Shared Hosting Features
 
  • Windows Server 2003/IIS6 - Sites created on Maze Networking servers now run on Windows Server 2003 and IIS6 technology.  More stable, more secure, and more efficient, Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6 are a fast growing and powerful web server combination.
 
  • Helm Control Panel - To take a thing as complex as hosting management and convert it into a tool users can easily use to effectively manage their web hosting needs takes great skill. The folks at Web Host Automation have done this with their Helm control panel. Helm is a web-based management console that allows you to manage every aspect of your website from billing to databases, FTP to statistics, Helm does almost everything you need and it just keeps amazing us with every new release. For a live demo of the Helm control panel, please click here.
 
  • 30 Day Money Back Guarantee - Maze Networking offers you the chance to try out our services with no fear of wasting money. If you decide you're not happy with Maze Networking hosting (which we highly doubt!), just ask us for a refund within 30 days of signing up with us and we'll refund your money, no questions asked. This does not apply to dedicated server plans.
 
  • Free Upgrades - You never have to fear that technology will get outdated. We update with the latest patches and software updated after we test them to ensure no major glitches will happen during the upgrade. This allows you to use the latest and greatest technology with a minimum of wait time.
 
  • Unlimited Phone/E-Mail Support - If you have a question, we're here to help. Phone support is available free of charge during normal business hours (8 AM to 5 PM M-F) and our trouble ticket system is available 24/7.  We normally respond within 2 hours during normal business hours and often after hours as well.  However, our after hours support response times are within 12 hours, unless it is an emergency.
 
  • 24x7 Monitoring System - Our monitoring system runs 24x7 to keep an eye on our servers.  It queries all our servers every few minutes, and also executes certain web pages to ensure no application services go down. If it does discover a problem, it notifies us by e-mail and pager so we can respond quickly to resolve the issue and keep your downtime minimal.  We have both an on-site and off-site monitoring system set up for redundancy.
 
  • Online Flash Tutorials - We provide you with easy-to-follow Flash-based tutorials and have a growing searchable knowledgebase to help you get the answers you need to your questions quickly.
 
  • 24x7 KB and Ticket System - We have a comprehensive online knowledgebase to help answer your most frequently asked questions.  For support issues, you can use our online support ticket system which we use to track your issue to closure.
 
  • Total Disk Space - This is the amount of total hard drive space available to you for storage of your website, log files, databases, and mail accounts.
 
  • Bandwidth - This is the total amount of traffic that can flow to and from your website in the past 30 days. This includes your FTP traffic. As a reference, 10 GB bandwidth is equivalent to about 1 million visitors to your site!
 
  • Static IP - To locate a website, you need an address. It's much like the address of a house in your neighborhood. If you know the address, you can find the house. An IP address is a numerical identifier for a computer on the Internet. Most shared plans operate on a single IP address, meaning multiple web sites can resolve to a single IP address. However, if you want to secure your site using SSL, as you might for handling credit card transactions, the use of a static IP is required. Due to the dwindling numbers of available IP addresses on the Internet, we try to conserve them as much as possible. Which is why we make them available to you only upon request.
 
  • www.domain.com & domain.com - If you have a domain name, or wish to purchase one through us, we will ensure your domain resolves to both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com (sometimes people forget, or like, to leave off the www).
 
  • Number of Domains - This is the number of independently manageable websites you can create with your plan. Some plans offer the ability to create multiple websites under one plan.
 
  • Shared SSL Domains - Shared SSL allows you to user our shared SSL certificate so you can secure through https a section of your site without the need to purchase your own SSL certificate or pay the monthly cost of a static IP. All you need to do is place the files you wish to SSL-enable into your SSL folder under your FTP root, and then you'd browse to those secured files by entering something like https://ssl1.oursslcert.com/yoursslfolder
 
  • Number of Subdomains - A subdomain is something like mysub.yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com. Basically, it allows you to create a website within a website without your needing to purchase an additional domain name.
 
  • Web Forwarding - Redirect your domain name to another web site using web forwarding.
 
  • Number of Domain Aliases - A domain alias allows you to have multiple domain names resolve to a single website. So www.yourdomain1.com could point to www.yourdomain.com.  You must register each domain name you wish to use as an alias with a registrar.
 
  • POP3/IMAP E-Mail Accounts - Connect via the standard POP3 protocol to download your e-mail messages into your e-mail client (such as Outlook) or use IMAP to store mail on the server and always have your e-mail and e-mail folders readily available to you anywhere.
 
  • Space per mailbox - The amount of space you have to store your messages. So, if you go on vacation and let your mailbox fill up over a week, if it reaches this amount of space, mail will start getting rejected back to the sender with a message your mailbox is full.
 
  • Autoresponders - These allow you to set up an automated response to any mail that comes into your POP mailbox. For example, when you go on vacation, you could turn your autoresponder on with a custom message saying "I'm out of town and will be back Monday". It's also useful for businesses that want to automatically let their customers know they've received a sales inquiry.
 
  • E-Mail Aliases - Allows you to have e-mail from an aliased domain you have set up on your account forward to a physical mailbox at your primary domain.
 
  • Mailing Lists - If you have a group of people you want to receive e-mails, rather than adding each name to your e-mail To: line, you create a list and send your e-mail to the list. Whoever is on the list will receive the e-mail.
 
  • Mailing List Members - The maximum number of people you can have on your mailing list.
 
  • Webmail - Check your e-mail from anywhere you have access the Internet. Webmail allows you to view any message you have in your inbox via a web page.
 
  • Catch-all Forwarding - Allows you to set up a default mailbox that "catches" all mail that is sent to your domain, but not to a specific account you have created. So, if I send an e-mail to joe@yourdomain.com, but joe doesn't have a POP3 mailbox or forwarder, that e-mail will go to the catch-all account. The catch-all account can be set up as either a physical POP3 mailbox, or forward mail to another mailbox.
 
  • E-Mail Forwarding - If you just want to have your e-mail forwarded to another mailbox, you can setup e-mail forwarders. Thus, if mail comes in to joe@yourdomain.com and you want to send it to joe@msn.com you can do this with a forwarder.  You can also choose to store and forward e-mail using a POP3 mail account.
 
  • Mailbox Disk Space - Individual mailboxes can not exceed 2 GB maximum. However, the total of all mailboxes cannot exceed your hosting plan's disk space limit.
 
  • Mailing Lists - A mailing list is an e-mail address you can send mail to and it will get distributed to everyone under that list.
 
  • Mailing List Members - This is the number of recipients that can be part of each mailing list under your web hosting plan.
 
  • Shared Calendaring, Mailboxes, Contacts, and Tasks - One of the most powerful features of our webmail software is the ability to share your calendars, mailboxes, contacts lists, and tasks with other members of your domain.  Perfect for small companies who need to share conference room calendars, manage their bosses tasks, and so much more!
 
  • Content Filters and Content Rules - Easily define what to do with incoming e-mail, such as forwarding, deleting, and organizing based on specific rules using the built-in content filter of our webmail software.
 
  • Password Protected Folders - Allows you to enable a popup login box on protected folders. Any files contained within a protected folder is not accessible until a user logs in. You can define individual users, groups and directories to protect.
 
  • FTP Accounts - To move files to your website, you need to use the File Transfer Protocol. You do this with an FTP client such as CuteFTP or WSFTP Pro. Each website is automatically set up with an FTP account. Depending on the number of accounts you are allowed, you can create additional FTP accounts for other users, and grant them read only, or write only privileges.  If your FTP client supports secure file transfers, you can also transmit your data securely with our servers.
 
  • Anonymous FTP Accounts - Anonymous FTP allows anyone to FTP files to and from your website.  We do not support anonymous FTP due to the potential misuse of the account by unknown parties.
 
  • Individual SSL Certificate - If you want your site to go secure using the https:// protocol (SSL), then you would install an SSL certificate on your site. Maze Networking sells inexpensive SSL certificates from InstantSSL which you can purchase here. You can also use certificates from VeriSign or Thawte, for example.
 
  • Virtual Directory Support - Create virtual directiories, which easily allow you to point a URL path to a physical folder or redirect the URL to another site altogether.
 
  • DNS Zone Editor - Change the DNS pointers for your site, such as A and MX records, to host a mail server off-site, for example.
 
  • Your Own Personal DNS - For resellers, this allows you to "mask" our DNS servers (ns1.Maze Networking.com and ns2.Maze Networking.com) by replacing them with your own domain name (ns1.yourdomainname.com and ns2.yourdomainname.com).  This means you can allow your customers to use your personal DNS instead of our own, making Maze Networking more invisible to your hosted customers.  This is by request and is not necessary if you do not need it.
 
  • Static IP's for Personal DNS - For resellers, this allows you put each of your Personal DNS names on a static IP, making the illusion that you are your own host even more complete to your customers.  These IP's are free and are in addition to any other IP's you may receive on your reseller plan.
 
  • Daily Backup - We backup all server files every night. If you need to restore a file for some reason, we can restore files from as long as 2 weeks prior. However, there is a $25 restore fee per incident.
 
  • ASP - An older, but still popular Microsoft web page scripting language that allows you to create dynamic web pages, that is, web pages that can change based on dynamically pulled data from a database.
 
  • Global.asa/Global.aspx - A file that Microsoft uses with the ASP/ASP.NET language which can set variables for the entire website, not just specific pages.
 
  • ASP.NET - Microsoft's quickly growing replacement for ASP scripting, .NET is a powerful language allowing developers to incorporate programming from C, C#, VB, and other languages.  Many newer off-the-shelf applications are now being built in ASP.NET instead of ASP, and it is a popular language among hardcore developers.
 
  • FrontPage 2002 Extensions - For users of Microsoft FrontPage 2002, a web design software, you can turn on/off extensions on your website which support specific capabilities of FrontPage 2002. Without these extensions, some features of FrontPage 2002 will not work
 
  • PHP - Another scripting language like ASP or ColdFusion which is becoming increasingly popular today. We provide full support for the latest PHP technologies.
 
  • ColdFusion MX 7 Scripting - Macromedia's latest incarnation of the venerable ColdFusion scripting language is more stable and includes more advanced features than ever before. Based on a Java platform, the language is very powerful, yet extremely easy to understand and use. For beginners learning how to program dynamic websites to advanced programmers looking for advanced functionality, this is one the best scripting languages to use.  The current implementation is ColdFusion MX.
 
  • ColdFusion Flash Remoting - This allows users of ColdFusion to build dynamic Flash MX applications driven from data pulled from a ColdFusion web page. The dynamic graphing capability of Flash Remoting is especially cool!
 
  • CGI-BIN - Users get their own personal CGI-BIN which allows you to put your executable scripts there. This is usually used with the Perl language.
 
  • Perl 5 - Perl has been around since the beginning of dynamic web pages. While difficult to learn, it is still in use quite a bit today, though its use is diminishing as more powerful and easier to learn scripting languages such as ASP, PHP and ColdFusion are taking hold.  We use ActiveState Perl for Windows.
 
  • DotNetNuke 3.x and 4.x One-Click Installation - Rapidly becoming one of the most popular free Content Management Systems, DotNetNuke (http://www.dotnetnuke.com) is supported using our included .NET and MS SQL services.  Using our One-Click method of installation, you can set up DNN in a matter of minutes with no .NET experience required!
 
  • Joomla One-Click Installation - Install the free, powerful Open Source Joomla Content Management System (http://www.joomla.org/) using a simple one-click installation.
 
  • ASP Poll One-Click Installation - Now install the free ASPPoll polling system on your website as easily as clicking a button.
 
  • ImageMagick Image Resize - For users of Perl and PHP, the ImageMagick image resize component allows you to resize images on the fly through code. Visit http://www.imagemagick.com for more information.
 
  • ASPImage - ASPImage is an image manipulation component you can use to resize images on the fly and much more.  For more, please visit http://www.serverobjects.com
 
  • ASPJpeg - ASPJpeg is an excellent on-the-fly image resize component for users of ASP and .NET. Please visit http://www.persists.com for more.
 
  • ASPUpload - ASPUpload is an ASP/.NET upload component you can use in your scripts. Please visit http://www.persists.com for more.
 
 
  • CDONTS - A Microsoft e-mail component we use with our IIS web servers. This component is slowly being phased out in favor of the newer CDOSYS component.
 
  • CDOSYS - Microsoft's new implementation of their IIS web server mail component that can be used with any web-based scripts. This component is replacing the CDONTS mail component.
 
  • Custom Error Pages - Don't you just hate that nasty "Error 404" page that appears when you go to a page that doesn't exist on a website anymore? This capability allows you to replace several common error page types with a custom page of your own. It could look like the rest of your site with a custom message on it, or could run some script to notify you of the problem
 
  • Access to Raw Log Files - If you need to look at your log files to determine who's coming to your site, you can always access your log files. We store the last 6 months of log files in zipped format.
 
  • ODBC DSN's - An easy way to connect to a database through a SQL script or web page is to use a DSN. DSN's are simple, "friendly" ways to call a database stored in your /db folder.
 
  • ColdFusion MX 7 DSN's - Create ColdFusion DSNs easily through your Helm control panel.
 
  • MS Access Support - Microsoft Access is a popular, easy-to-use desktop database application.  Microsoft Access database files (.mdb) can be used with web hosting as an inexpensive way to add a dynamic database-driven capability to your site.
 
  • MySQL DB's - MySQL is a powerful database that's becoming increasingly popular, especially with PHP users. This number reflects the number of MySQL databases you can create for your site.
 
  • MS SQL Server 2000 DB's - Microsoft's high-end database. MS SQL Server is very powerful and very capable for high usage sites. To administer MS SQL 2000, you need to ensure you have Enterprise Manager installed on your development PC as this is how you'll access your data. MS SQL is tricky to use in a shared hosting environment, so this is typcially for the advanced user.
 
  • Database Disk Space Limits - Your database can grow up to the total limit of your plan's disk space.  If you exceed your total plan disk space limit, you can add more as an extra feature.
 
  • Web-Based Admin of MySQL and MS SQL - Using the powerful PHPMyAdmin or MyLittleTools, you can easily administer your MySQL or MS SQL database via the web without needing any additional software. Create, delete, and design tables and data. Even create relationships with just the click of a mouse!
 
  • MS SQL Enterprise Manager Administration - For the power user who has Microsoft MS SQL Enterprise Manager installed on their local desktop, they can use it to administer their MS SQL database remotely.
 
  • Max Database Users - This is how many unique user accounts can have access to this database.
 
  • Connect to your database from an external website, or to an external website - We do not permit users to connect their non-Maze Networking hosted websites to our databases other than for short term testing.  Websites hosted with Maze Networking may also not connect to their external databases for more than a short period for testing.
 
  • Basic Bandwidth Stats - Helm comes with some basic bandwidth stats that tell you how much bandwidth you have used in the last 30 days and show your traffic over the last day.
 
  • MIME Type Editor - Add additional file types not supported by default, such as .mp3, so it triggers the right application in the user's browser when clicked on in your web site.
 
  • File Manager - Edit files, move files around, create new files, and delete files all from within the file manager of our web-based control panel.
 
  • Disk Space Usage Stats - You can view a breakdown of how much disk space your e-mail, website, logs, databases and other miscellaneous files are using as a total of your plan.
 
  • SmarterStats - An advanced statistical analysis program that is optional on the basic plans and included as part of the more advanced plans. You can tell everything from who has visited your site, to what part of the world they're from, to what pages are the most visited.
 
  • Extra Bandwidth - This is the cost for bandwidth over and above your plans allowable limits. This includes web, mail, FTP, and other traffic related to your domain, as indicated by the bandwidth usage shown in your Helm Control Panel.
 
  • Extra Disk Space - This is the cost for extra website diskspace if you go over your plans allowable disk space limits.
 
  • Extra Domain - This is the cost to add another website with features comparable to the others on your plan.
 
  • Extra Subdomain - This is the cost to add additional subdomains (ie. subdomain.yourdomain.com).
 
  • Extra Domain Aliases - This is the cost to add extra subdomains to your account. A domain alias allows you to take a parked domain name and point it to a site you have created in Helm.
 
  • Static IP - If you need SSL on your site, you will need to purchase a Static IP. Some software, such as eCommerce, may require a static IP as well. Normally, all sites are configured on a shared IP and sites are resolved in IIS using Host Headers.
 
  • Extra ODBC DSN - If you need to add another DSN for your databases, this is the cost per DSN.
 
  • Extra MySQL DB's - If you need to add an additional MySQL Database, this is the cost per database.
 
  • Extra MS SQL DB's - If you need additional MS SQL databases, you can add them to your plan at this price. Note, MS SQL DB's are only available on the Level 5 plans.
 
  • Extra POP3 Accounts - If you need to add more mailboxes to your web site, this is the cost per mailbox.
 
  • Extra FTP Account - If you need additional FTP accounts (for example you want to allow another individual FTP access to your website), this is the cost per FTP account.
 
  • SSL Certificate Installation - If you do not buy an SSL certificate from us, this is the cost to have us install an SSL cert on your domain. If you buy your InstantSSL certificate through us, we'll install it free.
 
  • Extra SmarterStats Installation - This is the cost for each extra SmarterStats account. SmarterStats provides detailed statistical analysis on your website traffic and visitors.
 
  • Lost data retrieved from Backup - While we do backup your data nightly, there is a per-incident restore fee. If you accidentally delete a file and need us to restore it from our tape backups, this is the cost per incident for us to restore your files. We can normally pull up to the last 2 weeks worth of data. There is a $25 restore fee.
 
  • FREE Virus Scanning on Files and E-Mail - We scan all E-mail for potential viruses using the Barracuda Spam and Anti-Virus filter.  Additionally, all our servers are scanned regularly with Symantec Anti-Virus to help protect both your computers and our servers from potential malicious viruses.
 
  • FREE Advanced Anti-Spam Filtering by Barracuda - We pass all incoming e-mail through a dedicated Barracuda Networks spam filter providing you with seamless and hassle-free anti-spam filtering.  With regularly updated algorithms and complex, constantly updated pattern matching, our Barracuda box helps screen out potential SPAM mail before it ever gets to your inbox.
 
  • Nightly Backups - We perform nightly backups to ensure we can recover in the event of a catastrophic failure. Keep in mind, there is a per-incident restore fee of $25.
 
  • Fast Support - We typically respond within 2 hours during business hours and often less. We also try to respond to your support requests on holidays and weekends as quickly as possible. All this ensures you are never left in the dark about your hosting services.