Terminology

Monthly Transfers

Data Transfer, or Bandwidth, is the amount of data transferred to or from your website. This includes HTML pages, images, etc.

We carefully monitor our customers' bandwidth usages to ensure that all the sites on any of our servers will enjoy fast transfer speed.

Customer Control Panel

Our Customer Control Panel is where you go to access and control every aspect of your account with us! It is completely home-grown, and as such is very flexible and specially tailored to all the unique features that Mr.Host offers.

Our control panel is located at https://manage.mrhost.ca (although you can always log in right from http://www.mrhost.ca/ too.)

CGI

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a programming interface between a web server and the system's backend functions - such as processing systems and databases.

It allows web servers to perform data functions and interact with users.

Custom DNS

We allow customers full control over their entire DNS settings by request.

This lets you add custom entries for your personal web servers or email servers, but it also makes it really easy to break your hosting with us.

Just let us know if you'd like to add some custom entries into your DNS settings.

Custom Error Pages

You can create custom error pages for your websites. This allows you to control what visitors to your site will see if they mistype a URL or request a page that doesn't exist.

You can easily setup custom error pages for each site you host, from the Customer Control Panel.

Data Backups

With every Mr.Host plan, we keep extensive back-ups of your data. We periodically take snapshots of the entire files system, and sync them with backup systems. If you accidentally delete a file you need, contact Mr.Host Support and we'll try and recover the most recent version of it we can.

We recommend you always keep your OWN backup copy of your entire website at a remote location as well.

All our storage is completely RAIDed and hot-swappable so if any disk fails, no data is lost, and we can replace the disk without any interruption of service!

There is no additional cost for these backup features.

Database Management Interface

The Customer Control Panel includes a full-featured database management interface, for creating, modifying and maintaining your MySQL databases.

See the Databases section of the Customer Control Panel to get started.

Disk Storage

This is the amount of usable space each customer is allowed on our servers. The number and size of all your files would dictate how much space your site needs.

This includes all HTML files, images, databases, scripts, email, etc. It is generally measured in GB.

Domain Forwarding

Domain Forwarding lets you redirect a domain to another site on the Mr.Host system, or to a URL anywhere on the internet.

You can configure as many forwarding URL's as you'd like from the Customer Control Panel.

Domains Hosted

You can host as many domains on your Mr.Host account as you'd like - there is no limit!

You can register new domains, and transfer existing domains right from your Customer Control Panel login.

Domain Registrations

All Mr.Host plans require at least one domain name associated with it. This domain can be registered through us, or through another domain provider.

If you register a domain through Mr.Host, YOU are the domain owner - NOT Mr.Host; so don't worry about losing your domain.

You can add as many domains to your account as you like, through the Customer Control Panel.

Email Access

All mailboxes on the Mr.Host system support POP3, IMAP and SMTP.

You can use your favorite desktop client (like Outlook or Eudora), mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc), or use our full-featured WebMail interface.

Email Aliases

An alias is a way of receiving mail from many addresses at the same mailbox.

For instance, you could receive email that is addressed to sales@yourdomain.com and service@yourdomain.com in a mailbox account called info@yourdomain.com.

There is no restriction in any of our plans as to how many email aliases you set up.

Email Announcement Lists

Email Announcement Lists (or Exploders as we like to call them) are like mini mailing lists. It allows you to setup a one-to-many email address, used for group posting. For example, you can setup the address list@mydomain.com, and have it go to up to 25 other email addresses.

This is especially helpful in work situations where you want to email all employees at the same time (ie- employees@mydomain.com)

There is no restriction in any of our plans as to how many email exploders you set up.

Email Catch-All Address

A catch-all address receives any e-mail that is sent to a non-existent account at your domain name.

For instance, if one of your addresses is jim@yourdomain.com, and someone sends you an email to jin@yourdomain.com, you will still receive it.

Email Mailboxes

An email account or mailbox is WHERE the mail sent to your email addresses goes on our server.

You can use your favorite email program (Outlook, Eudora, etc.), or use our web-based interface (http://mail.mrhost.ca) to view your mail.

All Mr.Host plans come with unlimited email mailboxes, each with its own username and password protection.

Email Vacation Messages

Email auto-responders or Vacation messages will allow you to setup an auto-reply on any email address(es) within your account. When someone sends an email to an address with an auto-responder, they will automatically receive a reply that you have pre-written.

There is no restriction in any of our plans as to how many email auto-responders you set up.

Email Virus Scanning

Protect your computer against malicious viruses, worms and trojans with our advanced virus protection system. All incoming email messages are individually scanned for suspicious content.

Disguised, encoded and even compressed attachments are extracted in full and compared to a comprehensive database of known viruses. This database is updated hourly to ensure rapid response when a new threat emerges.

File Manager

You can access your FTP account directly from the Customer Control Panel, using our Web-Based File Manager.

This gives you all the common functionality of your favorite ftp client, but all you need is a web browser - perfect for making quick changes or making changes when you're on the road.

Full FTP Access

The process by which files are transferred to the web server is called "FTP" (File Transfer Protocol). You have unlimited access via FTP 24-hours a day. Create and manage your website pages any time of day, at your convenience.

FTP Sub-Accounts

Mr.Host Customers have the ability to configure multiple FTP sub-accounts, which can be limited to individual sites or folder. This makes it easier for customer to hand out short-term login details to contractors or employees, without handing out full access to their accounts.

FTP sub-accounts can be configured through the Sub Account option under the FTP section of the Customer Control Panel

Google Gmail

Did you know you can use Google's Gmail for email hosting on Mr.Host Domains?

We can point email from your domain to the Google Gmail system, and you can use Mr.Host for everything else. Of course, you can always just use us for all your email needs.

45-Day Money Back Guarantee

Each of our web hosting plans carries a 45 day money back guarantee.

If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 45 days of your contract, you will be given a full refund of the monthly service fees paid excluding any domain registration or transfer fees, charges for excess bandwidth or other charges related to setup or utilization of the service.

htaccess Files / Password Protected Directories

You can use .htaccess files on all Mr.Host plans. .htaccess files are text files that you put in a directory of your website to tell our web server (apache) that you'd like to handle requests to that directory in a special way.

There's a lot you can do with an .htaccess file, but some of the most common uses are password-protection, blocking access from a specific IP range or referring URL, and redirecting requests to another URL.

There's almost nothing you can't do with a simple .htaccess file, and there are lots of tutorials all over the web about how to use them!

Check some Google Results

IP Address

Typically, in a shared web hosting environment, a number of websites share the same IP address (a string of numbers like 123.234.232.222). However, if you want to have an SSL Certificate, you'll need your own unique IP address.

You can request one be allocated to your account by contacting Mr.Host Support.

MySQL

MySQL is an open-source SQL (Standard Query Language) database that is fast and reliable.

We make backups of all customer databases on a daily basis, but you should of course make your own as well if the information is at all critical!

PERL 5

PERL is perhaps the best and most prevalent language for writing CGI scripts, because of its superior text-parsing abilities.

On our servers, PERL is located at /usr/bin/perl. To make sure your PERL script gets run from the web as a script you should name it with a .pl or .cgi extension.

We have dozens of PERL modules installed, including: DBI, Image::Magick, SOAP::Lite, MIME::Lite, etc. If there is a specific PERL module you would like installed, just contact Mr.Host Support

PHP

PHP is a web-optimized server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. It is used to create dynamic content quickly and efficiently.

To make sure your php script gets run from the web as a script you should name it with a .php, .php3, .php4, or .phtml extension

Python

Python is another programming language (like perl and PHP) that is popular for writing CGI scripts.

All Mr.Host plans come with access to python.

On our servers, python is located at /usr/local/bin/python. To make sure your python script gets run from the web as a script you should name it with a .py or .cgi extension.

Real Audio/Video Streaming

All Mr.Host plans include support for "http-streaming" real audio and video.

This basically means you can link to .rm files and they will stream to customers who have RealPlayer installed on their computer.

Secure Encrypted Email (POP/IMAP/SMTP)

Mr.Host supports secure encrypted access to all its mail services, including POPS, IMAPS and SMTPS.

For more information on how to configure your email client for secure email, see our Knowledge Base article here:

http://mrhost.ca/system/knowledge-base/email-mailing-lists/e-mail-client-setup/secure-email-using-ssl-with-imap-pop-and-smtp/

Secure Encrypted FTP Access

All Mr.Host FTP servers support secure encrypted FTP access using FTPS (both implicit and explicit).

For more information on how to configure your FTP client for secure FTP access, see our Knowledge Base article here:

http://mrhost.ca/system/knowledge-base/ftp-access/ftp-client-setup/secure-ftp-using-ssl-encryption-with-ftp/

Spam Filters

Our spam filter (powered by Spamassassin) flags incoming email messages that have a high probability of being junk email as spam. Spamassassin relies on rules and a centralized spam database to help it analyze potential spam messages.

While not completely perfect (and no spam filter ever truly is), Spamassassin can do wonders for cleaning up your inbox!

SSI

SSI allows you to insert dynamic content into your pages on the server-side. You can put things like the current time, last time this file was updated, or another file right into your HTML file without having to really write any code.

In order for SSI commands to be interpreted by our server, you have to name the file with a .shtml, .htm or .html extension.

SSL

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) allows the server to establish a secure connection with the client's browser for encrypted transmission of sensitive data (e.g. credit card information).

You can either get a certificate from us, or bring your own from any certificate signing authority if you already have one.

SSL requires a Unique IP.

To add SSL to your account, contact Mr.Host Support.

Sub-Domains

You can create sub-domains from within your control panel. Sub-domains are domain names with the form anything.yourdomain.com.

For instance, you can setup a sub-domain site called "forums.mydomain.com" to host your online chat forums.

Technical Support

We offer the same unparalleled technical support free to all our customers, no matter what your plan. You can contact support at any time day or night, every day of the year via email (Mr.Host Support) or from our web page.

We do not currently offer phone support as we feel that would make it impossible to offer our quality services at our current price points. However, our customers generally agree they'd rather send an email and have their solution within a few hours than wait on hold for hours.

We have some of the happiest customers in the industry, mainly due to our very high quality support team!

Uptime Guarantee

Mr.Host offers a 99.99% monthly uptime guarantee for all our services.

That works out to no more than 4.3 minutes of unplanned downtime per month!

See Our Guarantee page for full details.

Web-Mail Access

You can access your Mr.Host mailboxes via a secure web interface (similar to what is offered by aol, hotmail and yahoo)!

To access it, just visit http://mail.mrhost.ca/ with any web browser and log in with your full email address (not mailbox username!) and password.

This web-mail system works via IMAP, which means it can only see saved emails you left on the server and didn't download to your home computer with POP3.

There are a bunch of cool features such as customizing the look of the interface, spell-checker, attachment support, and multiple language support.

Website Aliases

A website alias allows you to have more than one domain name pointing to your website. For example, if your domain is xyz.com you can also point xyz.net , xyz.org or xyz.ca to your main site.

Website Logs

You have access to the raw web logs for your sites. These web logs are the same logs we use to process the nightly web statistics.

They are available for download through your regular FTP account. When you login, you'll see a weblogs directory; there will be one file per website, per month. Mr.Host keeps the current month, plus the last three months, zipped for your convenience.

Please note that depending on your traffic, these files can be very large!

Website Stats

Every night we analyze the log files for all the websites we host, and generate HTML reports which you can view via the Customer Control Panel.

We use a specially modified version of Webalizer to process our weblogs, which provides information like how many page views, unique visits, object hits, data transfer, countries, browsers used, and more.

The Mr.Host Web Stats will deliver all the statistics that you need to assess your traffic flow.

Websites Hosted

Each web hosting account is setup to host multiple websites, under the same disk space and bandwidth quotas. This lets you host unique sites, sub-domain sites (forums.mydomain.com) and website aliases, all at the same time, all under the same space and account.

This means you don't need to pay a whole separate hosting charge, just so you can host multiple sites.