Subject: Virtual Domain Names and Pricing
ART MATRIX - LIGHTLINK
PO 880 Ithaca, NY 14851-0880
(607) 277-0959 Voice
(607) 277-8913 Fax
(607) 277-5026 Modems
homer@lightlink.com E-mail
jes@lightlink.com E-mail
09/15/98 Tuesday 4:58pm EST
10 MONTHS IN ADVANCE, 2 MONTHS FREE
Most recurring costs are offered on a monthly or yearly basis.
If accounts are paid on the yearly basis, two months are given free.
Thus an account that was $20/month would be $200/year.
There is no committment for paying in advance. If you pay $200
for the year, and leave in 6 months, you would get $100 back.
PRICING SUMMARY
Telnet Account with web page space $10/month $100/year
Dialup Access to our modems $10/month $100/year
Extra E-mail aliases $0/month $0/year
Extra E-mail accounts with password $5/month $50/year
Domain Registration $0 one time setup
Domain Maintenance on Internet $35/year to the internic
Domain Maintenance on Lightlink
Non-IP Virtual Domain $10/month $100/year
IP Virtual Domain $20/month $200/year
Cold Storage $25/year
Domain E-mail Forwarding $0/month $0/year
TELNET ONLY ACCOUNTS, NO DIALUP
Telnet only accounts are $10/month and come with one e-mail
account and 25 meg of online disk space for mail, home, ftp and web
directories.
Your e-mail address is username@lightlink.com.
Your web URL is:
http://www.lightlink.com/your-account-name
Extra disk space is $1/meg/month average usage over 25 megs.
Disk space stats may be viewed at
http://www.lightlink.com/stats
Advanced payments are not accepted for disk space usage, but are
accepted for account charges.
FULL DIAL UP ACCOUNT
Dialup access is $10/month or $100/year.
We do not presently offer dialup only accounts, therefore dialup
plus telnet account is $20/month or $200/year.
E-MAIL ALIASES
E-mail aliases are presently free, but must be unique to the
system and not conflict with other names on the system. An e-mail
alias is a second e-mail name that forwards into your normal mailbox.
EXTRA E-MAIL ACCOUNTS
If you need extra mailboxes with their own passwords on
lightlink, they are $5/month each or $50/year. The user must already
have dialup access either with lightlink or elsewhere, as they won't
be able to dialup on their extra e-mail account name.
To read this mail they need to set their e-mail client to read
mail from pop.lightlink.com with their secondary e-mail name as the
pop user name.
If people are sharing a single dialup account to access multiple
mailboxes on lightlink, only one person may be signed on at a time.
VIRTUAL DOMAINS
WHY HAVE A DOMAIN NAME?
E-mail and web addresses tend to be heavily used in business
advertising, both in printed form and on the internet itself. E-mail
and web addresses tend to get imbedded in the underlying memory of the
internet and are very hard to erase or change once they are stored in
a million sites and news articles and other's web pages who have made
links to you.
Say you have an account named boss@lightlink.com.
If you invest money in advertising that says,
Web: http://www.lightlink.com/boss
E-mail: boss@lightlink.com
and one day you decide to change providers, all that advertising
will be no good.
Having a virtual domain name allows you to use
Web: http://www.yourdomain.com
E-mail: boss@yourdomain.com
It's called a virtual domain name, because the domain name does
not refer to a real network of machines belonging to you, but refers
instead to a network of machines belonging to your provider, but is
'virtually as good' as a real domain name.
If you change providers, you take your virtual domain name with
you and simply have your new provider point it to them rather than to
us. The e-mail and web addresses remain good no matter where you go.
Also if your company is named Your Domain, Inc, it is much easier
for potential customers to guess
http://www.yourdomain.com
than it is to guess
http://www.lightlink.com/boss.
Also 'boss' is clearly a sub account on someone else's machine,
namely ours, lightlink.com.
It is for these reasons that having a virtual domain name is
desirable.
This guarantees that your e-mail address and web URL will work no
matter where you go or what your real account name is on that system,
it also makes you look like you own your own system!
As an aside you should note that using your own domain name in
your web and e-mail addresses causes lightlink to lose any advertising
it might have received via having its name in your e-mail and web
address.
DOMAIN NAME FORMATS
Domain names must be 26 characters or less including the .com
at the end. DO NOT include the www. infront of your domain name,
as that is assumed.
Thus check for artmatrix.com not www.artmatrix.com.
Domain names must use only characters and numbers and no special
characters except for the dash '-', in partcular underbars '_' are not
allowed.
Domain names are inherently lower case, but may be advertsied as
upper case, http://WWW.ARTMATRIX.COM
DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION
There is a one time setup fee of $0, payable to lightlink, to
register, create and maintain a domain name on lightlink.
There is a $35/year fee, payable to the Internic, to maintain
your domain name on the internet. The Internic is the Internet
Network Information Center and is a central clearing house for many
domains. They will bill you directly for this charge, first two years
up front, and yearly thereafter.
Once your domain name is registered your URL will be,
http://www.yourdomain.com
DOMAIN NAME E-MAIL FORWARDING
For e-mail you may have any number of usernames@yourdomain.com
forwarded to any real account anywhere. There is presently no charge
for this, and you are free to edit your domain forwarding file any
time you like at
</pre><center><a href=http://www.lightlink.com/vd>Virtual Domain Forwarding</a></center><pre>
For example joe@yourdomain.com can be forwarded to joe@aol.com.
If you need extra e-mail only accounts with passwords on
lightlink, they are $5/month or $50/year each, as described above.
Then joe@yourdomain.com can be forwarded to joe@lightlink.com.
NON-IP and IP VIRTUAL DOMAINS
We offer two levels of virtual domain name service, depending
on how mission critical your application is.
Both will allow your web URL to be
http://www.yourdomain.com
but NON-IP virtual domains do not work as well as IP virtual
domains.
Actually NON-IP virtual domains do in fact have an IP number
assinged to them, but its the IP number of the web server.
IP virtual domains have their very own IP number unique to them
in the whole world.
Older browsing clients, such as Netscape 1.1 request the web page
by sending the IP number of the domain name and not the domain name
itself. Since NON-IP virtual domains have the IP of the web server,
the web server sees a request for its own home page and not a request
for the virtual domain's home page.
Newer web clients such as Netscape 2.0, aware of this problem,
send a web request with both the IP number and the domain name itself.
Thus when the request gets to the web server, newer web servers are
able to see that the request is coming in for the domain name even
though it has the IP number of the web server, and properly serve up
the domain name's web page instead of the servers.
NON-IP VIRTUAL DOMAINS
If you wish a non-IP virtual domain, the charge is $10/month or
$100/year per domain.
Non-IP virtual domains do not work properly with all browsers,
particularly with older versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer, the
AOL browser and various text based browsers like lynx.
There are *MANY* different kinds of browsers in use, particularly
in libraries, government agencies, laptops, and foreign countries.
Many of these have not kept up with the changing standards of the
internet and do not support NON-IP virtual domains properly.
On these browsers a non-IP virtual domain will fail to go to your
own home page but will fall instead onto Lightlink's main home page.
Also Non-IP virtual domains do not have proper reverse DNS so
requests for their web pages may be blocked by some firewalls as the
users end that try to make sure that domains and IP numbers match.
Non-IP virtual domains are not suitable for mission critical web
applications, however they seem to work properly with e-mail. (We
have never had a failure reported because of them.)
IP VIRTUAL DOMAIN NAME
If you wish an IP virtual domain the charge is $20/month or
$200/year.
IP virtual domains work properly with all browsers and with
e-mail.
MULTIPLE IP DOMAINS SHARING AN IP
If you have more than one IP domain, but all of them are pointing
to the same directory, the second domains will count as NON-IP domains
for charging purposes, even though they have a shared IP with the IP
domain.
HOW DO I KNOW IF MY DOMAIN NAME IS AVAILABLE FOR ME TO USE?
You can and should check to see if your domain name is already in
use, or one similar to it, by consulting the Internic whois database.
Click here to find out if you domain exists.
</pre><center>
<a href=http://www.lightlink.com/whois.html>
WHO IS </a></center><pre>
Alternatively from your shell account you can do the following:
telnet rs.internic.net
whois mydomain*
If you do not have telnet access, please request that we do this
for you.
To register your domain name, request the domain name
registration form from us.
Click here to have it mailed to you:
</pre> <center>
<a href=http://www.lightlink.com/domreg.html>
MAIL DOMAIN REGISTRATION FORM </a> </center> <pre>
E-MAIL VIRTUAL DOMAINS
One you have a working domain name, you may have mail to any
number of usernames@yourdomain.com forwarded to any account on any
real system anywhere. There is presently no charge for this.
In general all mail to your domain will go to your private
account on lightlink unless you specify particular
usernames@yourdomain.com that you would like forwarded elsewhere.
Username files may be edited at
</pre><center><a href=http://www.lightlink.com/vd>Virtual Domain Forwarding</a></center><pre>
Assume your primary account on lightlink is called 'boss'.
Username files have the following form:
yourdomain.com boss@lightlink.com
joe@yourdomain.com joseph@netcom.com
joseph@yourdomain.com joseph@netcom.com
susan@yourdomain.com susan@lightlink.com
info@yourdomain.com infobot@lightlink.com
Although the info bot is complicated to use, it is very flexible
and is presently no charge. It allows people to send mail to any
number of info or info-requests at yourdomain.com, and recieve back
prepackaged canned replies of as many files as you wish.
If you need an infobot, please contact homer@lightlink directly
for further information.
CHARGES FOR WEB BANDWIDTH USAGES
There is presently no charge for web bandwidth, however in the
near future we may charge for bandwidth use above a certain as yet
undetermined level.
Bandwidth will be determined by bandwidth usage, megabytes per
month used, and not number of hits. So if you keep your pages small
and to the point, you can get a lot of hits and not use a lot of
bandwidth. Images and sound files in particular use lots of
bandwidth.
Web hit statistics are available on our home page at
http://www.lightlink.com/stats
Homer and Jane