Technical FAQ

Can I have MP3's or Videos on my site?

Yes, provided you own the copyright to them..........

I want to sell things on my web site, will your shopping cart help me do this?

You need to start from the other end. Work out how you are going to process credit card transactions, then find a shopping cart that suits that method, then find a suitable hosting plan. If you are not an established business you will find it difficult to get a merchant account so you might be safer starting with Paypal: www.paypal.com This has its own shopping cart which can be used with any of our hosting plans. We do offer agora and OSCommerce, please ask us about this.

What sort of systems do you use?

All sites are hosted on rack mounted Pentium servers with a minimum 1GB RAM.

What sort of connections do you have?

Please Click Here for detailed information.

What backups do you run?

We store daily, weekly and monthly backups of each web site we host. Our servers also have spare disk drives installed so in the event of a hard disk failure we can restore all sites quickly. 

What sort of DNS system do you run?

We use a distributed DNS system with primary name servers in the USA and UK.

Many hosting companies run two name servers on the same server as your web site. You can spot these companies because they will give you DNS server names like dns12.hosting---company.com and dns13.hosting---company.com This is insecure, because if the web server goes down the DNS needs to propagate out when the system comes back on line. 

Our DNS system continues to work regardless of any issues with your web site.

Some hosting companies will put two name servers on different physical servers in the same data centre. This is not sufficient because if they have servers in more than one data centre and the line to the first location goes down, all the sites they host will diappear from the internet.

Even having two name servers in different countries is not always enough if both are set to update from each other. When one goes down their is the risk that the other will update incorrectly.

By updating from one central server we avoid this problem. The master DNS server is protected by a firewall and sends updates to the servers that broadcast the DNS information to the Internet. This prevents the master zone file information being corrupted by worms, trojans or other exploits. In the event that the master DNS server fails we have a backup machine running in parallel.

Some of our competitors think this system is overkill, but you should take this as an indication of how seriously we treat the business of hosting your web site. 

Can you change my MX record?

Yes, we can change your MX record so that your e-mail is directed to another mail server.

Why is your bandwidth not "unlimited"?

When we set up AJAHosting.com we wanted it to be the most reliable and honest web hosting company on the Internet. Many companies quote "unlimited" or "unmetered" bandwidth allocations, but in the small print you will find that they have the right to remove your site without warning if you are using too much bandwidth. Put simply, this means they have a limit but they are not prepared to tell you what it is. They need to have this clause because bandwidth (or data transfer) costs money. The telecom companies that provide internet connectivity charge for every GB of transfer on their networks and many "unlimited companies" have found that they cannot sustain their service without regularly removing accounts.

AJAHosting.com has a proper, sustainable, business model which offers high bandwidth allocations to all our customers with no automatic removal of sites for exceeding their allocations. We tell you how much bandwidth you have and give you a meter (in your control panel) to monitor your use of it.