Monthly price
Our low monthly price is all you pay for Web hosting and e-mail service. There are no setup fees and monthly fee is all you'll pay for normal usage. If you choose to prepay annually, you'll receive a discount. (There's no risk you can cancel at any time and receive a refund for the unused months of the prepayment.)

Contract Length
We don't force you to commit to a fixed contract length of several months or a year, like many companies. You can cancel our service at any time, however once you've started a new month you will be charged for that whole month.

Disk space
Disk space is the amount of space taken up by your Web site files, e-mail messages, databases, Web logs, and other files on our servers. An average Web site uses less than 100 MB (0.1 GB). Even our least expensive plan includes three times that, so you'll have plenty of room to grow. If you ever need more, you can upgrade to a larger plan for a small extra cost. (We'll warn you by e-mail if you start using more disk space than is included in your plan you won't be taken by surprise by any extra fees.)

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred by our servers for your account, per month. The more visitors your Web site has, and the larger your files are, the more bandwidth you'll use. Every time someone views one of your Web pages or sends you an e-mail message, a certain amount of data is sent over our network connections. For example, if a Web page and its associated images take up 50 KB of disk space, and the page is viewed 20,000 times in a month, that would use about 1 GB (1 gigabyte, which is 1,000 MB or 1,000,000 KB). If you have a small- or medium-sized Web site, and you don't expect your users to download or view large files such as software programs, MP3 files, or video movies, you'll almost certainly use less than 1 GB per month. Even our least expensive plan includes five times that, so you'll have plenty. If your site gets very busy and you need more bandwidth than your plan includes, you can upgrade to a larger plan for a small extra cost. (We'll warn you by e-mail if you start using more bandwidth than is included in your plan you won't be taken by surprise by any extra fees.)

POP mailboxes
A POP mailbox is simply a standard e-mail mailbox. With a POP mailbox, your messages will wait on our server until you read them using a standard mail program on your computer, such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, or Netscape Communicator, or by using our Webmail system. You'll normally use one POP mailbox for each person who receives e-mail. For example, if your domain name is "example.com", and two people George and Stacey will be reading e-mail, you will probably use two POP e-mail mailboxes, "george@example.com" and "stacey@example.com". If you need more POP mailboxes than your plan includes, you can upgrade to a larger plan, or you can pay a small extra fee for additional mailboxes you use, as shown under optional extras above.

E-mail forwarding aliases
An e-mail forwarding alias is an extra e-mail address that simply forwards mail to another address. The other address might be a POP mailbox on our servers, or a mailbox on another server such as an AOL mailbox. For example, if your domain name is "example.com", you could set up an extra e-mail address named "sales@example.com" that forwards mail to both "george@example.com" and "example@aol.com". These types of addresses are called aliases because they don't really provide new, separate mailboxes: instead, they provide extra custom addresses that forward mail to one or more real mailboxes elsewhere.

Webmail access
You can use our Webmail system to send and receive e-mail messages anywhere that you have access to a Web browser. It's full-featured (including address books, spell checking, and more) but simple to use. Webmail is great for checking your mail from an Internet cafe on vacation. Some people even use it as the only way they read e-mail because they don't want to bother setting up a normal e-mail program.

E-mail spam filtering
You can optionally turn on spam filtering for any e-mail address. Our system will then reject mail from servers that are used mainly by spammers. This eliminates a great deal of the spam you would otherwise receive. As an extra step, we also tag all incoming messages with SpamAssassin, allowing advanced users to perform additional spam filtering in their own mail program.

E-mail autoresponders
You can add an autoresponder to any e-mail address you create. Some people use this to automatically send a reply like "I'm hiking in Antarctica until December 26" when they're out of the office on vacation, and some businesses use this feature to set up a response such as "We have received your message and will respond within 24 hours" for sales e-mail addresses. Our autoresponders are smarter than most: you can even tell them to automatically stop sending a response after a certain number of days you won't have to remember to turn it off when you get back from a trip.

Mailing lists
Our service allows you to create mailing lists, which are special e-mail addresses that forward mail to many recipients. A mailing list can be used for group discussion lists (where everyone on the list can send a message to everyone else) or announcement lists (where only the list owner can send messages).

Recipients can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, either by visiting a Web page or by sending an e-mail message to a special address. Messages can be archived so they can be viewed later on the Web. Group discussion lists can be "moderated", allowing you to review and approve each message. This gives you the opportunity to reject spam and other inappropriate content before your subscribers see it. User-initiated subscriptions are automatically confirmed by the Mailman software (this process is sometimes called "double opt-in"), protecting you against false spam accusations.

You can create private lists so that people can't subscribe without your approval. Subscribers can choose to receive messages grouped together in "digest" form, cutting down on the number of messages they receive. Much of the routine work involved in running a mailing list (such as unsubscribing invalid addresses) is automatically handled for you. Although Mailman is often considered a complicated program to set up, our simple "wizard" allows you to get started right away by answering a few easy questions.

Mailing list limits
There are three limits on mailing lists: the total number of lists you can use, the number of subscribers that can be on a list, and the total number of messages delivered per month. The limits are shown above. The number of subscribers is the maximum number of subscribers for each list. The number of message deliveries is simply the number of subscribers multiplied by the number of messages sent. For example, an announcement list with 500 subscribers and one message sent every five days would result in about 3,000 deliveries per month (500 subscribers x 6 messages per month). Similarly, a group discussion list with 100 subscribers and five messages sent per day would be about 15,000 message deliveries per month (100 subscribers x 5 messages x 30 days).

(A frequent question we receive about mailing lists is "Can I use a mailing list to send unsolicited bulk e-mail?" The answer is no, you cannot; we have an extremely strict anti-spam policy that prohibits sending any unsolicited mail.)

Web site statistics
Once your Web site is running, you'll want to know how many people are visiting your site. We provide the AWStats Web statistics program preinstalled for all accounts you can use it to see how many people have viewed your Web site, which pages are most popular, what search phrases people use to find your site, which pages visitors came from, which countries your visitors are in, and more. If you prefer to use your own Web statistics program, the "raw" Web server logs are also available to you at no extra charge.

Subdomains
Support for subdomains gives you the ability to display different Web sites to visitors who type custom domain names. For example, if your domain name is "example.com", you could display a different Web site to people who visit "sales.example.com" instead of "www.example.com". Another use of subdomains is creating personal Web sites for family members, such as "george.example.com" and "stacey.example.com". Our subdomain feature is easy to use: just create a new folder at the top level of your Web site and that folder becomes a subdomain. You can create a subdomain like "sales.example.com" by simply creating a folder named "sales". Our plans include subdomains that work the moment you create the folder and if you need more they can be purchased. (If you're using Microsoft FrontPage to publish your site, some additional setup on both your end and our end may be required to make the full FrontPage functionality, such as guestbooks and counters, work properly in the subdomain.)

MySQL databases
Our plans include MySQL database support, allowing you to install scripts that can quickly manipulate and store large amounts of data. As an example, the popular phpBB community bulletin board software uses MySQL, and works well with our servers. As a general rule, each separate database script you use will require a separate MySQL database, although some scripts might be able to share databases.

Perl CGI script support
All our hosting plans support CGI scripts written in Perl, meaning you can use a wide variety of Web site customization scripts written by other people, or create scripts yourself.

PHP script support
All our hosting plans support PHP 4 and PHP 5 scripts (you can choose which version you want and change it at any time, or even use different versions for different scripts). As with our support for Perl CGI scripts, this allows you to use a wide variety of scripts written by other people, or create scripts yourself.

Script CPU time
Our servers run scripts for many Web sites, so your scripts can't use the full resources of a server all the time. That should be okay, because your Web site probably won't need to run scripts all the time (it will be idle between visitors). The numbers shown here are the average limits of what you can use. For example, if you have a script that takes half a second to run, and that script runs once every 100 seconds, then that script is using an average of 0.5% of the available "CPU time" (of a Xeon processor running at 2.4 GHz or faster). Many well-written scripts run in just a fraction of a second: if a script takes 0.03 seconds and runs 1200 times an hour, that would be 1% (because it uses a total of 36 seconds of CPU time every 3600 seconds). It's rare for a site to use more than 1% of available CPU time. In our experience, only very busy sites, or sites with extremely resource-intensive scripts, use more.

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