Web Site Terms Glossary

ASP
Every One Blue Avenue plan comes with full ASP (Active Server Pages) support. We also offer cgi and php support.

Auto-Responders
Every One Blue Avenue plan comes with email auto-responders. You have the option to turn on an automatic response email for every email address you host with us. If you have one turned on, every time somebody sends an email to that address they'll immediately get a reply email with whatever message you choose. This is useful for automatic distribution of documents, "I'm on vacation" notices, customer support email addresses, etc. You can add, remove, or change auto-responders at any time through your site administration portal.

Backups
We recommend you always keep your own copy of your entire web site at a remote location, but we'll do our best to make sure that's never needed. Our filers are completely raided and hot-swappable so if any disk fails no data is lost, and we can replace the disk without any interruption of service! You have the ability to set up your own backup plan through your site administration portal. There is no additional cost for these backup features.

CGI
Every One Blue Avenue plan comes with full CGI (Common Gateway Interface) capabilities now! To run a file as a CGI on your site, it can be put anywhere (it doesn't need to be in a special folder named cgi-bin or anything) as long as it has a .cgi, .pl or .py extension! We also offer php and asp support.

Disk Storage
All hosting plans each come with a standard amount of disk storage space. The sum of the file sizes of all your websites, all your email, and all your databases on a plan constitutes your total disk storage for that plan. The limits are set to prevent you from going over your disk storage. If you need additional storage space, you can of course upgrade your plan to raise your disk storage limit! You can see current usage or set limits on how much space any specific user can use via our site administration portal. Just for estimation purposes, a typical page of a web site is 30KB (1024KB = 1MB) and a typical email message is 3KB. Our plans start at 50MB of storage included!

DNS
DNS stands for "Domain Name Service" and is what translates nice human-rememberable names like OneBlueAvenue.com into computer-understandable IP addresses like 65.71.53.133! When you get your domain hosted at a One Blue Avenue, we maintain your DNS so that your site is available on the entire Internet. If you choose to maintain your own DNS settings, you will need to contact us for the name server settings you will need to set up. If you are transferring your domain to One Blue Avenue, please contact us for assistance with this.
NS1.WorldWideDNS.net
NS2.WorldWideDNS.net
NS3.WorldWideDNS.net

Domain Hosting
A domain name is something like OneBlueAvenue.com, Houston.org, or Houston.edu. Domain hosting is what we do at One Blue Avenue! In order to have a website that is accessible on the Internet at all times, there are two separate things you need to do. First, you need to register your domain, and second, you've got to have it hosted somewhere. You can register your domain one place and host it somewhere else, though most hosting services offer domain registration as well (we do). Without hosting, your domain is yours but you can't use it for email or displaying a website on the Internet. Without registration, you can configure all your hosting and email preferences through our web panel but it won't ACTUALLY work on the Internet!

Domain Parking
Domain "parking" is a free service we offer whenever you register a domain name through us. We put up a default "coming soon" page at your web site. Although domain parking is free, domain registration without a hosting plan is $30/year for .com/.net/.org/.cc domains. With domain parking you can also just have the domain automatically redirect people to a different URL or exactly copy another site hosted with us ("mirroring" the content).

Domain Registration
You are required to register your domain name via a domain registrar before it works on the Internet. Because of the world-wide nature of the Internet, of course only ONE person can own any given domain name at the same time. That's why you need to register yours before you start using it... and it has to be a domain name nobody else has already registered. Although you don't have to register your domain at the same place you use for hosting, it generally makes the whole process a lot simpler. You can transfer your domain registration between hosts at no charge.. you are the owner of your domain name.. not One Blue Avenue!

Domain Transfers
If you already own a domain name (you've registered it) you can transfer your hosting to One Blue Avenue at no cost. To do so, you will have to tell your domain registrar (where you registered the domain) to change the DNS servers for your domain to be:
NS1.WorldWideDNS.net 63.126.69.125
NS2.WorldWideDNS.net 63.126.67.253

Generally it takes a day or two once this is done for the entire Internet to correctly reflect the change and begin to look to One Blue Avenue when trying to access your site or send you email. This delay is due to the time it takes for DNS changes to "propogate" to all the local DNS servers at ISPs across the globe. Because of this, it's typically a good idea to also keep your site and email set up with your old provider while you transfer to One Blue Avenue if you want to avoid any downtime!

One Blue Avenue Rewards
You can get credit for referring people to One Blue Avenue! Tell your friends to put your name or domain name in the "referred_by" area when they sign up for a new account to get credit. Get $5 off your monthly hosting bill for each person you refer that creates and account with us as long as they are customers of One Blue Avenue!

Email Addresses
Every One Blue Avenue plan comes with email addresses @yourdomain.com! These addresses are configured through our site administration portal and can be set to go straight to a mailbox or forward to another email address. One email address (also known as an email "alias") can be set to forward to any number of other addresses and mailboxes! You can also set an email address to just discard any mail sent to it (optionally bouncing back a failure message to the sender). Finally, you can set up a "catch-all" email address at your domain which will handle all mail sent to any address @www.yourdomain.com that you haven't specifically set up. Having your own domain means you can really get creative with your use of email addresses!

Frontpage Extensions
All One Blue Avenue plans have the ability to support Microsoft Frontpage (98-2002) Extensions.. however you must contact support to have us turn them on. Also note, if you turn on FP Extensions your CGI scripts may no longer work. Microsoft Frontpage is a somewhat popular web-publishing program that we do not recommend you use. We recommend buying a book on HTML or using CityDesk or DreamWeaver. The "extensions" are basically little interactive elements you can include in your site when designing it Frontpage. They won't work when you publish your site to our server unless you've had the frontpage extensions enabled though! You don't need the extensions turned on just to use Frontpage to make your site. As long as you aren't using any extensions, your site will be fine without them.

FTP
FTP - File Transfer Protocol - is something you're going to have to use to get your website live on the web! It is a way to copy files from your home computer up to your directory on our web server. To connect, you'll need to know your server username and password. The name of the server you connect to is just yourdomain.com. When you've connected, you will need to go up 2 directories (to your web root). You should see a directory on our server named web. You should copy your website into that directory, not the directory you start out in! Whenever you upload new data to your website, the changes show up immediately on your live site (you may have to reload the page in your browser of course). By the way, you should name the main page of your site "index.htm" "index.html" "index.asp" or "index.php" - these are the files our servers look for when somebody goes to a URL (e.g. http://www.OneBlueAvenue.com/) without specifying a filename.

.htaccess
You can use .htaccess files on all One Blue Avenue plans. .htaccess files are text files that you put in a directory of your website to tell our web server (apache) that you'd like to handle request to that directory in a special way. There's lots you can do with a .htaccess file, but some of the most common uses are to password-protection, blocking access from a specific ip range or referring url, and redirecting requests to another URL. There's almost nothing you can't do with a simple .htaccess file, and there are lots of tutorials all over the web about how to use them!

IMAP
IMAP is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being POP3 and web-based email). Most email clients in existance today support the IMAP protocol, which basically reads your email directly from the server rather than downloading it to your local computer first (like POP3 does). This is good for keeping your mail organized on a centralized server (good if you access your email from different computers). This is bad if you don't like to keep your Internet connection active while you read all your email. This is also bad if you are worried about your disk space, since all your old email saved on our servers will count towards your total.

Java
All of our plans support the Java programming language. There are lots of different sorts of "Java" though, and it's hard to explain which ones we support and don't support right here. Basically, we DO support Java, Javascript (not really Java!), Java Applets, Java2, Java SDK/JRE, and Java Servlets (yes, Java Servlets!). We do NOT support JSP (or Tomcat/Jakarta), EJB, J2EE, or anything else not specifically mentioned here! Java's a big topic, and we recommend you know what you're doing if you're going to tackle using Java on your website!

Log Files
Everytime somebody visits your web site, our server takes a log of it in either your access.log file or your error.log file (for times when people get errors like 404, etc... These logs are available for you to download at any time through your site administration portal.

Mailboxes
All One Blue Avenue plans come with 5 number of mailboxes. These are different from email addresses in that they are WHERE mail sent to email addresses goes on the server. When you check a mailbox with your email client you have to enter your mailbox username (either the same as your server username or else something like domainuser02) and password. You will also have to enter your mail server name which is just mail.yourdomain.com. Multiple email addresses can deliver email to the same mailbox, and one email address can deliver email to multiple mailboxes. It all depends on how you configured it from your site administration portal! You can connect to One Blue Avenue mailboxes to check your email using IMAP, POP3, or web-based email. You can add, delete, and configure your mailboxes from your site administration portal.

Money-back Guarantee
One Blue Avenue is proud to offer an unconditional 30-day money back guarantee on all of our plans! If you are unsatisfied with our service for any reason at all within 30 days of signing up for hosting with us, simply contact us and let us know you'd like to cancel and get your money refunded. No problem, we'll do it immediately! That's it! We can not refund you for domain registration fees. You are still the owner of that domain name however and may transfer it to another host if you'd like!

MySQL
One Blue Avenue does offer access to MySQL databases. Access to this service requires an upgrade in your hostingplan. We make backups of all customer databases on a daily basis, but you should of course make your own as well if the information is at all critical! Your databases' disk usage count towards your total plan disk limits.

PHP
PHP is a relatively new programming language that was designed for making interactive websites, especially ones that interact with a MySQL database in the back-end. It generally runs even faster than perl and some say is easier to learn, too! It is similar to ASP from the Windows world, except it is open source. PHP version 4 (as well as version 3) is included free in every One Blue Avenue plan. To make sure your php script gets run from the web as a script you should name it with a .php, .php3, .php4, or .phtml extension.

POP3
POP3 is one of three ways you can access email in your mailboxes hosted with us (the other two being IMAP and web-based email). All email clients in existance today support the POP3 protocol, which downloads your mail from our server and copies it to your local hard drive. You can usually specify in your email client if you'd like a copy of the email to be kept on the mail server or not (or even to delete old mail only after a certain number of days). POP3 is nice if you don't want to stay connected to the Internet while reading and responding to your email: you can just connect, download the messages, disconnect, read and reply to your messages, re-connect, send the messages, and then disconnect! One problem with POP3 is if you decide to delete your old email from the server you won't have any old mail available to you when you try and check it via a different computer (or using the IMAP protocol or web-based email). On the other hand, this saves disk space on your plan!

SFTP
Secure FTP (SFTP) is just like FTP, except all the uploads and downloads are encrypted to increase the security of the process. If you have an FTP program that supports SFTP, we recommend you use it. All our plans support it and there's no harm in being a bit more secure, right?

Site Statistics
Every night we analyze the log files for all sites hosted with us and create a number of HTML reports of the site accesses represented by them. These reports are in a password-protected area on your site administration portal. You can manage access to your stats from our your site administration portal at any time. You can also download your raw log files and run whatever statistics program you'd like on them!

Site Administration Portal
This is where you administer your site, view site statistics, set up email accounts, perform backup and restore procedures, etc. It can be located by adding /siteadmin to the end of your domain name: http://www.domain.com/siteadmin

SMTP
To send email from your email client, you need to specify an "SMTP" (outgoing mail) server. Almost always, your ISP provides you one can use, something like mail.earthlink.net. Some ISPs, however, do not allow you to send mail using their SMTP server from a domain other than theirs! You're probably going to want to do that though, so we also provide an SMTP server to all our customers. It is simply mail.yourdomain.com, and as long as you have a single mailbox set up with us, it should work for you. We actually use "authenticated" SMTP, so that only One Blue Avenue clients may use our SMTP server (which is why you have to have a mailbox set up for it to work!). Make sure you check off the appropriate box in your mail client for this (something like "my server requires authentication"). Unfortunately, some ISPs block SMTP requests to any SMTP server other than theirs! If your ISP does this, and also doesn't allow sending emails with a From field outside of their domain you have two options. Use our web-based email or change ISPs!

Spell Check
All web-based email also comes with spell-check enabled. Never send an email with spelling errors again!

SSI
All One Blue Avenue plans allow access to SSI (Server Side Includes). SSI is kind of like a poor man's CGI that allows you to parse outside data right into an otherwise normal HTML file. You can put things like the current time, last time this file was updated, or another file right into your HTML file without having to really write any code. In order for SSI commands to be interpreted by our server, you have to name the file with a .shtml extension!

Sub-Domain
We do have the ability to host subdomains also - http://subdomain.yourdomain.com. Please contact sales for information on this servie.

Technical Support
We offer the same unparalleled technical support free to all our customers, no matter what your plan! You can contact support at any time of day or night, every day of the year via email at sales@oneblueavenue.com. We do not offer phone support currently as we feel it would be impossible to offer the quality services we do at the price points we do were we to take it on. However, our customers generally agree they'd rather send an email and have their solution within a few hours than wait on hold for hours just to talk to somebody on the phone who doesn't even understand their problem! We have some of the happiest customers in the industry, mainly due to our very high quality support team!

Transfer Bandwidth
Every time somebody visits your web site, or downloads a file from it, they use a little bit of transfer bandwidth in the process. Each One Blue Avenue plan comes with a different amount of included bandwidth per month, as well as a cost for any extra transfer over that. Generally it makes sense to upgrade to the next plan as soon as you go over your current plan's allotment. Our bandwidth allocations are very generous and are rarely ever even close to being reached by any of our clients! Bandwidth transfer does count ftp updates and email bandwidth. We keep our network very unsaturated so you always enjoy the fastest possible connect times to your web sites!

Upgrading
You can upgrade (and downgrade) any One Blue Avenue plan at any time without causing any downtime for your account! Upgrading is the only way to raise your disk space, bandwidth, or MySQL database limits!

Users
Every One Blue Avenue plan comes with a number of server users. These users allow ftp access to your web site as well as doubling as a mailbox. You can add, delete, and manage users from your site administration portal, of course!

Web-based Email
A new feature that we've added to every One Blue Avenue plan is the ability to access your One Blue Avenue mailboxes via a web interface (similar to what is offered by aol, hotmail and yahoo). To access it, just visit http://www.yourdomain.com/openwebmail/ with any web browser and log in with your mailbox username and password. This web-mail system actually works via IMAP.. which means it can only see saved emails you left on the server and did not download to your home computer with POP3. You can customize the look of your web-mail access, run spell-check on your messages, attach documents, filter spam and viruses, and much more!