General Questions Domain Name Questions Disk Storage and Traffic Our Network, Hardware and Software Email Facilities FTP and FrontPage CGI Scripts and Programs E-Commerce Features Database Support Technical Support and Resources

We bill you every three months in advance.   You can pay by Cheque, Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), PayPal or credit card (MasterCard or VISA).

No, you will not have to pay any setup fees when you upgrade - you simply pay the new monthly rate.  However, if you downgrade your hosting plan then there is a one-off charge of AU$16.50 to cover our costs.

We perform weekly tape backups of all servers for your protection.

Yes, we do.  In a nutshell, your site must be legal and must not encourage illegal behaviour.  It must not contain any obscene, threatening or hateful material.  Examples of unacceptable content include pornography, pirated software, materials related to hacking, and nudity.  For more information please refer to our Terms and Conditions.

No. In fact, we have a strict anti-spam policy. Please refer to our Terms and Conditions for more information.

Absolutely.  The Internet is the fastest growing medium in history, and we highly encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities it has to offer.

No.  You will need to gain access to the Internet through a local Internet Service Provider.  Once you have access to the Internet, you will be able to manage your web site on our servers from wherever you are in the world.  You can manage files via FTP or our Control Panel.

Not long at all. New accounts are generally set up well within 12 hours from the time we receive your order. Once your account is set up, we will send you an email to let you know your account details and login information. If you are using FTP or our Control Panel to upload your site, you can begin uploading files to your new web site as soon as you receive your account details. You will be given a temporary URL to access your site via the web prior to the completion of your domain name registration/transfer. If you are using FrontPage to upload your site, you will need to wait until your domain name has been registered or transferred before you can publish your site - that usually takes a day or two.

Yes.  We generate daily statistical data about your site's traffic.  A Windows-based report will include information about visitors, page views, file accesses, referrers, browsers used by your visitors, platforms used by your visitors, visitors' hosts, visitors' top-level domains, and the most common entry and exit pages.  These reports are among the most detailed and useful around, but you will also have access to your raw log files in case you want to examine the data further. 

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We allocate generous amounts of disk storage space for your use. To give you an idea of how much space you will need, you can store over 250 average webpages (graphics and all) within 10Mb. Obviously sites utilizing databases and the like will require more space. 

Of course this varies, but as a guide, the average site requires about 500 Mb of data transfer each month.  The average web page (graphics and all) is about 30 Kb.  If your site is particularly graphics-intensive or if you offer files for download you will most likely find that your monthly transfer will be much higher than average. 

Extra disk space can be purchased by arrangement at our usual excess disk space charges. Please see our Price List for details. Another option is to upgrade your account. Upgrades can be performed at any time. There are no upgrade setup fees - you are simply charged the higher monthly rate from the date of the upgrade.

In the event that you exceed your traffic allowance, we can offer you a 1GB, 5GB or 10GB upgrade that you can take up for one month, one quarter or one year. There is a Setup fee of AU$16.50 in this case plus the cost of the additional bandwidth. Please see our Price List for price details. 

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Our Linux based Servers are powered by Enterprise Class hardware running on Xeon E3-1240 Quad core (four by 3.33GHz) CPU processors, 8-12GB DDR3 RAM and RAID-10 storage for redundancy ensuring continuous and reliable delivery serving thousands of pages and scripts per minute. We run CentOS v7 x86 an Enterprise Class operating system with up to date Kernel and security patches to preserve and protect our customers’ data.  You can rest assured that we will always upgrade our equipment as necessary to keep your site running quickly and reliably. All of our plans include the cPanel control panel for easy web site management.

It sure will!  All servers are fed from a multi-homed OC192 super high speed backbone connection using top quality components from Cisco Systems. Our OC192 backbone is a fiberoptic Internet connection. This means that your connection will be at 10.0 Gb/s, whereas the average modem transfers at 56 Kb/s. That's a 170,000 fold difference!  To put it another way, an OC192 is equivalent to over 6,200 T1's, or over 200 T3's. That's a lot of bandwidth!

Our facility has full backup power including a backup generator in case of extended power outages.  The center is monitored 24 hours a day by a comprehensive security system supplemented by video surveillance equipment.  All servers are fed with conditioned UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) power that will run if utility power fails.  The UPS power subsystem is N+1 redundant with instantaneous failover in case the primary UPS fails.  In the event of an extended power outage, an on-site diesel generator can run indefinitely.  The generator is regularly tested to ensure that it will continue to function in the event of an emergency.

Our servers are located in Texas, USA and Brisbane, Australia.

We have a 99.9% uptime track record so in most months you can expect 100% uptime.

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You get at least five fully featured email accounts with your site (depending on which hosting package you choose).  Each email account will have its own address under your domain (e.g. you@yourname.com.au).  If you like, you can setup your account to have your email forwarded to another email account anywhere on the web.  We set up your main email account so that any mail sent to an unrecognised user at your domain is delivered to your main email address.  This can be very useful because it means you can use many different email aliases without actually having to set them up explicitly. You can also give any email account an unlimited number of email aliases so that when mail is sent to, say, an_alias@yourname.com.au then you will receive the email at, say, colleague@yourname.com.au (a real mailbox).

Yes.  Our WebMail system allows you to access your POP accounts through an easy-to-use browser-based interface.  No configuration is required, which makes it a perfect tool for people who need to access their POP accounts while travelling.  We provide comprehensive instructions on setting up your mail software to retrieve messages from your POP accounts.  Our customer support team is also available to assist if you run into problems while setting this up.

Our hosting plans come with at least 10 (to 100) Mailman subscribable mailing lists with up to 1,000 subscribers each.

Mailman is a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Mailman via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintainance. Once a list is set up, virtually all operations can be performed remotely, requiring no intervention upon the postmaster of the list site.

You can have unlimited number of virtual e-mail addresses. Virtual addresses are not the POP Mail Box type, but they can be used to redirect mail to a real mail box.

Autoresponders are a great marketing tool and can save you time answering common questions.  You can set up an autoresponder so that when a message is sent to, say, info@yourname.com, then your pre-written message is automatically returned to the sender.  All our hosting packages allow you to set up an unlimited number of autoresponders.

Yes, you can use IMAP or POP to access your mail on our servers. One of our two Webmail options is SquirrelMail, a PHP4-based Web email client. It includes built-in pure PHP support for IMAP and SMTP, and renders all pages in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It also has MIME support, folder manipulation, etc.

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This is perhaps one of the more intimidating tasks for first-time site builders.  It sounds hard but it is actually very easy. You can upload files using the web5star Control Panel, or you can use any FTP software. FrontPage users can choose to use FrontPage to publish their sites in one easy step. Our Customer Service Center contains comprehensive guides to uploading and maintaining your site.

You will have access to your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so you can work on your site whenever you want to.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a secure replacement for telnet.  Many users of telnet. rlogin, ftp, and other such programs might not realize that their password is transmitted across the internet unencrypted, but it is. SSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other network-level attacks.  Additionally, SSH provides a myriad of secure tunneling capabilities, as well as a variety of authentication methods.  All that you need, to use SSH on our servers, is telnet access and appropriate software on your local machine.

Yes, we do. Our servers support Microsoft FrontPage 97/98/2000/2002 Extensions.  The extensions are free.  You will be asked whether you want them installed on your site at the time you place your order.

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Sure you can.  It is a great way to make your site more interactive.  All hosting accounts on our servers come with a private CGI Bin.

Depending on the type of hosting account, there are a number of preinstalled CGI scripts available in our cgi-bin directory. The scripts we provide include Counter, CgieMail, FormMail, Simple and Advance Guestbooks, PHPBB2, Entropy Banner, Entropy Search, Java Countdown, Java Clock Random Html Generator, and Simple Cgi Wrapper. In addition, we offer "Fantastico", a CGI Script Installer with a great number of other scripts (not available in our Hello World plan). Please refer to our Features page for additional deails.

Our servers support Perl V5.8.8, PHP V5.2.13 and Java applets (though not Java servlets).

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Yes! All of our hosting plans are eCommerce enable. The most popular Shopping Cart is osCommerce. osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved.

osCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server.

With no restrictions or special requirements, osCommerce is able to run on our PHP enabled web server under the Linux operating system environment.

Administration / Backend Functionality

• Supports unlimited products and categories
• Products-to-categories structure
• Categories-to-categories structure
• Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
• Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
• Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation (MS3)
• Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
• Easily backup and restore the database
• Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
• Statistics for products and customers
• Multilingual support
• Multicurrency support
• Automatically update currency exchange rates
• Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
• Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics

• All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
• Customers can view their order history and order statuses
• Customers can maintain their accounts
• Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
• Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
• Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
• Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
• Forseen checkout procedure
• Secure transactions with SSL
• Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
• Global and per-category bestseller lists
• Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
• Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation

• Dynamic product attributes relationship
• HTML based product descriptions
• Automated display of specials
• Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
• Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters

• Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
• Accept numerous online payment processing (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
• Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis

• Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
• Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
• Free shipping based on amount and destination
• Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis

• Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
• Set different tax rates for different products
• Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis

For more information on osCommerce please refer to the osCommerce web site.

GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is an OpenPGP compliant application which enables you to encrypt data on your web site.  It is compatible with PGP  5.x and has very similar functionality.

If you intend to receive sensitive information over the web, SSL access alone does not guarantee the safety of your data.  SSL keeps the information safe as it travels to your web site, but does not provide any protection once the data arrives.  GPG can be used to immediately encrypt the data when it arrives at your web site - you only decrypt it once you have downloaded it to your hard drive.  That gives you peace of mind knowing that the information your customers enter into your secure form will be safe all the way across the web.

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Yes, we provide professional, responsive customer service via email 7 days a week.  We pride ourselves on delivering quality customer service.  You will receive effective and prompt answers to your questions.  Our strength in this area is one of the reasons we have an exceptional customer loyalty rate.

All services and facilities provided via our Control Panel are documented either via our HELP menu option (cPanel Documentation) or, for third party software, via their respectives information web sites.

We guarantee to respond to technical support queries within 12 hours, but we usually respond in well under 6 hours.  You will find our technical support staff helpful and responsive.  Our on-line customer support is provided via e-mail.

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