E-mail and Web Hosting

economy plans



Intro

Our economy web plans were created to offer an alternative to people who perhaps don't need the features in the standard plans, or who are looking for an even more inexpensive alternative. Perhaps you are just starting out, and you want to try out this web thing without committing as many resources. If you just have a small web site and you don't need all of the fancy aliases or forwards, one of our economy plans can get you hosted for much less cash outlay. How much less? A small web site with no e-mail could save $6/mo ($60-72/yr) over our Bronze web plan. A small web site with one e-mail address could save $6-9/mo ($60-108/yr) over our standard Bronze web and e-mail package.

Why?

Why would we want to create even cheaper versions of our already inexpensive hosting plans? Because we know that one plan does not always fit all, and we are altogether too familiar with what it is like to live within a tight budget. We wanted to offer more options to you, and by doing so, expand our appeal to a broader range of people. Someone who may have previously done without web hosting gets a service they desire and we gain a new customer. Everybody wins!

How?

How are we able to offer hosting cheaper than our other plans? When you purchase web hosting, you are essentially "renting" our system and network resources. Your web pages and e-mail consume disk space while your e-mail messages and web site visitors consume network bandwidth. The limits built into the economy plans mean that you consume less of these resources, and therefore we can charge you less, because it essentially costs us less to host you. In effect, the economy plans simply ensure that you are not paying for resources which you aren't using.

What's the catch?

As you may have gathered after reading the previous paragraph, the "catch" is that the economy plans are more limited than the standard plans, to cause them to consume less resources. However, this is really only a "catch" if you need to use these resources in the first place. If you do, the standard plans are always available for you. The limitations on the economy plans are as follows: The first two limitations are pretty self explanatory, but the third may need some explanation... With the standard plans, we do not artificially restrict the bandwidth to your web site. "Our bandwidth is your bandwidth", so to speak. By default, this is also the case with the economy plans, BUT... if a web site hosted via an economy plan were to take up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, we will "throttle" the connection to that site such that it is only allowed to use a percentage of our bandwidth if other sites hosted via the standard plans are trying to use that bandwidth at the same time. (What this will mean to your visitors is that your web site may load more slowly than it normally would.) In other words, when it comes to bandwidth allocation, the standard plans are our first priority.

The details

So, how is an economy plan different from the standard plans? Well, first of all, with the standard plans you choose a web plan and an e-mail plan individually. With the economy plans there are only three plans available, and you cannot "pick and choose" your web separately from your e-mail. The three plans are as follows:
EconoWeb
With this plan, you get 10MB for your web site, and no e-mail. You will need to use your existing e-mail address (at your ISP, for example).
EconoMail
This plan is the same as EconoWeb except that you also get a "forwarding" e-mail address. What this means is that we provide you with one e-mail address which will forward anything sent to it to your existing e-mail address. (The one you got from your ISP, for example.) You also gain access to our SMTP server, so you can send outgoing e-mail through us if you prefer, rather than via your ISP.
EconoPOP
This plan is the same as EconoMail except that your e-mail address is not a "forwarding" type address; you get an actual POP3 mailbox, so that your e-mail is delivered here, and you download it from us with your e-mail client. (Eudora, Netscape, Outlook, etc.) If you would like your e-mail address to forward elsewhere, (same as with the EconoMail plan) you can do this as well. Note that if you were to elect to permanantly change your e-mail address to a "forwarding" type, you might as well save the few dollars and get an EconoMail account instead... :-)
Another difference between the economy and standard plans is that you do not have the control over aliases and forwards like you do with the standard plans. In the standard e-mail plans, you can define as many aliases and forwarding addresses as you like. With the economy plans, you're stuck with only one incoming address (except for EconoWeb where you have no e-mail), and mail to that address will either forward to somewhere else (EconoMail) or go into your pop3 mailbox (EconoPOP).

Beyond that, there is no difference between the economy and standard plans. You still have access to the Account Manager, you can upload CGI scripts, you have FTP access to upload and maintain your web site, etc. All features are the same except for the changes noted on this page.

Upgrading to a standard plan

What if you have an economy plan and later decide that you want to upgrade to a standard plan? No problem. If you are paying by the month, you would be upgraded and your next month's fee would be that of the standard plan(s) you chose. If you have paid for a year's worth of service in advance, we will simply credit the un-used portion of your payment to your account, using a straight "divide by 12" method, rather than pro-rating at the monthly fee. (See the Yearly Rate page for more info about this.)

Economy plan summary

Economy Plans EconoWeb EconoMail EconoPop
Disk Usage 10 MB 10 MB 10 MB
Transfer limit Subject to restriction Subject to restriction Subject to restriction
FTP (and SCP) access to update HTML? YES YES YES
Your own CGI-BIN? YES YES YES
You can upload CGI programs? (C/C++, sh, perl, python) YES YES YES
Is PHP supported? YES YES YES
Access to your raw log file? YES YES YES
Web log analysis reports? YES YES YES
FrontPage Extensions? NO NO NO
Access to outgoing SMTP server? NO YES YES
E-mail forwarder? NO YES YES
POP3 mailbox? NO NO YES
Can read your e-mail via the web? N/A N/A YES
Java Servlets? YES YES YES
Price (Monthly Basis) $4/mo $6/mo $9/mo
Price (Yearly Basis) $40/yr $60/yr $90/yr
Savings if you pay yearly vs monthly $8/yr $12/yr $18/yr
Setup Fee None None None

Additional disk space beyond the 10 MB included may be purchased in blocks of 5 MB for $1/month per block or $10/year per block. Example: You want 25 MB of disk space, but no e-mail. You will need to purchase the EconoWeb plan for the initial 10 MB, and 3 additional blocks of 5 MB at $1/block/month, which is $3/month for the 15MB. $4/month for the EconoWeb plan plus $3/month for the additional 15MB would be $7/month, or if you wish to pre-pay for the entire year, $70.00. ($10/year * 3 blocks = $30; + $40/yr = $70/yr. You save $14.00/year.)