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explanation of hosting plan features

Features are listed in the approximate order as found on the Neotrope Hosting Plans page

Price per Month and Set-up Fee
All Neotrope Hosting plans are billed in three month increments, in advance. There is a set-up fee to start any new plan account (see hosting plan page for fee per plan level). Billing works like this: if you sign-up on Sept. 15, then we bill you for Sept. 15 through Dec. 15, which is three times the monthly fee for the plan you choose (if you chose the BIZ.plus plan, we would bill you 3 X $29.95). Then, on Dec. 15, we would bill you for the following three months (Dec. 15 through March 15). Monthly automated monthly billing is not available. Paper invoicing for businesses without corporate credit cards is available for an additional $5.00/month (inquire) — your business must be established for more than one year for paper invoicing.

Dedicated I.P.
All hosting plans except value.BIZ have a "dedicated I.P." or Internet Protocol address. See our hosting glossary for more information. A dedicated I.P. is required for e-commerce software using encryption.

Storage
Refers to the amount of storage space you are allocated on the main hard drive of the Web server where your account will reside. This amount is noted in megabytes (MB), and 1MB is about 75 floppy disks worth of space. E-mail accounts also use this storage space, and generally you would want to allow for 10MB for each user. Thus, if you had 10 employees, you would likely need to use the BIZ.plus plan. Additional storage space is available on our à la carte menu. Typical small business sites don't need more than 50MB of space for the actual site content — except e-commerce sites needing more space for applications and storing customer data, product info and photos.

Data Transfer
Refers to the amount of data (your site pages, photos, other files like PDF, and e-mail) allowed to be transfered to/from your virtual hosting plan each month, which is considered a 30-day period. Thus, 8 gigabytes (8GB) of transfer per month would be the total alloted to your account. If you experience "burst bandwidth," which for example might be most of your bandwidth allotment in a short period of time, there will be an extra charge (for instance if you had 6GB of traffic in one weekend due to a special event or promotion). Additional bandwidth fees are found on our à la carte menu. Note that bandwidth overages are ONLY charged if the entire server on which your account resides exceeds a specific amount in one 4-day period; so it's likely that if all other accounts on the same machine had lower than normal traffic, while your domain had higher traffic, you would NOT be charged for an overage. We've not yet had a client exceed their traffic allotment on the new servers installed October 2000.

POP3 E-mail
POP (post office protocol) accounts are e-mail "user accounts," meaning any account on your domain which has it's own log-in name and password such as yourname@yournewdomainname.com. Each POP account can have aliases (such as sales@ and info@ going to the same account), forwards (such as your.name@verizon.net), and auto-responders (vacation out-of-office message, or instant reply-back messages like price lists). POP accounts are created using your domain Admin Control Panel (ACP).

BlueSpin™ Lite E-Commerce
Our Bluespin Lite system was retired May 1, 2002 and replaced with a free solution from PayPal that requires no Merchant Account, no SSL cert, and can be working within a couple of days (you must have checking account and valid credit card). Inquire for more info.

Neotrope NeoCommerce
formerly BlueSpin™ Plus E-Commerce
Our new enhanced database-driven e-commerce system provides product information management through a browser-based admin tool, plus built-in reporting features. Requires SSL cert. For a complete visual tour of this system, click the linnk below.
> Visual Tour of NeoCommerce Shop

SSL Certs
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates. This allows you to have encrypted connections between your Web site and the visitor's browser. Requires dedicated I.P. Neotrope is a Thawte Official Hosting Partner.

Shared SSL
Shared SSL is no longer available.

Site Stats
All of our Neotrope Hosting Plans include powerful graphical site statistics. These reports are updated daily and archived over time and show how many visitors you've had, what they look at, where they came from, and which search engines might have been used to find you. It also shows interesting facts like time of day visitors arrive, pages they leave by, and other valuable marketing and tracking information about your site audience. Summary page shows average info to date.
>See Example Site Stats for Single Month

WebTrends
You can also choose to add monthly advanced reporting tools which contain a wealth of more advanced charts, graphics, and site visitor statistics like global visitor data, type of browsers used, keywords used in search engines and much more. You can choose to have this information loaded onto your site in a private area, e-mailed to you, or sent as a data file for use in other program like MS-Excel. See à la carte menu for WebTrends pricing.

FrontPage 2000 Support
Indicates you have the option to manage your site using Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and FP extensions, via a FP "User Web." Provided as a courtesy, on request, but without technical support on how FP works or debugging of your FP-based projects. (Note: Newest FP2002 extension support not yet available.)

Parked Domains
Allows you to have two domains point at same location. A good example of proper use might be a name like SouthBayRealEstateFirm.com which is descriptive but long, and SBREF.com which is simpler and shorter for e-mail use. So, your main domain in this example would be SBREF.com, and the "parked" domain would be the longer variant. If somebody typed in the long version, they would end up at the main domain, which is the short version. A parked domain is really just an "alias." E-mail support is only available for a primary domain, and not a parked domain (e.g., you could not send e-mail to somebody@longdomainname.xxx). Parked domains required a dedicated I.P. address.

Mprotect™ Image Protection
A simple to use script and account management tool which helps to protect your site images from copying by unauthorized users. Protects in two forms: from people right-mouse-click saving of images (a pop-up announces your images are copyrighted and reproduction is prohibited), and from people linking to your images via a URL, which steals your bandwidth (data transfer). It does not protect from cache copying or screen-capture, but provides a viable "deterrant" from image theft at almost zero cost. Does not require encryption or modification of your images (uses GIF and JPG files). Ideal for artists, photographers, or anybody who wants to protect their images from theft and unauthorized use by others.

NeoSearch™ Site Search Engine
A dynamic search engine which searches only the directories of your site which you specify (so it won't search your cgi-bin, or shopping cart files, for example). This system does "live" searching of your content and automatically finds only live pages. No need to update a pre-built database. This is the same search engine found on this site (see search box top right of all pages on this site). Licensed only for use on our servers.

Chili!Soft ASP
A limited-capability option to run active server pages (ASP) on our Linux-based servers. Runs generally as a page-parsing system to allow running your own custom ASP scriptlets in the same way you might run Perl or PHP. Does NOT have a database application layer, so we cannot create DSNs to connect to a dbase. You must use typical ASP scriptlets (not provided by us) to read/write flat-files. No technical support is provided for ASP beyond providing a list of supported objects and services. We cannot assist with debugging your ASP code, as we don't use ASP at Neotrope.

Tech Support
Neotrope provides all of our Web hosting customers with access to a dedicated customer support site which has detailed step-by-step instructions and close-up images on how to use our Admin Control Panel (ACP), how to set-up e-mail accounts in typical Web browsers, and other related information such as FTP settings and server paths for CGI-scripts. For information not found, or not understood, in this online documentation, we provide support by e-mail and by telephone with selected accounts. Our business accounts also provide toll-free technical support. Support incidents by telephone are limited to two per month, and additional incidents are charged a support incident fee, depending on support required. Free support is NOT provided for teaching you HTML, PHP, Perl, or determining why your HTML does not work properly — beyond providing you with the settings and information specific to our server. You are responsible for knowing how to use FTP, HTML, and the basics of the Internet.

Admin Control Panel (ACP)
All hosting accounts have a dedicated Admin Control Panel (ACP) which allows set-up of user POP accounts, admin accounts, e-mail aliases, and managing MajorDomo "reflector" public mailing lists. The ACP also provides a previous day site traffic report without having to go to the main Site Stat program. Note that the ACP is keyed to your domain name, so it's not available during domain name transfers during the "in-between" period. When your domain is set-up we do provide a "catch-all" e-mail account so nothing is lost during transitions to our server from another provider. You can also create "sub accounts" which allow your employees to upload pages and graphics to their own account area without having access to the main "root" public area of your site.

Secure APOP E-mail
In the same way that a Web browser makes a secure encrypted connection to e-commerce software, APOP allows your mail reader (like Eudora) to connect to your domain mail server. This prevents outsiders (like your ISP) from reading your e-mail. Recommended for e-commerce applications. Requires APOP-compatible mail reader.

Multiple CGI-Bin Support
Our server allows you to place Perl scripts into any public directory on your domain. This greatly simplifies multiple installations of things like random content scripts without having to rename files. You could place random.cgi into the cgi-bin, and another into a folder called "random," and they would both work. Perl scripts can end in either ".pl" or ".cgi" on our servers.

Automated Data Backup
Our IBM and Tivoli incremental network back-up server updates files on our servers once each week, and keeps them intact up to 60 days, or until they are changed on the server. You can also do manual data back-up to a proprietary format from the ACP.

MajorDomo "List Server"
Each hosting plan above value.BIZ includes a limited install version of MajorDomo. This application allows you to have a public mailing discussion list, such as for a project team at your company, where only authorized personnel may post messages which are then sent back out ("reflected") to all members of the list. Archive and summary features not supported. Auto or manual sign-up subscriber approval process.

SMTP YourDomain E-mail
Your outgoing domain e-mail can be sent through mail.yourdomain.com which makes people on the receiving end who may inspect your mail "source" think you have your own Web server, and not just a virtual hosted domain. You can also send e-mail out through your ISP, as many people do.

E-mail Forwarding
All POP e-mail accounts can be set to forward to another real POP account (you can't send an alias to an alias, as it might not always work). So, you could have yourname@yourdomain.xxx forward to yourname@yourisp.com so you'd only have one account to log-in to in order to retrieve e-mail.

User "Sub Sites"
Each POP user created on your domain has the option to have their own Web space, such as www.domain.xxx/~username, which you create in your domain Admin Control Panel. These sub-site users don't have access to your primary public domain area, so they can't accidentally delete your home page. This capability is only provided for your own company, and may NOT be used to sub-lease space on your account to others.

Telnet "Shell" Access
For certain advanced functions like creating .htaccess files, and/or setting special permissions on e-commerce applications, you may need to have "shell" access to your domain. This feature is left "off" by default as a security measure, but is activated on request for a limited window of use as necessary. (Password protected directories can now be managed using the web-based FileManager.)

Reliable Linux/Unix Web Hosting
Neotrope Hosting offers hosting services using the most proven and reliable technologies available, including Linux and Unix, running the Apache server software. We do NOT offer Windows-based Web hosting any longer due to consistent reliability and security problems. Our brand new servers have been running "non-stop" since October 2000 with no crashes or outages.

PERL and PHP Support
Two of the most popular "parsed" Web server languages, used to create and execute applications on the server ("cgi-scripts"). Perl 5 and PHP 4 are both installed on all of our servers. Server side includes (.shtml) support included.

Form Script Pre-installed
All Neotrope Hosting customers have a pre-installed form handler script which has been updated to prevent "spammers" from sending e-mail through your mail server without your knowledge. FormMail, which is used by most hosting companies, has a security hole. Our version has been updated and is secure. Sample forms and instructions are provided in our dedicated Customer Support Site.

Network "Spam" Block
As a service to our customers we have a server-wide "spam block" system in place which we update daily to cut down on the amount of unsolicited e-mail ("spam") sent through our mail servers.

Anonymous FTP Area
If you provide downloads from your site, such as documents or large graphic files, you might want to put them into an FTP area which is more efficient for larger downloads. Additionally, you have the option to create an "incoming" box for file uploads from authorized clients or business project partners (requires creating usernames). May not be used for sharing copyrighted materials like MP3, photos, or other files.

Free Site Promotion
Important Neotrope Hosting Customer Benefit!
All Neotrope Hosting customers can receive one free search engine submission service, on request ($29 value).

Everyone.net Support
Neotrope Hosting provides support for forwarding MX command required by third-party "free e-mail" and "plug-in portal" service providers like Everyone.net. One MX change is free, while additional changes are charged $20.

Secure Datacenter
Our secure network operations center uses top-of-the-line hardware, reliable Linux and Apache software, Cisco Routers, APC server UPS systems, IBM back-up servers, Diesel full-time power back-up, a redundant backbone to the Internet with premium optical cable connections (OC), and 24/7/365 system monitoring. Fully secure Telco-grade facility with video-monitored key-card restricted access to all areas of building. See our datacenter tour for more information.

You may also wish to view our
Frequently Asked Questions

Have a question about our service plan features which is not adequately answered or described here?
E-mail us at: support@neotropehosting.com

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