Ultratron FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions. This section is updated frequently, so feel free to check back often for helpful hints and tips. If you have a question which is not answered here, please let us know.
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Boy, isn't that the truth? As much as we'd all like to believe that if we search long and hard enough we are going to find that "perfect" deal, often when we dig under the wrong rock we *think* we've found the deal of a lifetime and yet digging further, often when it's too late, we find that what we *thought* was such a great deal ended up being not-so-great after all. Unfortunately for the webmaster community, this is often the case with website host providers. Here at Ultratron, we are comitted to keeping our rates competitive and our service top-notch. While it may be possible to find another provider that is less expensive, be sure you read the fine print for the unexpected, look into their network connectivity since this will greatly affect the loading speed for your pages, and see if they have the service and/or options that you will desire as your company (and website) grows and needs additional services.
The staff here at Ultratron know how difficult it can be to shop for web hosting solutions. Every provider of hosting services seems to have a different blend of services and prices, and to make matters worse, some providers hide various fees (setup fees, additional bandwidth fees, fees for adding extra email accounts, fees for performing domain registrations, etc.) in small print or don't even include them on their webpages. Or worse, some providers try to deceive you by offering things they can't really produce such as unlimited bandwidth (see below). At Ultratron, we believe in honest upfront pricing with no games or hidden fees. You will never be charged a fee that isn't listed on our webpages, and you have our word on it.
While we can't promise we can outbid anybody, we know that you would be pleased with our knowledge and service as an Ultratron valued customer and would love for you to give us a chance to tailor a plan to fit your budget and technical needs. If you are seriously considering choosing another provider over us based upon something we don't offer or because of price, please tell us about it and give us a chance to win your business. After all, what have you got to lose? We WILL match any reasonable competitor's prices.
We have been providing hosting services to clients worldwide since July 1999. Our staff has experience with Internet technology dating back to the mid-1980s, and has kept up with the latest in popular web-based business technology.
We don't want to blow our own horn but our clients have told us:
A lot of companies are out there that can host your web site but when you run into problems that can effect your web site, your hosting provider should be there for you. We are.
- We are a true hosting service (not a reseller) that can have your account set up within 12-48 hours.
- Fast connections to the Internet. Our servers are monitored 24 hours a day in house as well as by an outside monitoring service.
- 30 days money back.
- Robust and efficient UNIX (Linux) hosting.
- Great customer service.
- Knowlegeable technical staff.
Yes we do. A co-located server resides in our network facility and is owned and operated by the customer. We can even help install and configure the hardware and software for your server. A dedicated server is owned and managed by Ultratron, and can be customized according to customer need.
At Ultratron we understand that for many companies website downtime translates into lost revenue. It is for this reason that Ultratron has taken extensive steps toward ensuring that your website stays up reliably. Our webservers are protected against power failure by a combination of both backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies. Our webservers are protected against hard drive failure through disk mirroring. Backups are made nightly so that critical data can be restored if lost. In addition, the servers are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by skilled technicians. If the server should ever fail, replacement parts are kept on hand to get it running again in a hurry. While Ultratron can't control acts of nature, we do our best to ensure that your website stays up reliably.
YES! We make backups of each webserver nightly. While we recommend that our clients also backup their own data for added safety, feel free to let us know if a file gets inadvertantly deleted or corrupted and we'll be happy to restore it from our backups.
Because we won't lie to our customers about what they're buying. Some providers advertise amazing amounts of space for their customers. In most cases, though, if as few as one-fifth of their customers actually used all this space, the provider would run out.
Most web sites simply will not ever use more than twenty megabytes of space. It's a good thing, too, as that's what these providers are banking on.
Ultratron service plans and pricing structures are designed to keep our servers lean and fast. We won't place your website on an oversold server. We have fair and equitable usage limits that we feel provide a good value for your hard earned money.
If you need more space than a plan advertises, it's available at about one-fifth the price many other providers charge. Combine this with the fact that Ultratron runs high-quality, mirrored, server-class disk systems, and you'll see that we offer extraordinary real-world storage values.
Short answer:
There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.Long answer:
Neither a provider nor their customers can really afford to let one site on a shared server consume resources with no limits.Why? Consider these points:
Do you really want to be on a service where someone else's site is allowed to drag down the responsiveness of yours? Can a provider afford to let one customer use bandwidth that should be going to other paying customers?
Take a very close look at providers that claim to offer unlimited bandwidth. They're not stupid - they usually realize that they can't really afford to give people unlimited bandwidth. (But it's a great marketing ploy) Usually, if you dig deeper, you'll find some loophole for the provider - often a clause about excessive CPU usage on the server. They'll still shut you down if they decide you're using "too much," or they're just not making enough money off you.
Or, worse yet, maybe they don't put constraints on sites when they start using "too much". They just hope that nobody gets too popular. Meanwhile, off in the real world, other heavily-hit sites that are on the same server you're on can drag down the performance of your site. Do you really want someone else able to consume resources that should be going to your visitors?
In other words, do not pick a provider with an unlimited pricing structure. They are counting on the average of their customers not transferring what they are paying for or they are bottlenecking your pipe to the Internet. If people can't get to your site or are spending too much time loading the page, you will loose that hit.
If you are on a site with an unlimited pricing structure and you say nothing is wrong, one of four things is happening: 1) You don't know the difference 2) You are looking at your hit count -- just because you are getting hits, that doesn't mean that the person is actually loading your whole page. He might go to your page, let the HTML load (one hit) but not stay long because the images are loading to slow. If someone pushes the back button, you didn't make anything on that hit, did you? 3) Your site doesn't get enough traffic yet. 4) The provider hasn't filled up the particular server you are on. Wait about 3 months, and you will be having trouble.
If there were any way, financially, for us to offer unlimited transfers per month, we would. The numbers just don't add up and still leave the users happy. We could be easily taking $20 per month from people for unlimited use, and I'm sure we'd have a 100% turnover rate every few months.
Truth be told, there really is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. If any hosting company truly offered unlimited bandwidth, large sites such as Yahoo would sign up with that hosting company and save themselves thousands of dollars each month. If any company does claim to offer completely unlimited bandwidth, that company is either misleading customers, grossly inexperienced, or both.
Ultratron does not enforce any artificial quota limits on bandwidth per client. You have all the bandwidth you may need at your disposal. Our accounts come pre-configured with more than enough data transfer allowance to suit 95% of web sites. In addition, we don't tend to monitor individual accounts unless their excess bandwidth usage becomes noticible - ie. we do not nickle and dime our customers. Thus, the Data Transfer Per Month allocation for our accounts is unlikely to become an issue unless you have a very popular heavy traffic website in which case you are probably making enough money from it to afford the extra bandwidth costs anyway.
Isn't it better to have it clearly spelled out what you'e paying for, and what you're not? Unlimited bandwidth is a marketing trick, that's all. We don't believe it's at all fair to customers. Talk to Ultratron, and we'll talk real numbers with you.
While many providers pile 300-400 sites on a server, we at Ultratron like to keep our webservers running smoothly. To ensure that your website is not bogged down by a over-burdened webserver, we limit the number of accounts on each server to 200. In addition, we monitor the load on the servers and may lower this number if there are a few "busier" sites that are using more of the system's resources. Doesn't this cut into our profit margins? Of course! However, keeping our customers happy keeps them coming back!
All the added redundancy in our hardware, backups, limits on the number of accounts on each server, and so on result in much higher expenses to us than many fly-by-night web hosting providers. We are able to provide all this and still maintain competitive rates thanks to referals from our existing customers. Since we believe that word-of-mouth is the best form of advertisement, we work hard to please our customers. If you hear of anyone who is in need of our services, please ask them to consider us. This volume of business helps keep our staff and hardware top-notch while providing you with unparalleled service and value.
Yes! There are never, ever, hidden fees. All fees are clearly laid out, and we always ask your permission before doing anything that would incur additional charges to your account. No policy is set in stone. Common sense always takes precedence. We're willing to work with you to get you exactly what you need.
- We have a track-proven greater than 99.99% uptime ratio.
- Your site runs on professionally monitored and administered servers.
- We have a modern, secure facility
- We're an independent, full-service provider with full control over equipment and policies - we're not reselling someone else's services.
- Outstanding network connectivity - our DS3 Internet connections utilize private data delivery wherever possible, eliminating data congestion at public access points.
- We don't oversell servers or networks. This is why you don't see us advertising ridiculously high disk and bandwidth allotments.
- We provide direct interactive shell access to accounts. For serious web developers, this is a must.
- Full support for custom CGI and SSI is included on all accounts.
- We won't lie to you.
- We won't mislead you with hype-based, fine-print-loaded advertising.
- We will always treat you with respect, and as an individual.
We do not monitor or censor what content our users place on their sites as long as we do not get reports that the content is illegal or reports that a client is engaged in sending UCE (SPAM). Adult websites tend to take up a lot of bandwidth and system resources and thus are usually placed on seperate servers from our business clients to ensure lightning quick response for ALL our clients. We have nearly unlimited bandwidth potential (see details about our network) and even during peak loads don't use more than about 50% of our available bandwidth.
Heavens, no! Local ISPs are everywhere and can help you get connected to the Internet. Networks containing dialup users are often congested and slow. Do you want your customers to compete for bandwidth with dialup users? We prefer to keep our network clean and our bandwidth open for lightning quick loading of your webpages by your customers. We're dedicated to your web site's comfort and care. By not offering dial-up Internet access, we are able to focus our energies on giving your web site a solid, reliable connection to the Internet without cluttering the lines with dial-up accounts. We concentrate on doing one thing and doing it well: providing high quality website hosting and design services.
This is a tough question to answer. There are a great many reasons for transient slow performance, but there are ways you can investigate this further.
Network packets must travel a long way from your local PC to the server where your webpage is located, and back. During it's travels, each packet must pass through many routers and switches along the way, and experiences delays in each of these "hops".
Local PC:
If you dial into the Internet through a modem, most slowdowns occur between your PC and your dial-up account because this is where you have the least bandwidth (the amount of data which can be pushed through your modem at any given time, such as 33kbps, 56kbps, etc.). If you are using Windows 95/98, you may notice the little monitor lights in your status bar (usually lower right) which glow when data is being transmitted to or received from the Internet. If these lights are on almost continuously, then your network connection is "saturated" (ie. your computer is pulling as much as it can through your modem and the speed of your connection is the bottleneck).Dialup ISP:
Some dialup ISPs tend to have very limited bandwidth (aka. "a small pipe") for transferring data from the Internet to your PC. They count on not having everyone who is dialed in downloading pages simultaneously. If many people are dialed in and actively surfing simultaneously, the ISP's connection to the Internet can become saturated thus causing slow response to everyone dialed in through that ISP's Point of Presence (ie. it affects everyone dialing in to your ISP in your home town). If you notice slowdowns at busy times of the day, such as from 5PM to midnight, this may be part of the problem.The Internet Itself:
The Internet is actually made up of a backbone of many high-speed, high-bandwidth lines connecting major metropolitan areas throughout the world. Even though the bandwidth potential on these lines is huge, it is possible for router outages, or unusually high demand to lower the response time on the backbones themselves. To get a status report on how the major connection points on the backbone are doing, visit http://www.InternetTrafficReport.com/.Your site's webserver system:
We have a third party monitoring service check our servers every 5 minutes to ensure that things are running smoothly. If the webserver takes longer than a predetermined threshold of time to load a test page, our engineers are paged to look into the problem. This means any slowness on the part of the webserver is addressed quickly so that your site will continue loading quickly.
Operating a website from your home or office can be a very costly proposition. There are three main reasons that contribute to a prohibitively high barrier of entry to the Internet.
- Costs - The cost of creating a network for housing and maintaining your website can be exorbitant. Hardware (servers) and software (web management tools) require a significant initial outlay of cash. In addition, high speed redundant connectivity, such as a dedicated line to the Internet, costs thousands of dollars to setup and maintain. A file backup system or mirrored/redundant system is also essential to counter accidents that corrupt or erase files.
- Technical Expertise - A large amount of knowledge is necessary to setup and operate the requisite hardware and software. If you are not lucky enough to have this information yourself, not to mention the time it takes to properly operate the systems, the cost of hiring an Information Technology consultant is a price many businesses cannot afford to pay.
- Time - Maintaining a website from a home or office requires an inordinate amount of time. For a growing enterprise, time spent on monitoring and maintaining a website is time taken away from growing the business.
Any questions? Email support@ultratron.net.