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