The following are descriptions and/or details for various terms used throughout our website. If you require additional clarifications, please contact us directly.
The disk space allowed with your web hosting package represents the total amount of data (regular files, emails or databases) that you can store in your hosting account. 1 Mb (Mega-byte) = 1024 Kb (Kilo-bytes) = 1048576 bytes. On average an HTML page will take between 10 and 50 Kilo-bytes, and an optimized image can be between 50 and 200 Kilo-bytes.
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Your monthly bandwidth is calculated by multiplying the size of the files that are accessed on your website by the number of times that they are being downloaded. If you monthly total exceeds your allowed quota, your website visitors will see a simple error page informing them that you have exceeded your bandwidth limit. If this is case, you must upgrade to a superior package offering greater bandwidth or simply wait until the end of the month when your bandwidth quota will be reset to zero.
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Your domain name is your online identity. Your visitors will be able to access your web site by entering your domain name in their browser's address bar. It is therefore preferable to register a good domain name that adequately represents you, your company, or the services/products you are offering. It is also important to note that registering a domain name does not grant you any legal rights to that name and it might be prudent to register a trademark in order to adequately protect that name and prevent potential troubles in the future.
Canadian domain names (those ending with .ca) require special authorization and are subject to special conditions as established by CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Agency. If you are registering a website under a person's name, that person must be a Canadian resident or citizen. If you are registering under a business name, that business must be officially registered in the province you specified.
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Each hosting account allows you to host one domain name, with the exception of the ENTREPRISE web hosting package, which allows you to register up to 5 domains (so 4 add-on domains) with the same account. Each add-in domain is managed in a specific directory in your primary account.
Here's an example:
Your primary account is hosted in the home/site1/ directory. You have 3 domains (so 1 primary and 2 add-on domains):
- www.site1.com (primary site)
- www.site2.com (add-on 1)
- www.site3.com (add-on 2)
Using your cPanel, you setup your 2 add-on domains. Now, your public content for each site can be stored on the server in the following locations:
- /home/site1/public_html/ (primary site)
- /home/site1/public_html/site2/ (add-on 1)
- /home/site1/public_html/site3/ (add-on 2)
Each access to www.site1.com/index.html will be redirected (internally, in a way that is transparent to your visitors) to /home/site1/public_html/index.html.
Each access to www.site2.com/index.html will be redirected (internally, in a way that is transparent to your visitors) to /home/site2/public_html/index.html.
Each access to www.site3.com/index.html will be redirected (internally, in a way that is transparent to your visitors) to /home/site3/public_html/index.html.
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All hosting contracts are made on a yearly basis. Domain names are non-refundable. All payments must be made in Canadian dollars unless special arrangements are made with us beforehand (contact us for information).
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Each hosting package allows you to use one or more e-mail accounts. You will be able to send and receive e-mail just like you do with Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail, by using our special Webmail interface. You can also configure Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Tiger Mail 2, or any other email software to work directly with your Web Hosting Canada email account!
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Our mail servers are equipped with the latest generation of junk mail (anti-spam) filtres, reducing to a minimum the amount of spam you will receive. Our anti-spam software includes:
- SpamAssassin, with performs multiple tests on incoming mail to confirm authenticity. These include testing for common spam phrases like "million dollars", checking for an unusual number of question and exclamation marks, and so on. For each test performed, the email is given a certain number of points (if needed, you can even configure these). If the sum of all points is greater than a pre-established amount (also configurable), Spam Assassin will mark the email as Junk. For more information, visit: http://www.spamassassin.org
- Spam Box, which redirects junk mail to a special Junk mail directory.
- Check RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), which verifies that emails are not received from blacklisted servers or IPs.
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All incoming mail is automatically scanned for viruses. Any e-mail having attached files with the following extensions: ".ade, .adp, .bas, .chm, .crt, .eml, .exe, .hlp, .hta, .inf, .ins, .isp, .jse, .lnk, .mdb, .mde, .msc, .msi, .msp, .pcd, .sct, .shs, .url, .vbs, .vbe, .wsf, .wsh, .wsc, .bat, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .pif, .reg, .scr" are automatically blocked.
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Auto-responders allow you to configure an email account to automatically send a prepared answer to any incoming email. This can be useful, for example, to inform people that write to you while you're gone on vacation, telling them you'll be unavailable until a certain date.
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Mailing lists can be used to easily communicate with a group of people. You simply create the mailing list, and either sign up its members yourself, or have them do it. Afterwards, any emails sent to the mailing list email address are automatically sent to all subscribers to that mailing list. This can be very useful, for example, when communicating with groups of people at work, or team members at home.
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Web Hosting Canada gives you access to two different Webmail program, Horde and SquirrelMail. With these programs you can send, receive and manage your emails using an intuitive web interface similar to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail.
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You can redirect any emails originating from one email address to another one on your account. This can be useful, for example, if you want someone else to handle your emails when you're on vacation.
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The cPanel administrative interface is a powerful graphical web interface, and a standard in web management solution for shared hosting accounts.
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FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used to download/upload files from/to your server, using applications such as FileZilla or CuteFTP. You can configure the access rights to each FTP account you create in your cPanel, and thus create various user groups in order to control who has access to what.
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The File Manager is available in the cPanel and allows you to manage your files using an intuitive web interface.
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All hosting packages hosted with Web Hosting Canada are entitled to see usage statistics with two different programs: Webalizer and Awstats. These programs allow you to monitor your website's usage, giving you details about how many people are accessing your site each day/week/month/year, as well as their geographical location, referring link, operating system and much more.
Want to know what your statistics will look like? Take a look at a sample Webalizer report and a sample Awstats report.
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Server access and error logs are available through your cPanel and can allow you to see information about the latest accesses to your website, as well as any errors (useful for debugging PHP scripts, for example).
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Fantastico is a web installer platform that integrates with cPanel and automates the installation of the following applications:
- Blogs:
- Portals/CMS:
- Customer Support:
- Discussion Boards:
- E-Commerce:
- FAQ:
- Guestbooks:
- Hosting Billing:
- Image Galleries:
- Mailing List:
- Polls and Surveys:
- Project Management:
- Site Builders:
- Wiki:
- Other Scripts:
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Shell / Telnet access allows you to connect directly to your hosting account using the SSH protocol, and offers a powerful UNIX-style command prompt interface for more advanced users. A shell account can be very useful for any experienced webmaster or administrator, allowing them to perform various tasks (such as compressing/decompressing sets of files, for example) much faster than with any other method.
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Microsoft Frontpage is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design application with an easy and intuitive graphical interface. Web Hosting Canada's servers allow you to use FrontPage to connect directly to your account and easily transfer your files to and from your website.
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PHP is a powerful open-source programming language. Web Hosting Canada currently offers the latest version of PHP 4 and 5.
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The Perl programming language, originally developed for the UNIX operating system, is commonly used alongside HTML in order to create dynamic web pages. The current installed Perl version is 5.8.4, and most Perl modules are pre-installed.
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A CGI script is a small program that executes and performs a certain task once a specific event is triggered. This event can include accessing a web page, submitting a form, or receiving an email. The most common CGI scripts are designed to interpret form results, to update web counters, to display the current date and time, or even to display a product catalogue.
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Web Hosting Canada offers free technical support 24/7. In addition, we guarantee a resolution to any support ticket within 48 business hours of receiving it (average resolution time is 4 hours).
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MySQL databases are popular open-source relational databases that integrate well with PHP (also offered with all our hosting packages). A MySQL database can contain multiple tables and as much data as is permitted by your disk space quota. We currently use the latest version of MySQL 4 and 5 on our servers.
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phpMyAdmin is a powerful interface to your MySQL tables, allowing you to execute various SQL commands and to easily manage your existing databases.
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Receive a $50.00 USD sign-up bonus for Yahoo! Marketing (previously known as Overture) with any web hosting or domain purchase with us. These credits can be instantly applied for highly-targeted advertisements on Yahoo! search and its partner sites (including msn.com). A special link will be provided in your welcome email upon completing our order form; this link will allow you to receive the $50.00 USD sign-up bonus.
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All data stored on our servers is automatically duplicated on a number of hard drives configured in RAID-5 setup. In addition, off-server backups are automatically performed nightly, weekly and monthly. If ever you lose your data or wish to recover one of these backups, you can contact us and we will restore them within minutes. In addition, you also have the option of manually backing up your files using the Backup feature in your cPanel.
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You can password-protect files and folders using the feature available in the cPanel.
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Subdomains can be used to divide your website into distinct sections. The subdomain name precedes the domain name when entered in the browser's address bar, for example: http://subdomain.mydomain.com. Each subdomain can have it's FTP accounts, CGI scripts and more!
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Activating Leech protection (in the cPanel) will prevent other websites from linking directly to a password-protected area of your website. This feature redirects (or denies) the request to an address of your choice.
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Hotlink protection prevents other sites from including content directly from your website onto their website. This would prevent these sites from consuming your bandwidth without your authorization.
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You can create custom error pages to display the message (or page) of your choice whenever users access an invalid page (404 error) or do not provide valid authentication credentials (401 error).
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Using the cPanel, you may create automatic redirections, so that a visitor is automatically redirected from one address to another (example: http://mydomain.com/index.html is redirected to http://mydomain.com/home.php)
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Cron Jobs are commands that are automatically executed at set intervals. These may be configured through the cPanel and can be very useful when automating maintenance scripts.