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WHAT YOU GET

A virtual domain of your own. Your name in the address, your name on the mail, and 30 MB of disk with more of it for the asking.

Your own cgi-bin, running as your own user, with nobody else's scripts in the queue in front of yours.

Unlimited e-mail aliases and autoresponders on every virtual domain.*

Statistics every night from Analog and wusage. The reports are graphical, meaning there are bars.


THE NETWORK

Sun Ultra 1 and Netra machines on Solaris 2.6, with Red Hat Linux 4.2 and FreeBSD 2.2 alongside them. Two power feeds into the building, one of which is a generator we start on a Sunday.


WHAT WE DO NOT DO

We do not sell dial-up access, we do not design your pages, and we do not put anything of our own at the bottom of them.


Netscape Now

RealAudio served here

Best viewed at 800 x 600. Drawn to fit 640 x 480, which is what most of you have. 		 
 
The best address on the Internet for your company's home page.
SlopHost puts your pages on a virtual domain of your own, on a machine that is switched on, connected twice, and watched by somebody who is awake at the time.

Where do you want to go today is a fine question, and for most of our customers the answer is a page with their opening hours on it. The rest are projects described to us at length that we look forward to seeing finished.
WHAT IT RUNS ON

Apache 1.2 on the UNIX machines, and Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0 where a customer has asked for it by name.

Windows NT Server 4.0 with IIS 3.0 and Active Server Pages, on separate machines from the UNIX ones.

Perl 5.004, PHP/FI 2.0 and mSQL. Allaire Cold Fusion 3.1 on the NT side.

FrontPage 97 Server Extensions on every server. We install them because your copy of FrontPage will not publish without them, and for no other reason we are able to give you.

Shockwave Flash 2.0 served with the correct MIME type, which sounds small and is the entire reason your animation does not play at some hosts.

RealAudio 3.0 and RealVideo, streamed from our machine rather than downloaded from yours. 		 
WHAT IS NEW

6 AUGUST. Console is now on every account. It is described below.

24 JULY. When the Pathfinder pictures went up this month, the sites that stayed reachable were the ones that had asked somebody else to hold a copy first. We will hold a copy of yours for the week you expect to need it.

12 JUNE. We have read the WIRED cover about push and we are not going to install a channel server this year.
INTERACTIVE ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
Console, our web-based account manager, lets you add a mailbox yourself without writing to us. It is the first thing we have built that our customers use more than we do.

It adds aliases and autoresponders, changes a password, points a subdomain at a directory and shows you last night's transfer. It runs in Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 3 and uses no frames, because the first thing anybody does inside a frameset is press Back.
ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
Mercantec SoftCart and Cart32 are installed and licensed on our machines, so a catalogue and a basket do not have to be written from nothing. Orders are taken through our shared secure server, which uses 128-bit encryption inside the United States and 40-bit outside it, a decision taken in Washington rather than here.

Your secure order page will be at an address with our name in it rather than yours. Customers do read the address bar, which is something we have learned rather than assumed. A merchant account is arranged between you and a bank, and the introduction is the whole of our involvement.
DOMAIN REGISTRATION
We lodge the InterNIC template on the day you ask. The fee is InterNIC's and they bill you for it, so there is never a question afterwards about whose domain it is.

It is registered in your name, with you as the administrative contact and ourselves as the technical contact. That is not the arrangement everywhere and it is worth asking about wherever you end up. A new domain takes about a fortnight to reach the root servers and nobody can shorten that.
HOW WE COMPARE
  SlopHost Hiway webcom Erol's TIAC
Virtual domain on your own name Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
FrontPage 97 Server Extensions Yes Yes Yes — —
Cold Fusion 3.1 Yes — — — —
Domain registered in your name Yes — — — —
Account manager in the browser Yes — — — —
Compiled in June from each company's own published pages. A dash means the page does not say, not that the answer is no. Telephoning to ask would have been the better method and we did not do it. Three of these companies sell a good deal more dial-up access than hosting and we have not held it against them.
 
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* Unlimited means we do not count them. It does not mean we could not.
If you use frames, please also ship the NOFRAMES version. A search engine is a browser from 1994 and shows no sign of getting older.
We answer electronic mail within four hours during business hours. Outside business hours we answer it in the morning, which is also within four hours if you send it at the right time.
We have read the TRUSTe programme documents twice and have not joined. Our privacy statement is one paragraph long, which is either the argument for joining or the argument against it.

Copyright 1997 SlopHost  ·  slophost.com  ·  Last updated 6 August 1997