Frequently Asked Questions

AVIA! specializes in virtual servers. You can find a home for your web site on our web servers and establish a presence on the internet regardless of your needs. We help you register your own domain name (included in the setup fee), which will become your unique address on the World Wide Web.

Having your own domain name does not reveal that you are renting web space, and, since email can be addressed to your domain (e.g. www.yourname.com) you will not have to announce a new email address should you change internet access providers. With a domain name you can transfer your web presence at any time and not lose your identity since you can take your www.yourname.com with you.

The AVIA! Virtual Server Solution allows you to start on a small and grow upward as you need to. The AVIA! server architecture is one of the most robust and flexible in the industry. Customers may use their AVIA! server solutions for e-commerce, on-line auctions, chat forums, virtual postcards, polls and surveys, live audio and video, secure conferencing, market research, banner advertisements, shopping carts, email (virtual post offices), classified ads, databases, search engines, on-line stores and malls, and much more.

Yes, you will be able to access your domain name with or without the WWW in front. For example, you can access the domain name "mydomain.com" by going to "www.mydomain.com" as well as "mydomain.com".

No, you need local Internet access to maintain your web site and retrieve email sent to your site. We recommend several dial-up providers for this service. Providing a specialized Virtual Server service means are able to devote more time to our customers web presence and to enhancements of the entire Virtual Server System.

Yes, AVIA! has a special account add-on for our MS Front Page Users. Any of the standard accounts may be upgraded with support for Microsoft FrontPage 98 extensions. The extensions are backward compatible with Microsoft Front Page 97 so you need not purchase Microsoft FrontPage 98.

NOTE: Certain active FrontPage components (such as forms) specify files ending in ".DLL". In these instances, the ".DLL" will need to be manually replaced with ".exe" to work correctly on our servers.

Yes! AVIA! will design your web site and has several starter packages to help get a business going on the web at an attractive price. We will work with you to understand your goals and work within your budget. We will also work with you help you do as much or as little of your web maintenance yourself.

For special needs AVIA! stands ready to implement and assist with web page consulting, web page development, and custom scripting services. For more information, contact sales@AVIAweb.com.

Yes! We have a wide list of upgrades to our basic account which may be added on at any time. We also give you any monthly rental credit toward your new virtual server.

AVIA! will register new domain names with the InterNIC for you. The InterNIC will bill you directly for 2 years of domain registration at $35.00/year, or $70.00 total. We do not charge for registration and we register the domain in your name.

If you have an existing domain we will fill out and send you a modify domain name template to forward to hostmaster@internic.net. When you place an order be sure to specify that you are requesting a transfer and NOT a new domain.

When InterNIC announces the completion of the transfer, there is a 72 hour propagation period where visitors could go to either site. At the end of the 72 hours you should contact the previous host to have them delete the old domain from their records and update their DNS record. If you use this same provider for your Internet access you will not be able to access your domain site at AVIAweb.com until they update their DNS.

You should keep the service at the present site while waiting for InterNIC to complete the transfer. We will provide you with a temporary IP address so you can mirror the site on our server. All email and web pages will still be accessed from your current site until propagation is complete.

During the propagation period persons accessing your site will be going to both sites until all are eventually accessing the new site hosted by AVIA!.

Once the InterNIC announces that your domain name has been registered (or transferred, if applicable), it usually takes about 72-hours before it is active. All internet providers must update their records (DNS tables) to reflect new site locations. This is called propagation.

The InterNIC charges $70.00 to register a new domain name. This fee covers the first two years. They currently bill at a rate of $35 per year. The InterNIC will send you an invoice via email between 3 weeks to six weeks after the domain is registered.

No. Our experience has shown that 300 to 500 MB/month is more than enough data transfer for 90 (+)% of all web sites and we use it as a bench mark. Depending on the quantity and size of your files, 1000MB could support many thousands of hits per week.

Files must be transferred to the web server via File Transport Protocol (FTP). If you have a PPP internet account and need FTP software. We recommend WS_FTP for PC's. AVIA! offers unlimited FTP access.

You have unlimited access via FTP 24-hours a day. As such, you can create and maintain your web pages on your own computer and upload files to your web site at your convenience.

In general, if you have more than one domain account at AVIA! we can point each domain address to the same HTML files. There is a $20.00 setup fee to mirror sites and $10.00/monthly fee for this service.

Yes! You can use your account for commercial purposes. The World Wide Web has become an efficient and cost-effective means of making information, products and services available to the internet community. AVIA! Virtual Server secure processing is available using SSL and PGP to provide an environment whereby payment information (such as a credit card number) or confidential information (such as a custom form) can be transmitted from web browser to web server in an encrypted mode.

We bill based on monthly increments. AVIA! has options available for quarterly, semi-annual or annual billing. With annual billing customers get 12 months of service for the price of 11! We will soon accept MasterCard, Visa, and American Express as well as personal and business checks.

Yes. We encourage our customers to send email to support@AVIAweb.com with questions or concerns about their web site. We are relatively quick to respond to support email around the clock. If we cannot offer a solution to a concern within a reasonable time frame, we will invite you to call us or we'll call you directly.

Orders for servers will be configured within 48 hours, but most times will be done the same day. Once an account is set up an activation notice will be sent you via email including a user-id, password, and FTP hostname. You can begin uploading files to your new web site immediately. Domain account users will be given a temporary URL to access their site via the web prior to the completion of either domain registration or transfer.

You can place an order for a Virtual Server account directly from our web site 24 hours a day, or by calling (508) 393-0750 between the hours of 6 PM to 11 PM Monday through Friday EST.

100 Continue	404 Not Found
101 Switching Protocols	405 Method Not Allowed
200 OK	406 Not Acceptable
201 Created	407 Proxy Authentication Required
202 Accepted	408 Request Time-Out
203 Non-Authoritative Information	409 Conflict
204 No Content	410 Gone
205 Reset Content	411 Length Required
206 Partial Content	412 Precondition Failed
300 Multiple Choices	413 Request Entity Too Large
301 Moved Permanently	414 Request-URI Too Large
302 Moved Temporarily	415 Unsupported Media Type
303 See Other	500 Internal Server Error
304 Not Modified	501 Not Implemented
305 Use Proxy	502 Bad Gateway
400 Bad Request	503 Out of Resources
401 Unauthorized	504 Gateway Time-Out
402 Payment Required	505 HTTP Version not supported
403 Forbidden

AVIA! supports RSA encryption. PGP version 5.0 should visit the PGP(tm)FAQ page. We do not currently support DSS/Diffie-Hellman encryption keys. For more information on PGP and other Security issues visit our Security page.

AVIA! protects its customers from others who would use their servers to send their mail! The way we do this is to require our customers to log into their POP accounts to receive mail before begin able to send their mail.

For users of Microsoft Outlook this means you might get an error on occasion, but on the next attempt to send will work fine. If you want it to try to send again right away just use the tools menu and the send item. In Outlook 98 the F5 key will initiate a full re-send.

In your root account you have a directory called cgi-bin. It is the place you put your cgi programs. When you address them in your web pages use the first part of your domain name with "cgi" tagged on the end. For example, if you were using a cgi program called foo.pl, you would use: /j-redcgi/foo.pl .

Why is there a PHF program in my cgi-bin?
Doesn't that make my account insecure?

The original "phf" program was distributed with a number of older web servers. It was supposed to be an example of the "right way" to write a cgi program such that people could not send special characters and break out of your program to run their own programs on your server. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in the code such that a knowledgeable hacker could execute just about any program on your server without your knowledge. Since this program was distributed with these older web servers, and most people did not remove it after it was installed, it became a very popular way for people to try to break into machines.

The "phf" program that is on your server is NOT the same program. Since many wanna-be hackers try to use this exploit, we have written our own version of the phf program that tracks and logs the hackers attempts. The program on your server is nothing more than a simple perl script that forwards the hackers browser to our main server. (You can look at the script for yourself to see that this is so.) This program analyzes the data sent by the attacker, but there is no way that it can be used to break into your account.

On our servers, we log each hit, including the date and time of an attack, and the host that the attacker was coming from. We periodically compile these logs and forward complaints to the service providers used by the attackers, and to the proper authorities as needed. The programs on our servers also analyze the attacker's request and returns bogus data that looks like the attacker's command has succeeded. (One common attack is to try and grab the password file from your server. In this case, our program returns a real-looking password file, that contains a garbage account and password information.) We are constantly adding new security features to our servers and network and cooperate regularly with numerous organizations and agencies in an on-going effort to protect your data. AVIA! pursues and prosecutes illegal activities.