under the sun. They currently charge $70 total for the first
two years, and $35 per year after that. This fee covers a new registration,
and an unlimited number of transfers between web providers. If your domain
name changes hands, then it is considered to be deleted by the old owner,
and newly registered by the new owner, which again must pay the $70 for the
first two years. It also covers updates to the contact database, which stores
the names and addresses of domain owners. They will bill you separately from
us, which means you'll receive a bill from them for $70 if you register a
new domain, and a separate invoice from us for the hosting services we
provide. If you are simply transferring a domain from another web hosting
service to BEST-HOST™ there is no InterNIC fee.
We also accept all foreign globally viable domain names.
For example:
You will have to register these with the foreign NIC service in your country,
for we cannot be expected to speak all these languages. However, we will
supply you with all the information that you need to register the domain
name. Here is a list of foreign domain registers that you may check pricing
and registration info with:
Foreign Domain Name Registration Sites