| Q This "managed hosting" seems like a valuable service.
Tell me more about it
A Essentially, we have taken the "managed server" principle and applied it
to hosting, resulting in a high-quality high-integrity "managed hosting" service that
would otherwise cost you several hundreds per month.
We use specialised software packages to monitor your website every 5 minutes
and take appropriate action if a particular service is unreachable. This action will
normally be to attempt to restart the application. If this attempt fails, then a pager
message will be sent to our support staff, who will immediately investigate the problem
personally and do whatever is neccessary to fix it. Once fixed, either automatically or
manually, emails will be sent to both our support staff and the site owner with
information as to what happened and the time it took to get the service back on line
again. Downtime should never be more than 5 minutes maximum, the monitoring interval.
This applies to all software services supplied and maintained by us, but naturally not
to any packages maintained by a client. For example, if your
shop/catalogue becomes misconfigured in such a way that Interchange cannot run it
(invariably this happens because the site owner has done something wrong with the shop),
then this is obviously outside of our realm of responsibility. However,
if Interchange is restarted and a particular shop/catalogue fails to start up and so
remains off-line, our systems will detect this and send an email message (plus optionally
an SMS/pager message) to the site owner so that he can remedy whatever faults he created
which caused this problem. This in itself is a valuable service.
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| Q I'm not familiar with the Interchange eCommerce package - can you describe it?
A Interchange is a full-featured and mature eCommerce package which has been
developed over a number of years, and now has a full web-based control panel which can
administer your affiliates, databases, sales and everything involved in eCommerce.
It is Open Source / Free Software and licensed under the GPL, so you may be sure that you will never
be left out in the cold with a product which is restricted to proprietary support only.
The original developer has now brought together a group of talented programmers and
developers to form the 'IC Dev Group', being the core group which steers Interchange in
the best direction and then develops for it.
It is also very secure and is run in thousands of installations under the most rigorous
conditions of heavy load and high-volume sales. It is fully internationalised in terms
of both currency and languages, and is capable of being integrated with many different
payment gateways in several currencies.
It can be full customised to any extent you like - for example, compare the two demo sites
here (Hard Goods and Soft Goods) to this site for Zolotek. Our own site looks very
different and yet runs the same Interchange software. You may customise the site using
the Control Panel, or if you prefer by ftp and ssh directly on the actual files. Building
a new catalogue is as simple as running './makecat new_shop_name' and answering a few basic
questions about the URL etc - and if you want it even simpler, then you can just
use our Interchange module
in our own Control Panel.
Because it is actually an application server (not just a script),
it requires a Perl daemon (server) to be running continually, meaning that many ISPs
will not allow you to run it, and you will need to find a specialist hoster such as
ourselves. As well as the daemon, it requires you to use a proper database such as
PostgreSQL or MySQL to get the best performance, both of which we provide free of
extra charge. (Though if you only have a few products you may use
the built-in GDBM database instead.) Because it uses a proper database and a real server
(not just a perl script) it can be scaled up to many thousands of products - in fact up
to the limit of the databases we use which is well over a million records.
Interchange is an excellent choice for a number of reasons:
it is backed and developed by the IC Dev Group
you have the full source code and can modify it as you like
it scales from a few to thousands of products, and so grows with your business
it is proven to be safe, secure, versatile, and very capable
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Q What back-ups do you make?
A We make daily back-up copies of everything in your personal directory,
excepting: logs, tmp and session files. We also make SQL back-ups of your MySQL or
PostgreSQL data. These are kept off-site on another server in another data centre, where
they can be used both for restoring data loss in the event of some disaster (eg, you
accidentally uploaded an empty database over the top of your active one ... ) or for use
in a "fail-over" event where we need to activate a back-up server until your main server
comes back on-line.
| Q Can I have more than one domain name pointing to the one site?
A Yes - you just need to ensure that they are all entered in both the DNS
records and the webserver configuration file.
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Q Do you provide Windows hosting, or FrontPage extensions?
A No, absolutely not. in the interests of the security and stability
of our systems and for the benefit of our customers we do not provide Windows
hosting or any MS 'tools'.
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