DecaTech Solutions
  		 DecaTech, Your Personal Internet Professionals

Web Hosting FAQ

  1. What types of Hosting plans does DecaTech offer?
  2. How do I host with DecaTech?
  3. What is disk space?
  4. What is monthly traffic?
  5. What are visitor statistics?
  6. What is a virtual email address?
  7. What are POP3 email accounts?
  8. What is CGI-BIN access?
  9. I'm writing a CGI script - what are the paths on my server?
  10. What is your cancellation policy?
  11. Can I use FrontPage to build my website?
  12. Can I use a secure URL with my website?
  13. Do you support PHP?  What is PHP?
  14. Do you support ASP?  What is ASP?
  15. How do I setup my homepage?
  1. What types of hosting plans does DecaTech offer for my website?
    We specialize and focus on LINUX (currently Fedora Core 4) with MySQL databases, and PHP, ASP, or CGI-BIN server-side programming. We also offer custom Windows plans if you require Microsoft Windows based hosting.

    You can view an overview of all of our hosting plans, or compare them in a handy table format.

  2. How do I host my website with DecaTech?
    First of all, you'll need to register a domain name, if you haven't already done so. You can contact us to have us register one for you - our expertise in helping you select one that's a good fit for you is included in our fee.

    Next, select a hosting plan that is a good fit for your needs.

    Update your current or new domain to point to our DNS servers. Unless we tell you otherwise, our default servers are:

    NS4.DECATECH.COM  - 208.109.101.178
    NS2.DECATECH.COM  - 64.41.72.106

  3. What is disk space?
    Everything related to your website is stored on disk: your regular html files, images, multimedia files, POP mail messages, cgi-scripts and so on. Your disk space total is the sum of the size of all of these files. A MegaByte (MB) is 1000 KiloBytes (K). For example, a short html text file is usually only 1-2K, and a medium size, optimized graphic could be 75-125K.

  4. What is monthly traffic?
    Each time a web page, image, audio, video, and other elements of your website is accessed by a visitor, traffic is generated. Your monthly traffic allowance is the sum of outward-bound, inward-bound, and email, and vary per web hosting plan. If you should happen to surpass your allowance for a month, you will be notified via email, and be subject to an additional fee on your next web hosting invoice.

  5. What are visitor statistics?
    All DecaTech web hosting plans include a single HitMonitor - weekly visitor statistics via email or a webpage all web hosting plans. HitMonitor provides statistics on your website's traffic - including unique visitors and total visits.

    Additional HitMonitor's can be ordered for other key webpages on your site, to track them specifically.

  6. What is a virtual email address?
     A virtual email address allows you to use an address associated with your domain by having it forward to any real email address. Most of our web hosting plans allow for an unlimited number of these "aliases", but check the plan's description first.

    Here is an example of a virtual email address:

    service@decatech.com --> joe17@yahoo.com

    In this example, the virtual address service@decatech.com forwards all email to the user's real email address - joe17@yahoo.com

    Virtual email addresses have two great benefits. One, they shield your website from having to change your email address if you cancel your account with your ISP/Email provider. (i.e. Yahoo) Only your virtual email address would have to be modified, in one place. Two, they allow you to maintain a more professional front on your website - hiding your sometimes long and unprofessional actual email address.

  7. What are POP3 email accounts?
    POP3 email accounts provide you with a true email account that can be accessed from anywhere when you have access to the internet.

  8. What is CGI-BIN access?
    CGI-BIN is a special folder on the web server that provides you with the ability to run programs to do more complex tasks for your website. A good example is a mail-form that gives you the ability to take input from a form and send it to an email address. You, or your web developer will have direct access to installing these programs at any time. Some web hosting providers don't allow this, for security purposes.

  9. I'm writing a CGI script - what are the paths on my server?
    Note: This info is specific to our UNIX hosting plans. For Windows plans info - contact Support.
    Perl5 /usr/bin/perl
    Sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail
    Date /bin/date
    Domain path /var/www/vhosts/[domain]/httpdocs
    Your Script http://[domain]/cgi-local/[script].cgi

    For example, in the above paths, if your site is www.coloradomusic.org, "domain" refers to "coloradomusic.org".

  10. What is your Cancellation Policy?
    Please refer to the cancellation section of our Billing and Cancellation Policy.

  11. Can I use FrontPage to build my website?
    Yes, we support FrontPage extensions on all of hosting plans, which allows you to build and upload your website.

    Refer to this document for general help with FrontPage access setup.

  12. Can I use a secure URL with my website?
    Yes, you have access to a shared secure URL with our Copper and higher UNIX hosting plans and all Windows plans.

    Just upload your secure content via FTP to the httpsdocs folder instead of httpdocs. (Frontpage users upload via https://www.domainname.com)

    Then, to access it use a web address like this:

    https://secure.decatech.com/domainname/file.html

  13. Do you support PHP?  What is PHP?
    PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Processor".

    The goal of this public domain, freely available language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated web pages very quickly. No additional software is needed, but you do need to know how to program in PHP. The official website is an excellent resource.

    PHP is often used for features like authentication, (such as our DomainManager account management system) shopping carts, and dynamic content. DecaTech has web developers that are extremely proficient in PHP programming.

    PHP is available with all of our Linux plans.

  14. Do you support ASP?  What is ASP?
    An Active Server Page (ASP) is an HTML page that includes scripts that are processed before they are presented to the user requesting the page. ASP is very similar to PHP, but is a proprietary commercial technology licensed by Microsoft.

    Our Linux hosting plans support a limited public domain version of ASP called Apache::ASP. See the official Apache::ASP website for documentation and programming examples.

    All of our custom Windows hosting plans offer native ASP support.

  15. How do I setup my homepage?

    The greatest source of confusion is the filename(s) that can be used to setup your homepage. This also applies to any other folder/directory you setup. A homepage or default page is what the visitor sees when they type in your main URL or your URL + foldername. Any other time, you explicitly name the file and have the visitor access it via a link from the navigation of your website.

    It is important to avoid uploading files of the same name, in the same folder, with different extensions. This leads to confusion as to why you aren't seeing your changes on the website. The server has to accommodate multiple languages and multiple styles of extensions. (For example, MS FrontPage naturally creates HTML files named file.htm while other tools might create them as file.html)

    Here is the order of precendence and all acceptable filenames + extensions that the server supports for homepages or default folder files:

    index.html
    index.htm
    default.htm
    index.shtml (SSI)
    index.php
    index.asp
    index.cgi