Hosting Features

Free Domain Aliases!

Domain aliases allow you to point multiple domain names to the same web hosting package. For e.g. suppose yourdomain.com was the primary domain name for the hosting package and you also wanted to point yourdomain.net (additional TLDs) or yourdomains.com ( mis-spellings) or someothername.com (additional brandnames) to the same hosting package - then you would specify these additional domain names as domain aliases. The important point to note is that the way a domain alias functions - the visitor is not redirected to the primary domain name - the domain name that he or she typed in the browser continues to be displayed as-is through out the visit.

You can add up to 5 Domain Aliases with each hosting package that you purchase. Kindly note that DNS Services are included for the primary domain name only and not for domain aliases.

Domain Access with and without "www"

Our web servers are configured to allow domain access with and without the "www." in front of the domain name i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com will both work perfectly.

FTP Features

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer files between machines with widely different operating systems. With our hosting packages, you can use any FTP based client to upload data / content to the web space included in your hosting package.

Unlike some hosting companies which restrict the amount of data that you can upload and download on a daily basis, with ALL our hosting packages - you get the ability to upload and download data 24x7, unlimited number of times. Add to this, you get the ability to add up to 100 FTP users. Using the FTP Manager in the hosting control panel you can do all of the following:

• Add / Delete FTP Users
• Restrict Access of a FTP User to a particular folder
• Set Disk Quota Limitations on a per FTP User Basis
• Change Passwords
• Suspend / unsuspend access of FTP Users

You are also given access to the Complete Log of Actions performed by each user i.e. you can find out which FTP user connected from what IP Address, at what time, and uploaded / modified / deleted which all files.

Private Folder for Storing Sensitive Data

A private folder is included with every hosting package which allows you to store data and files securely and quickly via FTP. This folder is outside your web directory i.e. not directly exposed on the internet via HTTP and has special security permissions such that no user, other than the FTP Users specified by you, has read or write access to the data in this folder. By creating sub-folders within this private folder and restricting Access of FTP Users to particular sub-folders, you can share files securely and reduce or eliminate the need to copy data on disks for overnight delivery, thus saving both time and money. Our FTP servers allow you to resume partial transfers where they left off, so even if you get disconnected or end a session, you can always reconnect and resume the transfer where you left off at a later date or time.

Web Traffic Reporting

A powerful web traffic reporting tool is included within your control panel. This tool generates web based reports that provide insightful information about the users visiting your website, such as, the number of unique visitors, no of hits, avg duration spent by each user on your website, most viewed entry and exit pages, search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site etc.

Using the Web Statistics Manager in the control panel, you have the:

• ability to password protect your web based traffic reports to ensure that only authorised people have access to this data
• option to automatically delete web log files after generating the web based traffic reports to save disk space
• ability to disable the generation of the web traffic reports
• ability to customize your web traffic reports by setting the following parameters

  • Skip Hosts - Specify hosts / IP addresses from which all data (hits/page views etc), should not be taken into consideration while generating statistics
  • Skip Files - Specify filenames / directories which should be ignored while generating statistics
  • Only Files - This is the opposite of the 'Skip Files' option. The option is used to include in stats, only accesses to URLs that match the specified filenames / directories
  • Not Page List - List of file extensions which must be counted as 'Hit only' and not as a 'Page View'

Password Protect your Directories

Directory Protection is an easy-to-use web based tool included in the control panel that allows you create as many password protected areas as you want without requiring any programming. This allows you to store sensitive material online and give browser based access to such content / data to authorized users only. A password dialogue box will automatically popup in the browser when an attempt is made to access the password protected directory or any of its sub-directories.

Your Own Backup Policy Manager

The Backup Manager provides comprehensive and cost effective protection by allowing you to define highly flexible backup policies that will protect their critical data. The web-based backup policy manager provides an easy-to-use one-step wizard to add each policy.

You just needs to follow the steps mentioned below:

• select the directory for which the policy is being created
  this could be the entire website directory, a sub-folder or the database directory - depending on what critical data you wants to backup
• specify the frequency of the backup
  daily / weekly / monthly
• specify the number of backup files to keep
  backup archives are rotated 'no of backlogs' times before being deleted

You are allowed to add as many policies as you want. This allows you to creatively structure any kind of backup policy that you require.

For e.g. you can add one policy which takes a backup of the entire website on a daily basis, with 5 backlogs. Another policy, which takes a backup of the entire website on a weekly basis, with 4 backlogs, and yet another policy which takes a backup of the entire website on a monthly basis, with 6 backlogs.

With the above set of policies, you have created a comprehensive backup plan with multiple restore points for his website. You can roll back to a point in the last 5 days, or restore a backup which was taken every week for the last whole month, or a backup that was taken monthly upto 6 months ago.

Raw Log Files

Comprehensive Raw Log files are made available in each web hosting packages Logs Folder.

The raw log files consist of:

• Web Log Files
  These files are generated by the web server to record all requests made to the website. They are primarily used by website statistics software to generate reports on essential marketing metrics for your website such as the no of visitors, pages viewed, visit duration, referring websites, search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site, visitor's computer configurations etc
• FTP Log Files
  These files are generated by the FTP server to record all logins, uploads and downloads made to and from your hosting package
• Mail Log Files
  These files are generated by the mail server to record all emails sent using code on your website

The Log Files Manager in the control panel provides extremely flexible options to manage these raw log files. All options can be configured seperately for Web, FTP and Mail Log files. The user can choose to disable a particular type of logging in order to save disk space. If the user chooses to enable logging, the system allows the user to specify log rotation options to delete older log entries automatically so that the log files do not continue growing in size indefinetely. The user can specify the no of backlogs to maintain for each type of log file, set a max log file size and set log rotation frequency (daily/weekly/monthly).

Customizable Error Pages

When a visitor attempts to connect to a web site and an HTTP error occurs, a generic message is sent back to the visitor's browser with a brief description of what happened during the attempt to establish a connection. For example, if a visitor attempts to connect to a page that no longer exists on the web site , an HTTP error will be returned in the form of an HTML page that contains the statement "The requested URL was not found on this server".

You can use the "Custom Errors Pages" section of the Control Panel to customize HTTP errors that are sent to clients when web server errors occur.

You can customize the following HTTP errors:

• 401 - Authorization Failed
• 403 - Permission Denied
• 404 - File / Resource Not Found
• 406 - Resource Not Acceptable
• 500 - Internal Error

The customization options allow you to redirect the user to a local URL / remote URL or specify a text / HTML message on the occurance of the specified HTTP error.

SSL Secure Server Manager

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protects data by creating a secure connection between a client and a server using encryption enabled by a server's SSL Certificate. SSL is required if your website is an ecommerce website (or) has any secure login areas (or) requires any secure pages. The SSL Manager in the control panel allows you to manage your CSR's (certificate signing requests), public and private keys, SSL certificates provided by your CA and self-signed certificates generated by the server.

100 ODBC DSN Connections

Database Source Names (DSN), are data structures used to describe a connection to a database. Using the control panel, you can add up to 100 DSNs for connecting to Microsoft Access, Excel, SQL Server or MySQL.

Unlimited Microsoft Access Databases

You can deploy unlimited number of Microsoft Access Databases within any windows hosting package. We have created a Private Database Folder within your web space where you should upload/create all Microsoft Access Databases. This folder has been placed outside your primary web folder for security reasons, so that visitors to your website do not get direct access to your databases.

Please note that for performance and reliability reasons, we strongly recommend the use of Microsoft SQL Server for the deployment of production-quality web sites/applications. Microsoft itself has stated the following - "Microsoft Access was designed as a single-user desktop database, and not for server use. When multiple, concurrent users make requests of a Microsoft Access database, unpredictable results may occur."

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Database Services

If the hosting package that you have purchased includes MSSQL Database(s) then you get 5 Database Users per Database that you have purchased. Using the Database Manager section in your control panel, you can add / delete MSSQL Databases, add multiple database users for a single database, change passwords etc.

Each database user can use Enterprise Manager or Query Analyzer to connect to and manage the MSSQL databases.

.NET Support

All our windows hosting packages support the following .NET technologies:

• .NET Framework v1.1 and v2.0
• ASP.NET
• ADO.NET
• ASP.NET Web Services
• XML Web Services
• .NET Mobile Internet Toolkit

Other Supported Web Development Technologies

All our windows hosting packages support all the popular windows-specific web development technologies, empowering you to create your website or web application in the language of your choice.

Supported web development technologies include:

• Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.0
• MSXML 4.0
• XSL 2.1
• CDO
• Cdonts
• Window Media
• Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
• Real Audio / Video HTTP Streaming
• Macromedia Flash
• Macromedia Shockwave
• If the hosting package that you have purchased includes Custom DLL Registration, then you can also register Custom DLL and OCX files instantly using the Control Panel

Supported Web Publishing Tools

You can upload data / publish content on your website / transfer files to and from the server using any of the following:

• FTP Based Clients
• Drumbeat
• Macromedia DreamWeaver

MySQL Database Services

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL (Structured Query Language) relational database server. If the hosting package that you have purchased includes MySQL Database(s) then you get 5 Database Users per Database that you have purchased, and the ability to do the following from your hosting control panel, using the Database Manager section:

• Add / Delete MySQL Databases
• Restrict Access to the database from a set of IP Addresses / Hosts
• Add multiple database users for a single database
• Define granular level database access policy on a per user basis i.e. you can decide which all privileges a user should be given from Select, Insert, Update, Delete, Create, Drop, Grant, Reference, Index, Alter Privileges
• Change Passwords
• Suspend / unsuspend access of database users
• One-click Access to phpMyAdmin - a web based tool for administering your MySQL database that allows you to create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields etc.

Website Speed Booster

The Website Speed Booster, as of this writing, is a feature unique to our hosting control panels ONLY. It automatically enhances the speed of your website by upto 20x times and more. This tool works by compressing the content delivered to the client when it is sent across the network. It uses the browsers ability to uncompress this data seamlessly. The tool does not require any changes in website code nor does it require any additional software on the client. All browsers starting from Internet Explorer 4.0, Netscape 4.06, Opera 5, Lynx 2.6 support this feature. Our solution will simply not compress the data if the visitor has a non-compliant browser.

Using the control panel you can boost the speed of all of the following:

• all static pages i.e. html, js, css files etc
• all dynamic pages i.e. php, perl, cgi, python files etc
• all images and downloadables i.e. gif, jpg, png, doc, pdf, xls files etc

Auto Correct URL Spelling

This option is another feature unique to our hosting control panels ONLY - it attempts to automatically correct misspellings of URLs that users might have entered, by ignoring capitalization and by allowing up to one misspelling (character insertion / omission / transposition or wrong character). Requests to documents sometimes cannot be served by the web server because the request was misspelled or miscapitalized. This option addresses the problem by trying to find a matching document. It does its work by comparing each document name in the requested directory against the requested document name without regard to case, and allowing misspellings. A list is built with all document names which were matched using this strategy.

If, after scanning the directory,

• no matching document was found, then the server will proceed as usual and return a "document not found" error
• only one document is found that "almost" matches the request, then it is returned in the form of a redirection response
• more than one document with a close match was found, then the list of the matches is returned to the client, and the client can select the correct candidate

For example, if the visitor to your website types in http://www.yourdomainname.com/home.htm or http://www.yourdomainname.com/Home.html in the browser's address bar, and the actual page which exists on the web server is home.html then the visitor will automatically be redirected to http://www.yourdomainname.com/home.html if the Auto Correct URL Spelling option is enabled.

Unlimited Web Forwarding Rules

The Redirect Manager in the hosting control panel gives you the ability to forward requests for any local folder, sub-folder, file to another domain name, URL, or IP address seamlessly. For e.g. if you want http://www.yourdomainname.com/corp to redirect to http://www.someotherdomain.com, then you can add a rule for the same. The easy-to-use Redirect Manager allows you to add as many such web forwarding rules as you want.

Direct Download Manager

Another feature exclusive to our control panels - the Direct Download Manager helps you save several hours of your valuable time by allowing you to download files to your web space directly from another server via a HTTP URL or FTP URL. If you need to transfer large files to your web space that are already available on some other server, then you would typically have to download these files locally to your desktop and re-upload them. All of this could take up quite some time depending on the file size and your internet connection speed. However, using the server-to-server transfer facility provided by the Direct Download Manager you can utilize the server's high speed connection to directly download large files, so, even if you are connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection, file transfers will occur at the very high speeds.

This feature is most useful when you are transferring your website date from your previous web hosting provider, as you could just zip up your whole website and instead of downloading it locally to your desktop, directly download it on the server and unzip it there.

Supported Web Development Technologies

All our linux hosting packages support all the popular linux-specific web development technologies, empowering you to create your website or web application in the language of your choice.

Supported web development technologies include:

• PHP
• Perl
• CGI
• Python
• Ruby
• Server Side Includes (SSI)
• Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
• Real Audio / Video HTTP Streaming
• Macromedia Flash
• Macromedia Shockwave

Supported Web Publishing Tools

You can upload data / publish content on your website / transfer files to and from the server using any of the following:

• FTP Based Clients
• Macromedia DreamWeaver