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Anonymous FTP
Allows visitors to upload and download specified files from designated directories without usernames or passwords. Anonymous FTP differs from standard "FTP Access" which requires usernames and passwords.

Bulletin Board
WWW Board is a threaded World Wide Web discussion forum and message board which allows users to post new messages, follow-up to existing ones, and more.

Calendars, Shared and Private Web Based
Web based Private calendars are readable and writable by one Email user, while shared access calendars can be assigned to specific domain users with read only or read/write access.

Clam Anti-Virus Scanner
Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet.

Detection of over 28000 viruses, worms and trojans, Virus database is updated every hour, and Fast scanning

CreditCards / Checks Accepted
We accept MasterCard, VISA, Discover, and American Express credit cards. We also will accept personal checks, however you must make a full year's payment to create a new account. If paying by check, your account will not be accepted or become active until your check has cleared.

Autoresponders
Sends an automated Email response to each incoming message that is sent to a specific address. Each Email address on your account can have a different autoresponder. An example: Joe sends an Email to sales@AldenHosting.com. The autoresponder for this Email address sends a prewritten message back to Joe automatically.

CGI script
Used to supplement basic HTML to make your website more interactive and functional. Hit counters, guest books, order forms, and many other useful features can all be programmed in CGI scripts. Alden Hosting offers a free library of CGI scripts that you can use to enhance your web site. These can be found and installed from your EZ Site Control Panel. All of our plans come with their own local cgi-bin directory where you can store custom CGI scripts that you may have written yourself or found elsewhere on the web.

Data Transfer per Month
Each time a web page, image, audio, video, and other elements of your website are accessed by your visitor, traffic is generated. Your aggregate traffic is the sum of outward-bound, inward-bound, Email, and anonymous FTP traffic. Our daily data transfer allowances are high enough that most of our users stay within the limit. Traffic overage will be charged according to the additional traffic pricing (see our additional items pricing page).

Detailed Usage Statistic/ Access to Raw Log File
Alden Hosting gives you detailed graphical and tabular usage statistics for your website grouped by weeks, days, and hours. Using this information, you can track how many hits you are getting, where those hits are coming from, which page is the most popular, how much data transfer is occurring, and more. Access to raw log files allows you to analyze the usage using even more sophisticated programs.

Disk Space
Everything related to your website is stored on disk: your regular html files, images, multimedia files, anonymous ftp files, POP mail messages, cgi-scripts and so on.

Domain Alias
Allows additional domain names to point to a common website. This feature is useful when you want users to be able to access the same web site through a number of different addresses. An example: Acme Corporation registers two domain names, A and B. It places its web site at A, and makes B a domain alias of A. Whenever someone types in the address of domain B, they are automatically redirected to domain A.

Domain Name Computers connected to the Internet identify each other using numerical IP addresses, which are very difficult for humans to remember. A Domain Name is an easy-to-remember Internet address in plain alphabet (such as "AldenHosting.com") which is translated automatically into the IP address. A more formal definition is given by InterNIC:

"An addressing construct used for identifying and locating computers on the Internet. Domain names provide a system of easy-to-remember Internet addresses, which can be translated by the Domain Name System (DNS) into the numeric addresses (Internet Protocol (IP) numbers) used by the network. A domain name is hierarchical and often conveys information about the type of entity using the domain name. A domain name is simply a label that represents a domain, which is a subset of the total domain name space. Domain names at the same level of the hierarchy must be unique, for example there can be only one com at the top level of the hierarchy, and only one netsol.com at the next level of the hierarchy."

Domain Name Registration
In order for visitors to find your website using the domain name of your choice, you need to do two things. First, you need to reserve your domain name with InterNIC, the organization that registers domain names. Second, you need to provide InterNIC with the nameserver of your domain name, so that the IP address for your domain name can be disseminated throughout the Internet.

Alden Hosting can help with both steps. If you order any of our Webhosting plans, we will handle the above process free of charge. If you are not yet ready to have a web site but want to reserve just the name, Alden Hosting can handle this procedure for you also.

Domain names are going fast. Go to our domain registration page. to register yours!

Email Forwarding
When email forwarding is activated, messages sent to a certain email address are forwarded to another address. For example: Joe sends an email to webmaster@yourname.com. The message is forwarded immediately to you@your-ISP.com.

FormMail
FormMail is a generic www form to e-mail gateway, which will parse the results of any form and send them to the specified user. This script has many formatting and operational options, most of which can be specified through the form, meaning you don't need any programming knowledge or multiple scripts for multiple forms. This also makes FormMail the perfect system-wise solution for allowing users form-based user feedback capabilities without the risks of allowing freedom of CGI access.

FrontPage 2002 Extension
In order for you to use all the features that come with your Microsoft® FrontPage® 2002 WebPages editor, FrontPage Extension should be installed for your account. You may enable this feature by going to your EZ Control Panel.

FrontPage Web Administrator
The FrontPage Web Administrator can Fix some Frontpage upload and server applications problems by performing a "Server Check" and "Recalculate the Web" to detect and repair your Frontpage webs. By using the links on this page, you can perform tasks such as adding a new user, inviting people to your site, configuring settings for your Web site, and adding or deleting a subweb.

FTP Access
Used to upload and download your website between your own computer and the Alden Hosting Web servers. You have unlimited FTP access to your account 24 hours a day 365 days a year, allowing you to set up, change, or maintain your web site at any time.

Guestbook
Guestbook allows you to set up your own comments page. From there, visitors can add entries to your guestbook and they will be displayed with the most recent at the top and scrolling down, or vice versa. Other options include the ability to limit HTML in the entry, link to e-mail address with mailto tag, use a log to log entries, redirect to a different page after signing, emailing whenever a new entry is added, and much more.

IMAP Email Server
A protocol allowing a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server. It permits manipulation of remote message folders (mailboxes), in a way that is functionally equivalent to local mailboxes. IMAP includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; searching; and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof. It does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by a mail transfer protocol such as SMTP.

Java
(After the Indonesian island, a source of programming fluid) A simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, multithreaded, dynamic, buzzword-compliant, general-purpose programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995(?). Java supports programming for the Internet in the form of platform-independent Java "applets".

Java is similar to C++ without operator overloading (though it does have method overloading), without multiple inheritance, and extensive automatic coercions. It has automatic garbage collection.

Java programs can run stand-alone on small computers. The interpreter and class support take about 40 kilobytes; adding the standard libraries and thread support (essentially a self-contained microkernel) adds an additional 175Kb.

Java extends C++'s object-oriented facilities with those of Objective C for dynamic method resolution.

Java has an extensive library of routines for TCP/IP protocols like HTTP and FTP. Java applications can access objects across the Internet via URLs as easily as on the local file system.

The Java compiler and linker both enforce strong type checking - procedures must be explicitly typed. Java supports the creation of virus-free, tamper-free systems with authentication based on public-key encryption.

The Java compiler generates an architecture-neutral object file executable on any processor supporting the Java run-time system. The object code consists of bytecode instructions designed to be both easy to interpret on any machine and easily translated into native machine code at load time.

The Java libraries provide portable interfaces. For example, there is an abstract Window class and implementations of it for Unix, Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh. The run-time system is written in POSIX-compliant ANSI C. Java applets can be executed as attachments in World-Wide Web documents using either Sun's HotJava browser or Netscape Navigator version 2.0.

JavaScript
(Formerly "LiveScript") Netscape's simple, cross-platform, World-Wide Web scripting language, only very vaguely related to Java (which is a Sun trademark). JavaScript is intimately tied to the World-Wide Web, and currently runs in only three environments - as a server-side scripting language, as an embedded language in server-parsed HTML, and as an embedded language run in web browsers where it is the most important part of DHTML.

JavaScript has a simplified C-like syntax and is tightly integrated with the browser Document Object Model. It is useful for implementing enhanced forms, simple web database front-ends, and navigation enhancements.

JavaScript originated from Netscape and, for a time, only their products supported it. Microsoft now supports a work-alike called JScript. The resulting inconsistencies make it difficult to write JavaScript that behaves the same in all browsers. This could be attributed to the slow progress of JavaScript through the standards bodies.

JavaScript runs "100x" slower than C, as it is purely interpreted (Java runs "10x" slower than C code). Netscape and allies say JavaScript is an "open standard" in an effort to keep Microsoft from monopolising web software as they have desktop software. Netscape and Sun have co-operated to enable Java and JavaScript to exchange messages and data.

Java Server Pages
(JSP) A freely available specification for extending the Java Servlet API to generate dynamic web pages on a web server. The JSP specification was written by industry leaders as part of the Java development program. JSP assists developers in creating HTML or XML pages that combine static (fixed) page templates with dynamic content. Separating the user interface from content generation allows page designers to change the page layout without having to rewrite program code. JSP was designed to be simpler than pure servlets or CGI scripting. JSP uses XML-like tags and scripts written in Java to generate the page content. HTML or XML formatting tags are passed back to the client. Application logic can live on the server, e.g. in JavaBeans. JSP is a cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Pages, which only runs in IIS on Windows NT. Applications written to the JSP specification can be run on compliant web servers, and web servers such as Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server, and Microsoft IIS that have had Java support added.

Java Servlets
A Java program that runs as part of a network service, typically an HTTP server and responds to requests from clients. The most common use for a servlet is to extend a web server by generating web content dynamically. For example, a client may need information from a database; a servlet can be written that receives the request, gets and processes the data as needed by the client and then returns the result to the client. Applets are also written in Java but run inside the JVM of a HTML browser on the client. Servlets and applets allow the server and client to be extended in a modular way by dynamically loading code which communicates with the main program via a standard programming interface. Servlets are more flexible than CGI scripts and, being written in Java, more portable. The spelling "servelet" is occasionally seen but JavaSoft spell it "servlet." There is no such thing as a "serverlet."

Java Servlets Manager
In many production environments, it is very useful to have the capability to deploy a new web application, or undeploy an existing one, without having to shut down and restart the entire container. In addition, you can request an existing application to reload itself, even if you have not declared it to be reloadable in the Tomcat 5 server configuration file.

To support these capabilities, Tomcat 5 includes a web application (installed by default on context path /manager) that supports the following functions:

• List the currently deployed web applications, as well as the sessions that are currently active for those web apps.
• Reload an existing web application, to reflect changes in the contents of /WEB-INF/classes or /WEB-INF/lib.
• List the OS and JVM property values.
• List the available security roles defined in the user database.
• Remove an installed web application.
• Start a stopped application (thus making it available again).
• Stop an existing application (so that it becomes unavailable), but do not undeploy it.
• Undeploy a deployed web application and delete its document base directory.

Mail Lists
You can send one Email to a group of people, called a "Mailing List," making it convenient to Email the same group of people on a regular basis. You can name the mailing list then enter the many Email addresses that belong in the list. Notice that you can have up to 500 Email addresses in a mailing list. You are limited to sending 500 Emails in a 24-hour time period.

You will need to create a list of senders that will be allowed to send mail to one of your Email lists. The senders will consist of Email addresses, not names. If someone not on the "Allowed Senders" list tries to send an Email to a mailing list, he/she will receive an Email letting the person know that they are not permitted to send mail to this mailing list.

MySQL
A database engine. Alden Hosting provides support for creating a simple searchable database. More complex database-website interfaces requires custom programming. More information on mySQL can be found at http://www.mysql.org.

PERL
A high-level programming language, started by Larry Wall in 1987 and developed as an open source project. It has an eclectic heritage, deriving from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, various Unix shell languages, Lisp, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Originally developed for Unix, it is now available for many platforms. PERL's elaborate support for regular expression matching and substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks involving string manipulation, whether for text or binary data. It is particularly popular for writing CGI scripts. The language's highly flexible syntax and concise regular expression operators, make densely written PERL code indecipherable to the uninitiated. The syntax is, however, really quite simple and powerful and, once the basics have been mastered, a joy to write.

PHP: Hypertext Processor

Alden Hosting supports PHP V5.

Self-referentially short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.

In an HTML document, PHP script (similar syntax to that of Perl or C ) is enclosed within special PHP tags. Because PHP is embedded within tags, the author can jump between HTML and PHP (similar to ASP and Cold Fusion) instead of having to rely on heavy amounts of code to output HTML. And, because PHP is executed on the server, the client cannot view the PHP code.

PHP can perform any task that any CGI program can do, but its strength lies in its compatibility with many types of databases. Also, PHP can talk across networks using IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, or HTTP.

PHP was created sometime in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. During mid 1997, PHP development entered the hands of other contributors. Two of them, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rewrote the parser from scratch to create PHP version 3 (PHP3).

Python:
Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.
Python combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. It has modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing. There are interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various windowing systems (X11, Motif, Tk, Mac, MFC). New built-in modules are easily written in C or C++. Python is also usable as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface.

POP3 Email Accounts
These are your Email mail boxes on our server that can be accessed directly to retrieve your mail using such programs as Eudora, Outlook Express, and Netscape Mail. Each POP3 account has its own password to ensure privacy. You can check your Email from anywhere around the world if you have access to the Internet.

RAID
RAID, short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, is a method whereby information is spread across several disks, using techniques such as disk striping (RAID Level 0) and disk mirroring (RAID level 1) to achieve redundancy, lower latency and/or higher bandwidth for reading and/or writing, and recoverability from hard-disk crashes. Over six different types of RAID configurations have been defined.

Referrer Log
Referrer logs add extended tracking capability to your web site statistics and access-log. You will know where your customers are coming from. For example, you will know what keywords they typed in to find your site and what search engine they came from. It provides invaluable information for your marketing efforts.

Ruby:
Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.

Search Engine
A remotely accessible program that lets you do keyword searches for information on the Internet. There are several types of search engines; the search may cover titles of documents, URLs, headers, or the full text.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data - a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers.By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:.

SSI (Server Side Includes)
SSI (Server Side Includes) are directives that are placed in HTML pages, and evaluated on the server while the pages are being served. They let you add dynamically generated content to an existing HTML page, without having to serve the entire page via a CGI program, or other dynamic technology. The decision of when to use SSI, and when to have your page entirely generated by some program, is usually a matter of how much of the page is static, and how much needs to be recalculated every time the page is served. SSI is a great way to add small pieces of information, such as the current time. But if a majority of your page is being generated at the time that it is served, you need to look for some other solution.

ALL SSI pages MUST end in .shtml NOT .html or .htm !!!!

Basic SSI directives
SSI directives have the following syntax:
<!--#element attribute=value attribute=value ... -->

It is formatted like an HTML comment, so if you don't have SSI correctly enabled, the browser will ignore it, but it will still be visible in the HTML source. If you have SSI correctly configured, the directive will be replaced with its results.

The element can be one of a number of things, and we'll talk some more about most of these in the next installment of this series. For now, here are some examples of what you can do with SSI

Today's date
<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->

The echo element just spits out the value of a variable. There are a number of standard variables, which include the whole set of environment variables that are available to CGI programs. Also, you can define your own variables with the set element.

If you don't like the format in which the date gets printed, you can use the config element, with a timefmt attribute, to modify that formatting.

<!--#config timefmt="%A %B %d, %Y" -->
Today is <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->

Modification date of the file This document last modified <!--#flastmod file="index.html" -->

This element is also subject to timefmt format configurations.

Including the results of a CGI program This is one of the more common uses of SSI - to output the results of a CGI program, such as everybody's favorite, a ``hit counter.''

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter.pl" -->

In order for your SSI to work, the web page must have .shtml extensions.

Sample SSI:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/count.cgi"-->
Please note that the url must be relative as shown above. Following would not work:
<!--#exec.cgi="http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/count.cgi"-->
  
For more discussion on SSI, please click here.

Shopping Cart
Keeps track of what your customers have ordered from your Internet store. Customers add and remove items from their shopping cart, and then the order is tallied when they are ready to check out. If the customer decides to submit the order, the program Emails the order information to the address of your choice and sends a confirmation to the customer.

Simple Search
The simple search CGI script was written to allow people to set up a search of their site, so their users could enter keywords and find all documents matching those keywords. It was written to be simple, so there are not many options.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application.

Spam Assassin
SpamAssassin(tm) is a mail filter to identify spam.
Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email.
The spam-identification tactics used include:

• header analysis: spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, fool you into thinking they've sent a valid mail, or fool you into thinking you must have subscribed at some stage. SpamAssassin tries to spot these.
  
• text analysis: again, spam mails often have a characteristic style (to put it politely), and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. SpamAssassin can spot these, too.
  
• blacklists: SpamAssassin supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.org, ordb.org or others.
  
• Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.

Spam Corral
The sendmail virus/spam filter (Spam Assassin) redirects all received spam to the spam corral, instead of delivering it. However, it is possible that a piece of spam could be valuable or even that a non-spam message be misidentified as spam and corralled by mistake. The spam handling programs in this package make dealing with spam simple and easy.
The notification program is run once a day by a cron job, whereupon it will send email notification messages to all recipeints of spam, summarizing each of the messages received since the last time it was run. When a user receives notification, they can optionally reply to the message, listing any pieces of spam which they wish to see and it will be remailed to them (this time it passes through the filter unscathed).

The Spamhaus Block List
The Spamhaus Block List (SBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of verified spam sources (including spammers, spam gangs and spam support services), maintained by the Spamhaus Project team and supplied as a free service to help email administrators better manage incoming email streams.
The SBL is queriable in realtime by mail systems thoughout the Internet, allowing email administrators to identify or block incoming connections from IP addresses involved in the sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email.
The SBL database is updated 24/7 by a dedicated international Spamhaus team (US, UK, NL, I, JP, AR) and is broadcast by 32 SBL zone mirror servers based in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Africa, UK and USA. Spamhaus also supplies direct hourly Datafeeds of the SBL to many of the Internet's major Internet Service Providers, Corporations, Universities, Government and Military networks.

Spamhaus Exploits Block List
The Spamhaus Exploits Block List (XBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits.
Incorporates CBL data and OPM data
The XBL wholly incorporates data from two highly-trusted DNSBLs, the CBL (Composite Block List) from cbl.abuseat.org, and the Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor from opm.blitzed.org, therefore mail servers already using cbl.abuseat.org and opm.blitzed.org should NOT also use xbl.spamhaus.org or you will be making 'double' queries to basically the same data source and only one DNSBL will appear to work, the other(s) will appear to not catch anything. For additional FAQs and information on the CBL see http://cbl.abuseat.org/. For information on OPM see http://opm.blitzed.org/info

Streaming MultiMedia Server
Streaming Server is server technology which allows you to send streaming QuickTime data to clients across the Internet using the industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols. It is based on the same code as Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server. Supports QuickTime (.mov), MP3 audio (.mp3), or MPEG-4 (.mp4) files.

Web-Based Email
Web-Based Email is a standards-based webmail package that allows you to access your Email from any Web browser on the Internet. It includes built-in support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. Web-Based Email has all the functionality you would want from an Email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation.