LuxSci Service & Concept Descriptions

Contents

• Data Backups & Restores
• Disk Space Quotas
• Web Site and FTP Bandwidth Quotas
• Your Email Boxes / Users
• MySQL Databases
• Hosting Multiple Web Sites in One Account
• Virtual Directory Web Hosting
• Hosting Your Own Domain(s)
• Secure Web Site Hosting
• SMTP Proxy Servers
• Translate Your Email

Data Backups & Restores

To insure the integrity of your web and email data, we perform nightly backups of all your data to machines in the same data center as your servers. Furthermore, we perform archived weekly backups of all your data to machines located in a geographically distant off-site location. These archives are kept for one month.

Your account can have data restored from backup once per month at no additional cost. If you require data to be restored from backup more frequently, there will be a fee of $25.00 per additional restore (or more depending on the complexity or amount of recovery necessary).

If you require a customized backup schedule, or that archives of your data be kept for a longer period of time, contact sales for a custom quotation.

Disk Space Quotas

All LuxSci accounts come with a minimum of 100 Mb of disk space. If this is not enough for you, you can easily upgrade. The current base cost is $2.90/month or $29.00/year for each additional 100 Mb of disk space. The price goes down if you purchase 1Gb or more of space. See the price list.

Your disk quota is not a hard limit on your disk usage. Your disk usage is unrestricted, but it is monitored throughout the month, and you are charged based on a 95^th percentile of disk usage (95% of the time, you used less than this much disk space): this allows you to exceed your quota for up to 36 hours duing the month without incurring overage charges. You will be charged $0.50 for each 10 Mb (or fraction thereof) that you exceed of your 95% quota each month. The status of your disk quota is given online in the member services area. You can upgrade your disk quota anytime in the LuxSci member's web site.

LuxSci supports optional user-level disk quotas so that you can manage the amount of disk space used by your users. These disk quotas are "hard" in the sense that if the user exceeds his or her quota, the user loses access to many services: the ability to receive email, SMTP relaying, FTP, etc. These quotas are not "hard" in the sense that it is still possible for a user to exceed his or her quota; however, once the user has done so, it is much more difficult to use more space.

Web Site and FTP Bandwidth Quotas

Note: this quota is not relevant to email-only hosting clients.

Your bandwidth quota represents how much data (in megabytes) you expect people to download or upload from/to your site per month via HTTP or FTP. If you have a lot of visitors, a lot of multimedia, or a lot of web sites, you may need more bandwidth. If you have a personal home page or small business page with a small number of visitors, the default of 1 Gb/month (1024 Mb/month) will probably be fine.

You can choose your bandwidth limit based on the needs of your account; you don't have to pay for bandwidth that you don't need. Additional bandwidth currently costs $2.50/month or $25.00/year per each additional Gigabyte. The price goes down if you purchase a lot of bandwidth, see the price list. You can increase your bandwidth quota at any time through the LuxSci member's web site.

Your bandwidth quota is not a hard limit to how much information may be downloaded from your account. The actual bandwidth that you use will be computed for the month and you will be charged based on the total number of megabytes downloaded and uploaded via HTTP and FTP. You will be charged an overage fee of $0.75 for each 1/8 Gb (128 Mb or fraction thereof) that you exceed your bandwidth quota each month. The status of your bandwidth quota is given online in the member services area.

Your Email Boxes / Users

Each email box represents a distinct user's login account to LuxSci. This includes a login to the member's portal, access to services such as WebMail, FTP, POP, IMAP and SMTP. Typically, each person who needs individual email access will need an email box (i.e. will be a "user"). Each LuxSci account comes with at least one email box; additional email boxes currently start at $0.15/month or $1.50/year for WebMail services and increase in cost as you add POP, IMAP, SMTP, and Spam/Virus filtering functionality. You can add additional users to your account at any time through the LuxSci member's web site. See the price list for detailed pricing.

If you have your own domain name, you can have more email addresses than users because you can set up an arbitrary number of "email aliases" which forward email from any specified email address at your domain to your actual users. So, you might now need separate email boxes for addresses like "info," "webmaster," "sales," etc. You can send and receive email for these aliases from any email box you wish. This is one difference between our service and other services that offer 10 or 100 POP email accounts. We give you unlimited aliases to cover all the various addresses you may need, and charge only for actual users.

You can also have a "catch-all" email address for your domain(s) where all email sent to anyone your domain who is not defined by a mailbox or alias is forwarded to address(es) of your choice. All aliases can be managed through online tools in the LuxSci member's web site.

MySQL Databases

Adding a database to your web site allows you to more easily create dynamic web pages, build e-commerce systems, do searches, collect data and surveys from visitors, and much more. You can add any number of MySQL databases to your account at a cost of $1.00/month or $10.00/year each.

See also the MySQL Web Site.

Hosting Multiple Web Sites in One Account

LuxSci allows you to have any number of web sites and domains associated with your account. All share the same overall disk and bandwidth quotas so that you don't waste money on extra disk and bandwidth for each separate domain.

For web hosting customers, web site access statistics are calculated separately for each domain. If you would like to host more than one web site on LuxSci, there is a additional charge of $1.00/month or $10/year per additional web site. If you are an email hosting customer, there is no charge for additional domains (unless we manage your DNS).

Virtual Directory Web Hosting

The least expensive way to setup your web site is to use a "virtual directory". Instead of purchasing your own domain name and having us host it, you can use our domain name, luxsci.net, together with a "site name" of your choosing. For example, your web site address could be "http://luxsci.net/site-name". You can have multiple web sites as virtual directories; see multiple web site hosting. This method is least expensive because you don't have to purchase your own domain name and you don't have to pay for DNS services.

If you do have your own domain name, you can take advantage of virtual directory web hosting to give our separate web sites in your domain to your individual users. They will have full control over the contents of your web site within their virtual directory.

Hosting Your Own Domain(s)

If you already own your own domain(s), such as yourdomain.com, (or wish us to register one for you) we can host web sites and/or email for these domain(s). LuxSci must manage the DNS for these domains. If you want additional subdomains like site1.yourdomain.com and site2.yourdomain.com, there is no additional charge for the DNS (except, see multiple site hosting).

There is no limit to the number of domains that you can have in your LuxSci account. Some of these can be for email hosting only; some for email and web hosting. It is not a problem for LuxSci to host the email services for your domain even if some other company will be the web hosting provider.

Secure Web Site Hosting

If you would like to have a web site secured via SSL, you must obtain a secure site certificate from a trusted third party and a unique IP address from us for your domain. We can help you obtain the secure site certificate; these cost between $159.00 and $199.00/year from our partner, Thawte.com. A dedicated IP address for your secure web site costs $3.00/mo or $30.00/yr.

If you wish to provide your own secure certificate, LuxSci will provide you with a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and you can purchase or generate the certificate and give it to us and we will install it on our web servers. Note that in this case, you are completely responsible for obtaining and renewing your certificate.

If you wish LuxSci to provide your secure certificate for you, you will pay us and we will coordinate with Thawte.com to purchase and renew your certificates. All you will have to do is, perhaps, verify your identity and ownership of your domain with Thawte. This method involves the least work for you and ensures that your certificate will never expire without your permission.

If you have us order the certificate for you from Thawte, you have two options: a basic certificate or a premium certificate.

• A Basic Certificate: Is very fast and easy to obtain (1 day) and correspond's to Thawte's "SSL123" certificate. This certificate include: 128-bit capable encryption, domain check and validation, and highest-in-industry browser compatibility.
• A Premium Certificate: This requires full authentication of your domain name and company and can take several days to several weeks to process the paperwork. These correspond to Thawte's "SSL Web Server" certificates. This certificate include: 128-bit capable encryption, stringent business verification and authentication, and highest-in-industry browser compatibility.

LuxSci allows you to (optionally) have separate web site directories for the secure and insecure versions of your web site for maximum flexibility.

Contact our sales department for more information to arrange for these services.

SMTP Proxy Servers

We have developed an SMTP Proxy technology to help maximize your quality of service. All incoming email passes though the SMTP Proxy servers before delivery to your actual INBOX on your actual email server. This provides your with these benefits:

• Becuase all email and anti-Spam filtering takes place on the proxy servers, these services to not eat up the precious computer power of your email servers -- so your WebMail, POP, IMAP, and Outgoing SMTP services remain fast and available.
• Becuase all incoming email hits the proxy servers first, email worms like SoBig which cause massive Internet congestion may result in the proxy servers working very hard, but should not seriously affect your real email servers -- so your WebMail, POP, IMAP, and Outgoing SMTP services remain fast and available even when the rest of the Internet is under massive virus and worm attacks!

Clients of our Email Defense service receive another layer of transparent Spam and Virus filtering that provides much more protection against email attacks and unwanted messages.

Translate Your Email

Using automatic web page translation technologies, LuxSci enables you to translate your email to and from many languages including: Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh!