Glossary of terms

Bandwidth / Transfer / Hits
Any outbound traffic from your web site is considered data transfer. FTP uploads do not count as data transfer. Each time a html file, graphic file or any other element on your web page is loaded, data transfer is generated. Please Read our Service Level Agreement regarding bandwidth.

Disk Storage
Disk storage refers to the amount of server disk storage your account is allocated. This space is used to store your html files, graphics, audio/video files and all other files that make up your web site. Your POP3 emails are not stored in this space. You are allotted an extra 20 MB of space for your mail spool. Should you require additional space for your content you will need to upgrade your account to the next shared package.

Static IP Address
Every shared hosting account can be changed to a static IP address. This means that you can change your account to have its own unique set of numbers (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) specifically assigned to your web space. With the advanced control panel that M8 Solutions uses static ips are only necessary for ssl support. Log into your control panel and change it at anytime.

SSL Ready
SSL Stands for Secure Socket Layer and is the most commonly used method of encrypting and exchanging data securely on the net. This when you see "https://yourdomain.com" vs. "http://yourdomain.com". This is also noted by the small lock symbol in your browser status bar when connecting to a secure site. For SSL you require a static IP address as well as a SSL Certificate. We can purchase and install a certificate for your domain from www.instantssl.com for a low fee of 99$ CDN per year.

Instant Setup
Your account will be setup within 15 minutes of placing your order online. This service is available 24 hours a day 7 days week.

Site Studio Software
Need a free, custom site design? Use our Site Studio software to make a custom web site. There are over 50 built in templates upload your own graphics and you can have a site built in minutes. Try it today!

Email Features

Email Accounts
Each of our shared hosting packages comes with unlimited POP3 email accounts in addition to email forwards and aliases. You have the option to retrieve email directly from POP3 mailboxes on the mail server using an email program such as Eudora, Outlook or Outlook Express. You may also access your mail through the web interface.

Email Aliases / Forwards
Using Email Aliases or forwarders gives you the ability to receive any email at *@youractualdomain.com. Specific email addresses that you want to forward out of your domain to another email account can be accomplished through MonsterControls or by editing your .redirect file within your /home directory. For example you may want to forward all email addressed to sales@youractualdomain.com to an AOL account such as Bob232@aol.com or another POP3 account on your domain bob@youractualdomain.com. The best part about using aliases or forwards is that the person emailing you never knows the mail is being redirected.

Email Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a pre-determined message with information you want automatically sent to anyone who emails a designated email address/mailbox at your domain.

PGP
PGP is a program that adds privacy to your electronic mail that you send through our network. It encrypts your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text.

Mail Lists
You can create multiple mail lists based on your customer's interests. You provide customers an email address they can send an email to and be added to your personalized mailing list. As soon as customers sign on they are sent a friendly welcome message. This is a great way to cost effectively communicate with your customers through monthly newsletters, sales updates or just a friendly hello. Each list can hold 1000 names and a 75kb message can be emailed to all the lists you create.

Technical Support

99.9% Uptime Guarantee
We guarantee that 99.9% of the time that your web site will be accessible via IP address to the world. The IP address is the numerical value equivalent to www.youractualdomain.com. If your web site is not online 99.9% of the time we will refund the percentage of your monthly hosting fees equal to the downtime.

30 Day Money Back Guarantee
If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with M8 Solutions's services we will gladly refund all monthly fees you have paid if you cancel within the first 30 days of signup.

Detailed Online Billing
View your past and current invoices, payments, account history and services online 24 hours a day.

Trouble Ticket System
Built right into your control panel is instant access to our technical support staff 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Anytime you have questions or need help just click on support center and submit a trouble ticket to our staff.

You may also submit trouble tickets via email to support@m8solutions.com, or via the trouble ticket form on this site.

Ecommerce

SSH - Secure Shell
The industry standard for encrypting terminal connections and file transfer over the Internet. Additional indentification proof is required for SSH access.

osCommerce Shopping
The osCommerce shopping cart is a feature packed online shopping cart that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs involved.

Server Side Includes (SSI)
Lets you embed CGI scripts into your web pages. The scripts will execute automatically when the web page is opened.

Password Protected Pages
Protect directories within your web site so that only approved username and password combinations gain access.

PHP
A server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language.

Chat Software

Additional Software

FrontPage 2002
The Microsoft FrontPage 2002 web site creation and management tool gives users everything you need to easily create and manage great web sites. You are required to own and install the FrontPage 98 or 2000 software and on your home system.

Web Based Control Panel (HSPHERE)
Through our partnership with HSPHERE your control panels allows you to perform all aspects of your web site administration. You can add/edit your email redirects and forwards, setup and manage your mailing lists and autoresponders, password protect directories and manage the username/password combinations, download your raw access-logs, manage your site with Site Manager (create, edit and upload files to your web space). You can also change read, write or executable permissions on any of the files or directory in your web site, create MS SQL, mySQL databases, configure DSN's plus much more.

mySQL
A database is a structured collection of data. It may be anything from a simple shopping list to a picture gallery or the vast amounts of information in a corporate network. To add, access and process data stored in a computer database, you need a database management system such as mySQL. Since computers are very good at handling large amounts of data, database management plays a central role in computing, as stand-alone utilities or as parts of other applications.

Wireless Application Protocol Ready (WAP)
Allow your clients and potential customers to view your web site on cellular phones, pages and other wireless devices with Internet access.

Advanced Features

CGI-Bin
Directory setup with special permissions to auto-execute user-defined scripts. CGI is used to accomplish tasks which are not supported by basic HTML such as a hit counter or guest book. You may use this directory to execute any cgi-script you write or ones that are already pre-written for you. The directory is specially designed for scripts that end in *.pl as scripts that end in .cgi will execute from any directory within your web space.

Free Web applications
M8 Solutions provides you with a listing of the most popular and easy to use free Open Source web applications available on the market today. We can help install these for you for a small fee, or you may install them yourself at no charge.

Custom MIME Types
Adds the ability for serving multiple content types such as midi files, special audio formats and others.

perl 5.6.0, C, C++, , Python 1.5.2 and Python 2.1.1 &
Various types of scripting languages / shells that are installed on all M8 Solutions machines.

Custom Error Documents
By placing a file in your main directory called missing.html, you will be able to provide a customized page to any viewer that requests a file with their browser that does not exist on your domain.

Disk Usage Meter
Lets you view real-time statistics on how many MB of disk storage your web site is utilizing. Also breaks down usage to file, directory or entire web site.

Bandwidth Consumption Meter
Lets you view real-time statistics on how many GB of bandwidth your web site is utilizing. Will also show you projections for the week and month.

Website Management

FTP
File Transfer Protocol or the method used to "upload" your web site files to storage space on our network. You have unlimited access to your domain via FTP 24 hours a day to setup, change and manipulate your web site. M8 Solutions's network is compatible with any FTP client you choose to use.

Anonymous FTP
Capability of setting up a public area where anonymous users can upload and download files from your web server.

Domains

Domains Included
Not only can you host your main domain but now host additional domains within your account as well. These domains will have the same features like email, cgi-bin, ability to run scripts, databases, and manage all your domains in your control panel. Each plan provides for free extra domain hosting according to the plan you choose add additional domains for only $2.00 a month.

Parked Domains
The parked domain feature allows you to register a domain that is hosted elsewhere. This creates a DNS zone that will map user's domain to the IP of the external server where the site is hosted.

Sub Domains
You can create unlimited subdomains to your domain. A subdomain is a lower level domain. Domains and subdomains have equal functional capabilities, including web site management, e-mail service, FTP, etc. For example, if your domain name is mydomain.com, entering mysubdomain will make your full subdomain name look like mysubdomain.mydomain.com.

Domain Alias
Domain alias is an extra domain name that points to a 'primary' domain. For example, the owner of the domain company.com can register another domain name, e.g. company.net and have it point to the location of company.com. This means that every Internet user who goes to company.net will land in company.com.

Website Monitoring

Daily Backups
We do daily backups of your sites data and your email spool file. In the event you lose or corrupt any of your data you may request a restore from our technical support department.

Site List Search Engines
Within your control panel you can automatically list your site with the top search engines by your sites keywords, title and meta tags.

Raw Access Logs
These are the text logs showing every hit to your site and what the user downloaded, accessed or viewed. For statistical analysis you can download these to compile on your local machine in programs like MediaHouse LiveStats or other site analysis programs.

Graphical Referrer Logs
This is an extended logging feature that documents where each visitor to your site came from. You will know if they found you through a search engine or a web site link. It will show you the search engines users queried and what keywords or sentences they typed in to find your web site. This is invaluable information when trying to determine if marketing campaigns are paying off.

Webalizer
This is a very powerful tool for graphically tracking visitors to your site. It provides you statistics on how long visitors stay at your site, what pages they visited and the order in which they were visited. It also provides the most popular entry/exit pages, what browsers your visitors use, which countries your site is most popular in and with referrer logs activated it will graphically capture how the user found your web site.

Hardware and Network

Server Hardware
Each shared server is Dual Pentium IV-2GHZ with 1GB of RAM. Our servers are custom built to our needs and spare parts are kept in inventory in case of hardware failure. We keep 10 pre-built machines in inventory at all times ensuring that if the entire server fails we can swap the hard disk into another server and have it back online within 30 minutes.

Server Operating System
Each of our shared servers runs a custom version of Red Hat Linux with Apache Web Server 1.3.23.

Network Connectivity
Your web site will be hosted within a primary data center - This site is fully redundant from the power, air-conditioning and fiber connectivity. TDC-01 has 5 T3 connections to the Internet, each capable of handing 45Mbits of traffic, 2 OC-3 connnections each capable of 155Mbits, and 2 OC-12 connections each capable of 655Mbits of traffic.