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 connection.

For example, if a Web page and its associated images take up 50 KB of disk space, and that page is viewed 20,000 times in a month, that would use about 1 GB of bandwidth (1 gigabyte, which is 1,000 MB or 1,000,000 KB).

On our Silver plan, that's enough to allow five million people a month to view the page you're reading now. That would be a very busy site; if 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 much less bandwidth than we include in even our most basic plan.

If you ever need more bandwidth because you do have an extremely busy site, we can deliver that, too. For example, our Platinum hosting plan includes enough bandwidth to allow over 25 million people to view this page. That's five times as much bandwidth for less than $20 a month. You can switch plans at any time with no penalty, so you know you won't outgrow the bandwidth of our service.

No. We never charge any kind of setup fee.

No. With our service, domain name registration is included in your monthly fee. You won't receive a bill from Network Solutions or anyone else.

No. We renew your domain name at no charge each year as long as we continue to host your Web site.

There is no charge to cancel your Web hosting service, and you can do so at any time — you aren't locked into a fixed-term contract. (Even if you choose to prepay your hosting fees for a year, you receive a refund for the unused portion if you cancel.)

Keep in mind that if you switch to another Web hosting company and you want to keep using the free domain name we registered or renewed for you, we'll switch your account to our "domain name only" plan and charge you a prorated amount for the remainder of the year.

For example, if you canceled a .com domain after nine months of Web hosting, and you wanted to keep the domain name for use with another Web hosting company, we would charge you $5.00 (one-quarter of the $20.00 annual "domain name only" fee) to cover your use of the domain name until it expires in three months' time.

The charge only applies if you want to keep the domain name. If you decide you want to stop using the domain name completely, there is no fee at all (unless you cancel three or more separate Web hosting accounts after using them for less than 60 days, in which case we reserve the right to charge the "domain name only" registration fees mentioned above to cover the unusual costs involved).

Most of our customers pay with a credit card. We accept VISA, Mastercard, American Express and Discover (Novus) cards. If you have one of these cards, you can sign up online and have your account set up within one business hour.

We also accept payment in advance (in six month or one year increments) by check or money order in US dollars, drawn on a US bank account. Choose "Advance Payment by Check or Money Order" as your payment method on the signup form, then follow the instructions on the final page to send in your payment. We will activate your account and register the domain name when we receive the payment.

Yes, we offer free support to help you transfer your files to our servers, set up your e-mail program, and similar tasks that relate to our servers. Like all Web hosting companies, we can't offer free help to design your Web site, troubleshoot Web design or layout problems, or provide programming assistance with CGI scripts.

Our friendly customer support is not backlogged like many other companies. We almost always reply to e-mailed questions within two business hours or less.

Yes, you do: We register it in your name. This means that if you cancel our Web hosting service, and you want to use your domain name at another Web hosting company, you can take your domain name with you without any ownership hassles (our standard, inexpensive "domain name only" registration fees apply).

Some other Web hosting and domain registration companies list themselves as the owner of the domain name, which can lead to problems if you ever want to move your domain name. We don't do that.

No, we don't. (Of course, you're welcome to display advertising on your pages if you wish.)

Our company has been in business since 1991, and is located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We're a small enough company that you'll get personalized attention, but we're not too small — we have thousands of customers. You can count on us to be here when you need us.

Other Web hosting services force you to deal with a separate company to register the domain name. Figuring out the technical side of things (such as DNS servers) and coordinating between the two companies can be confusing and frustrating.

To sign up for a new domain name and Web hosting with us, you simply fill out a single signup form that doesn't ask for any technical information, and we handle everything else.

We use Apache Web server software, running on reliable Linux servers. However, you don't need to know any Linux commands to use our service; you'll upload files using a standard FTP program or Microsoft FrontPage, and change your account settings using your Web browser.

Our servers are housed in a secure data center with battery backup and emergency generators able to withstand power outages of at least one week. The data center is staffed 24 hours a day so that any network problems are dealt with quickly. To provide stable, uninterrupted service, we only use servers with RAID disk arrays. Offsite backups are made daily.

Our network connectivity includes multiple redundant Gigabit Ethernet connections to the MAE-WEST interchange point in Silicon Valley, giving direct access to every major North American Internet backbone — our connection speed is unsurpassed.

We're so sure our service is reliable that we guarantee 99.9% uptime or better. If your Web site is not available to the public at least 99.9% of the time in any given month, or if you're dissatisfied in any other way, just let us know and we'll promptly give you a full credit for the problem, with no quibbling.

Finally, you can count on us to be here to serve you in the future: we've been in business since 1991, and we've been on the Internet since 1994. (In fact, we were operating Web sites before yahoo.com and amazon.com existed!)

No. You'll still need to maintain an account with the company that provides your Internet connection over a modem, cable Internet service, or DSL connection. Our service is an add-on that gives you a new, reliable Web site and permanent, memorable e-mail addresses so that your online presence does not rely on the whims of your ISP.

If you sign up for a brand new domain name, it usually takes less than an hour until the entire Internet can access your Web site, although in rare cases it may take as long as 48 hours. (The exact time depends on the domain name registry and other factors not under our control.)

Transfers of existing domain names (previously registered elsewhere) can take several days, depending on how quickly your old domain name registrar transfers the domain name to us. We don't begin charging you until your Web site is successfully transferred to our servers.

In either case, of course, we'll track your domain name status and let you know as soon as it is fully working.

We handle the technical side of "hosting" your Web site, but we don't create the text or graphic design of the Web pages that will go on your site — the content is up to you.

One way to create your site is by using a Web design program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, or Netscape Composer. It's even possible to create HTML files using a text editor such as Notepad if you're interested in learning how HTML works.

Our service makes it easy to receive e-mail. For each e-mail address, you can either store the incoming messages in your mailbox on our server (called a "POP mailbox") until you read them using an e-mail program such as Outlook Express, Eudora, or our Webmail Web pages; or forward the messages to an existing mailbox you have somewhere else, such as an address @aol.com.

For example, if your domain name is www.example.com, you could create these POP mailboxes:

sales@example.com
info@example.com
billing@example.com
john@example.com
susan@example.com

You could also create forwarding addresses, like this:

• events@example.com forwards to john@example.com and susan@example.com
• roger@example.com forwards to example@hotmail.com
• any unknown address @example.com forwards to john@example.com and example@yahoo.com

Mail sent to any of those addresses would be immediately forwarded to the other addresses shown. For example, mail to roger@example.com would immediately be sent to example@hotmail.com, and Roger would read it the same way as he would read his other hotmail.com mail, with no special mail program needed.

The system is completely flexible; you can mix and match POP mailboxes and forwarding addresses as you wish, and change them at any time using your account management page.

We include 50 POP mailboxes and 200 forwarding addresses with our Silver plan (other plans include more).

If you're already using an SMTP e-mail program, such as Microsoft Outlook, Qualcomm Eudora, or Netscape Communicator, you can simply duplicate the settings of a working "account" that's already listed in your mail program and change the "From" e-mail address as appropriate: for example, you might change the "From" address to "susan@example.com". Of course, our account management pages have all the details if you need to create an account "from scratch".

If you use America Online, you can download and use a program such as Outlook Express to send and receive e-mail using our SMTP and POP mail servers. If you're new to these programs, don't worry — just drop us a line and we'll tell you exactly what to type and where.

If you don't want to bother with a normal e-mail program, you can use our Webmail system to send and receive messages instead. It's full-featured (including address books, spell checking, and more) but simple to use, and you can send and receive mail from anywhere you have access to a Web browser.

Yes. You can check a box on your account control panel to turn on spam filtering for any e-mail address. Our system will then reject mail from servers that are used mainly by spammers. We've found that this can eliminate a great deal of the spam our users would otherwise receive.

Yes. We support CGI scripts written in Perl, meaning you can use a wide variety of scripts written by other people, or create scripts yourself.

We also provide two useful CGI scripts that are preinstalled for all our customers and require no additional setup:

Yes, we have PHP 4.3.10 and PHP 5.2.0 installed, and you can easily choose which version to use with our online control panel.

Yes, our Silver Web hosting plan includes five MySQL databases.

Our Web hosting accounts include shell access via telnet and SSH. This allows advanced users to harness the power of the Unix command line to setup CGI scripts and perform similar tasks.

Yes. We provide FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions for Unix, meaning we support almost all features of FrontPage 98, FrontPage 2000, FrontPage 2002, and FrontPage 2003 with Server Extensions at no extra charge. You can publish your Web site from directly within FrontPage and take advantage of FrontPage features such as counters, feedback forms, and site search.

(We do not offer "advanced FrontPage hosting", which would allow you to connect your Web site to a database from within FrontPage. Not many people need "advanced FrontPage hosting" with the extra database features; if you're not sure whether you need it or not, you almost certainly don't. Also, keep in mind that because our servers use the reliable Linux operating system, rather than Windows, we don't offer what Microsoft calls SharePoint Services, which FrontPage 2003 can use to access an extra set of advanced options only available on Windows servers. Again, very few people need these for designing a normal site.)

Yes.

Yes. As long as the video or audio item is in the form of a normal file that doesn't require a special "streaming media server" (which is normally required only to broadcast live events), it will work. In general, if it plays from a file on your personal computer, it will play properly from our servers.

Yes, you can create unlimited subdomains at no extra charge.

Subdomains give 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 "robert.example.com" and "mollie.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 instantly becomes a subdomain. You can create a subdomain like "sales.example.com" by simply creating a folder named "sales".

(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.)

Yes. If you're experienced with Apache .htaccess files, you can use them to add password protection to Web pages, control MIME types, change "404 Not Found" messages, or deny pages to certain IP addresses.

We also have a simple checkbox interface that allows you to manage the password-protection feature of .htaccess files. This means you can password-protect directories on your Web site without learning how .htaccess files work.

Yes, we offer SSL security ("https" connections). This feature allows you to display encrypted pages to your customers, and is normally used to collect credit card numbers and other secure information using CGI scripts. You've probably seen SSL security in action when you purchased something online — your Web browser activates the "lock" icon and tells you your connection is secure.