Support Start > About Us and Our Services > About Web Hosting > Services We Don’t Offer

We handle the technical side of “hosting” your Web site and keeping the servers running smoothly, but we don’t create the text or graphic design of the Web pages that will go on your site or maintain Web site scripts for you. In other words, you are responsible for creating and maintaining your web site’s content.

Our systems do not offer the following technologies and services:

• Background programs such as IRC bots.
• ColdFusion support.
• Dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers (VPS).
• Streaming media servers, including those supporting the RTSP protocol.
• Java Development Kit (JDK).
• Java “servlets” that require the Java Runtime Environment or Tomcat (or similar) on the server, including JavaServer Pages (JSP). Normal JavaScript and Java applets that run on the visitor’s computer are fine, of course.
• LDAP directory server hosting.
• “Mailman only” list hosting, where we host the Mailman lists without hosting other e-mail.
• Microsoft Exchange Server (e-mail, calendar, etc). However, you can still route e-mail through a separate Exchange server that you manage yourself.
• Microsoft ASP script or ASP.NET support.
• Microsoft Access, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or FileMaker database support (we do support the more widely used MySQL database). Note that you can use Microsoft Access (or other programs) on your local PC and have them connect to a MySQL database on our servers via ODBC.
• The “mod_perl” and “mod_php” Apache modules. Using these modules on a shared server would not be secure; instead, we run scripts under a separate Unix “user id” for each customer, using Apache’s suExec feature. FastCGI is available to allow Perl and PHP scripts to run as fast as they would under mod_perl or mod_php.
• The ability to install your own PHP PECL extensions (unless you compile and install your own copy of PHP, which we don’t recommend). Note that we do support PHP PEAR packages.
• Plone content management system. Plone does not work on our systems because it requires root access, the ability to use arbitrary port numbers, and the Zope Web server software instead of the standard Apache Web server (see below).
• WebDAV. The currently available versions of WebDAV do not allow files to be owned by different Unix user IDs. This makes it inappropriate for servers that allow people to upload executable scripts: WebDAV would allow users to view each others’ files, which we consider unacceptable.
• Shared group calendars and contacts (these usually require WebDAV or Microsoft Exchange).
• Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
• Zope application server. Even though there are a few ways suggested to run Zope under Apache, those work-arounds will not work with our server setup.

Most “shared hosting” customers are unlikely to need these services. We’ve listed them here merely to help people who might search our Web site for these phrases.