General Non-Hosting Account Questions

Merchant Accounts
We have partnered with the two best merchant card service companies in the business in order to bring you a discounted way to setup a new merchant account. Basically, NO application or setup fees for any of the plans. Please refer to our Merchant Accounts area for more details.

Web Site Design services
We would be glad to design or redesign your web site for you. If you need a new logo, just tell us what you want. We can also slim down your graphics for you to make your web pages load a lot faster. For more details please refer to our Web Site Design page.

Do you have a Newbie Guide?
Absolutely. We have partnered with an online school called "Newbie Guides". We can get you a lifetime membership for less than $50. Please see our Newbie Guide page. Also, we have reprinted some general "get started" articles in our Tips & Tricks area. We have created many "How To" articles in our Web Tools area. However, the Newbie Guide's strongest features are that it will supply you with all the details you need to advertise and sell your products on the web.

Our Policies

Privacy Policies
We absolutely believe in your right to privacy and will NEVER release or sell any information about you. Rest assured, we will never release your email address or any other info to anyone for any reason. Of course, we will, under court order release any required information. Also, we will help the authorities in any criminal investigations. For full details see our privacy policies page.

Our Hosting Policies
Our web hosting policies are pretty simple and straight forward. Don't try to crash our servers, don't SPAM, don't have a "Hate Group" or "X-rated" site, don't be extremely offensive and don't try to use these services to perform any criminal acts. For exact details see our policies page.

Account Features

Bandwidth / Transfer / Hits
Your Platinum account will have 25 Gig/month bandwidth on your shared hosting package. Any outbound traffic from your web site is considered data transfer. FTP uploads do not count as data transfer. Each time a html file, graphic file or any other element on your web page is loaded, data transfer is generated.

For Instance, Gold Unix Accounts are limited to 5 GB/month (about 300,000 hits/month on an average site). Any bandwidth above the maximum for your account will be billed at $5/gig (if prepaid) or $10/gig (if paid after you have used it). Gold accounts should upgrade to the Platinum account for extra bandwidth since the Platinum account allows a lot more bandwidth.

Disk Storage
Disk storage refers to the amount of server disk storage your account is allocated. This space is used to store your html files, graphics, audio/video files and all other files that make up your web site. Your POP3 emails are not stored in this space. You are allotted an extra 10 MB of space for your mail spool on each email account.

Should you require additional space for your content you will need to upgrade your account to the Platinum package or if you already have the Platinum package you may pay $9.95/month to add another 1000 megs to your disk space. Actually, most web sites do not require more than 100 megs. In fact 6STAR.NET's web site, with all of the web pages and downloadable files, uses about 200 megs.

Number of Domains Per Server
We do not overload our web servers. We bind 1 class C of IPs to each machine (255 accounts). This ensures that your web site loads fast and is always available to your visitors. All servers are held at or below 50% capacity in order to handle peak loads without slowing down your web site.

Domain Registration
We are a Gold Premier Partner which gives us the ability to register your new domain name within 5 minutes of your order. Network Solutions charges you direct via postal mail for $35.00 per year. You are able to register your domain for up to 10 years at a time for large discounts on the yearly fee. For instance, you will only have to pay $15 when you register your domain for one year through us. Additional years are only $10/year.

Static IP Address
Every shared hosting account is configured with a static IP address. This means that you are given a unique set of numbers (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) specifically assigned to your web space. This allows you to access your web site via a web browser or development tool regardless of the status of your domain name. Having your own IP address also gives you the opportunity of publishing your web site to your new web space before actually transferring your domain name to our DNS. This results in no down time when transferring your web site from another hosting company.

Personalized Nameservers
All Network Solutions whois? searches will show your company name as the network your domains are hosted on and will show your company as the technical contact for all the domains you register. This is done by using your own personal name servers instead of ours. In other words, instead of using "ns.6star.net" and "ns2.6star.net" as your name servers for your domain name, personalized name servers will use "ns.YourDomain.com" and "ns2.YourDomain.com" as your name servers. Some of our resellers who wish to remain totally anonymous may wish to use this feature. If you are not a reseller, you will not need this.

SiteMonster Software
Need a free, custom site design? Use our proprietary SiteMonster software to make as many custom web sites as you need. Our "Site Builder" software can automatically create your web site for you (you don't even need to know anything about HTML). Programmers charge Thousands for just a simple 5 to10 page web site. Try it today!

Instant Setup Monster Control Panel (Unix only)
Once we have setup your account, your web site's Monster Control Panel will allow you to instantly setup anything you want. Our awesome Monster Control Panel will automatically setup over two dozen "ready to run" software programs for your web site. Also, it will allow you to setup all your email accounts, mailing lists, auto responders, user accounts, databases, directory and file permissions, and everything else that you'll ever need. On top of this, it is your user friendly interface to view all of your site statistics and web traffic access reports (sorted in every way), and also links to all of the other things you need such as tech support. In short, it gives you complete control of your web site so that you can setup anything you want instantly.

Email Features

Email Accounts
Each of our shared hosting packages comes with unlimited POP3 email accounts in addition to email forwards and aliases. You have the option to retrieve email directly from POP3 mailboxes on the mail server using an email program such as Eudora, Outlook or Outlook Express.

Email Aliases / Forwards
Using Email Aliases or forwarders gives you the ability to receive any email at *@yourdomain.com. Specific email addresses that you want to forward out of your domain to another email account can be accomplished through MonsterControls or by editing your .redirect file within your /home directory. For example you may want to forward all email addressed to sales@yourdomain.com to an AOL account such as Bob232@aol.com or another POP3 account on your domain bob@yourdomain.com. The best part about using aliases or forwards is that the person emailing you never knows the mail is being redirected.

Email Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a pre-determined message with information you want automatically sent to anyone who emails a designated email address/mailbox at your domain.

PGP
PGP is a program that adds privacy to your electronic mail that you send through our network. It encrypts your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text.

Mail Lists
You can create multiple mail lists based on your customer's interests. You provide customers an email address they can send an email to and be added to your personalized mailing list. As soon as customers sign on they are sent a friendly welcome message. This is a great way to cost effectively communicate with your customers through monthly newsletters, sales updates or just a friendly hello. Each list can hold 1000 names and a 75kb message can be emailed to all the lists you create. We also have more robust mailing lists for the Platinum Unix accounts called MajorDomo which is covered separately in the "Advanced Features" area.

Personal SMTP Server
You have a personal SMTP mail server on each domain you host with 6Star.net. This mail server enables you to send mail out through your domain at mail.yourdomain.com

WMail (Unix), IMail (Windows)
Lets you view, delete, send, receive and manage all of your email accounts through the convenience of your web browser.

SendMail (Unix), ASP QMail (Windows)
Lets you send email messages directly from your web page or from a form on your web page.

Technical Support

Platinum Level Toll Free Technical Support
Guaranteed 24 x 7 tech support (All holidays included) to answer all your questions.

Platinum Level Email Technical Support
Guaranteed Response time of 5 hours or less to tech support email via our leading edge Ticket Monster support system.

Instant Setup Monster Control Panel (Unix only)
Once we have setup your account, your web site's Monster Control Panel will allow you to instantly setup anything you want. Our awesome Monster Control Panel will automatically setup over two dozen "ready to run" software programs for your web site. Also, it will allow you to setup all your email accounts, mailing lists, auto responders, user accounts, databases, directory and file permissions, and everything else that you'll ever need. On top of this, it is your user friendly interface to view all of your site statistics and web traffic access reports (sorted in every way), and also links to all of the other things you need such as tech support. In short, it gives you complete control of your web site so that you can setup anything you want instantly.

Monster Chat
Live chat with our friendly tech support experts. They will talk to you "one on one" in our online Monster Chat room.

99.9% Uptime Guarantee
We guarantee that 99.9% of the time that your web site will be accessible via IP address to the world. The IP address is the numerical value equivalent to www.yourdomain.com. If your web site is not online 99.9% of the time we will refund the percentage of your monthly hosting fees equal to the downtime.

30 Day Money Back Guarantee
If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with 6Star.net's services we will gladly refund all monthly fees you have paid if you cancel within the first 30 days of signup.

Personal Representative
You will have a dedicated reseller representative from 6Star.net to help you 24 hours a day with any questions or problems that may arise. This dedicated representative will always be your personal contact here at 6Star.net.

Ecommerce

FREE Shopping Cart Systems
We have two FREE shopping cart systems installed with every account.

Let's Take an Order
Is the simplest shopping cart solution and lets you add all of your products into a one page HTML document that will sort your products with price, quantity and other attributes you set. It lets you create a custom receipt and order page and emails both you and the customer when an order is completed.

The Boutique Shopping Cart system
Is a very robust shopping cart system which will empower you to setup a complete store with different departments and categories for your products.

More detailed information about both of these shopping carts and a demo may be seen by viewing our web page of FREE Pre-installed Ready-to-Run Programs.

Free Merchant Account
A Free merchant account will save you the normal $595 setup cost. This will allow you to accept and instantly process charge cards on your web site.

Miva Merchant Commercial Shopping Cart System
We fully support this industry leading shopping cart system and will install it for you. We CAN give you a FREE license to use it without having to buy it for $495. However, as much as we would love to give you this system for a few dollars/month, Miva requires that everyone charge a bare minimum of $19.95/month. Sorry, but we are FORCED to charge you this much.

Miva Merchant Order
This is a scaled down version of the "Full Blown" Miva Merchant shopping cart system. It will provide you with the ability to setup a 25 item store for $4.95/month.

Cybercash
A service that connects a storefront or web site to the CyberCash payment services, enabling businesses to accept secure, real-time credit card payments at their web sites.

Secure Server (SSL)
All shared hosting accounts are provided with secure server access. Any sensitive information such as credit card information that can be encrypted before transmission through a web browser. SSL will light up the key in your customer's browser, greatly increasing customer trust when buying from your site.

SSH - Secure Shell
The industry standard for encrypting terminal connections and file transfer over the Internet.

Server Side Includes (SSI)
Lets you embed CGI scripts into your web pages. The scripts will execute automatically when the web page is opened.

Password Protected Pages
Protect directories within your web site so that only approved username and password combinations gain access.

PHP
A server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language.

MS Transaction Server (Windows only)
Microsoft Transaction Server is a component-based transaction processing system for developing, deploying, and managing high-performing, scalable, and robust enterprise, internet, and intranet server applications.

Chat Software

Java Chatroom
Chatroom that you can install on your domain that will let your users login and converse about topics you set or random topics set by the users.

Volano Chatroom
A more sophisticated chat room with the ability to have personal, restricted chat rooms , auditoriums for moderated events, membership database support, server-side event reporting and chat message logging.

Additional Software

FrontPage 2002
The Microsoft FrontPage 2002 web site creation and management tool gives users everything you need to easily create and manage great web sites. You are required to own and install the FrontPage 98, 2000 or 2002 software on your home system.

Real Audio / Video
We provide full support for RealMedia technology from RealNetworks to stream audio and video from your web site. Streaming allows your users to see or hear your multimedia files without having to download them to their local PCs first.

Web Based Control Panel (MonsterControls)
This is our proprietary web administration system which allows you to perform all aspects of your web site administration. You can add/edit your email redirects and forwards, setup and manage your mailing lists and autoresponders, password protect directories and manage the username/password combinations, download your raw access-logs, manage your site with SiteManager (create, edit and upload files to your web space). You can also change read, write or executable permissions on any of the files or directories in your web site plus much more.

Miva Empresa
Enables your server with XML based Miva Script, commerce processing and database. Miva Script applications running under Miva Empresa execute in a sandboxed data and runtime environment. Special virtual domain and shared server features let busy site administrators create per user and per domain runtime environments.

Support for Plugins
Support for Vream (Virtual Reality Authority Software), Voxware, Vivo Active, Midi and IPIX, Sizzler, Fractal, FutureSplash, Infinop's Wavelet Image Compression, VocalTec Internet Phone, TrueSpeech Digital Audio, VRML, Macromedia's Shockwave.

Wireless Application Protocol Ready (WAP)
Allow your clients and potential customers to view your web site on Palm Pilots, cellular phones, pagers and other wireless devices with Internet access.

Online Data Bases

mSQL / mySQL Databases (Unix only)
A database is a structured collection of data. It may be anything from a simple shopping list to a picture gallery or the vast amounts of information in a corporate network. To add, access and process data stored in a computer database, you need a database management system such as mSQL/mySQL. Since computers are very good at handling large amounts of data, database management plays a central role in computing, as stand-alone utilities or as parts of other applications.

Microsoft SQL Server (Windows only)
Microsoft SQL server is capable of supporting even the most demanding web applications. Microsoft SQL Server is a robust enterprise-caliber relational database server that is designed for enterprise databases. It is simular to and competes with Oracle and Informix.

Microsoft Access / FoxPro (Windows only)
Microsoft Access comes bundled with Microsoft Office Pro enabling you to connect your database on your PC to update and manage your production database on your servers. Powerful and fully compatible with ASP scripting, this feature is available on NT virtual servers only. FoxPro is a popular database than can be deployed on any NT server for high-end database functionality.

Advanced Features

CGI-Bin
Directory setup with special permissions to auto-execute user-defined scripts. CGI is used to accomplish tasks which are not supported by basic HTML such as a hit counter or guest book. You may use this directory to execute any cgi-script you write or ones that are already pre-written for you. The directory is specially designed for scripts that end in *.pl as scripts that end in .cgi will execute from any directory within your web space.

Pre-Installed CGI-scripts (Unix 15, Windows 4)
We offer many pre-written scripts available FREE for your use. These include hit counters, two shopping cart systems, two guest books, bulletin board system, visitor links page, random quote displayer, and much more. To see a list of these scripts and a demo of each one, please check out our FREE Pre-installed Ready-to-Run Programs web page.

Custom MIME Types
Adds the ability for serving multiple content types such as midi files, special audio formats and others.

Unix Shells: bash, csh, tcsh (Unix only)
Each shared server has 3 different shells available letting you choose which you are most comfortable scripting in.

Perl, C, C++, Java JDK, Python & TCL Compilers
Various types of scripting languages / shells that are installed on all 6Star.net machines. 6Star is supports the latest version of each one.

Emacs (Unix only)
An extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor that is used in a UNIX shell.

Pine, vi, elm, Joe, Pico & Cron Tab and .htaccess (Unix only)
Pine is an easy to use UNIX shell-based email client that organizes your emails complete with address book, sent items and inbox. VI, JOE and PICO are text editors that lets you create and edit files within telnet. ELM is very simple email program that lets you just send and receive emails from within your telnet shell. CRON TAB is similar to an alarm clock, it executes set commands at user-defined times. .HTACCESS lets you setup password protected directories within your web site.

Majordomo
This is a very flexible tool for interacting with your customers or clients. In simple terms it's an interactive style newsletter that allows all subscribers to distribute information. There are many configurable features including automatic subscribe and unsubscribe and much more. When one authorized user emails the Majordomo listserver that email is sent out to everyone on the list to read.

Cold Fusion
Cold fusion is a sophisticated scripting language for web developers that want advanced site development and database interfacing. Cold Fusion supports MS Access, dBase, FoxPro, and Paradox databases.

Custom Error Documents
By placing a file in your main directory called missing.html, you will be able to provide a customized page to any viewer that requests a file with their browser that does not exist on your domain.

Website Management

FTP
File Transfer Protocol or the method used to "upload" your web site files to storage space on our network. You have unlimited access to your domain via FTP 24 hours a day to setup, change and manipulate your web site. 6Star.net's network is compatible with any FTP client you choose to use.

Anonymous FTP
Capability of setting up a public area where anonymous users can upload and download files from your web server.

Telnet
Telnet is a telecommunications software utility which allows you to become a user on a remote computer. Once you access the remote terminal, you can use it for its intended purposes. Unlike FTP, the telnet utility does not allow you to transfer and save files to your own computer.

Website Monitoring

Daily Backups
We do daily backups of your sites data and your email spool file. In the event you lose or corrupt any of your data you may request a restore from our technical support department.

Site Listed With 3500 Search Engines
We automatically list your site with the top 3500 search engines by your sites keywords, title and meta tags.

Raw Access Logs
These are the text logs showing every hit to your site and what the user downloaded, accessed or viewed. For statistical analysis you can download these to compile on your local machine in programs like Web Trends or other site analysis programs.

Graphical Referrer Logs
This is an extended logging feature that documents where each visitor to your site came from. You will know if they found you through a search engine or a web site link. It will show you the search engines users queried and what keywords or sentences they typed in to find your web site. This is invaluable information when trying to determine if marketing campaigns are paying off.

Wusage 7.0 (Unix only)
This is a very powerful tool for graphically tracking visitors to your site. It provides you statistics on how long visitors stay at your site, what pages they visited and the order in which they were visited. It also provides the most popular entry/exit pages, what browsers your visitors use, which countries your site is most popular in and with referrer logs activated it will graphically capture how the user found your web site. Wusage can be configured to run nightly or weekly.

Media House LiveStats (Windows only)
All Windows-based shared hosting accounts come with Media House LiveStats Log Analyzer with Referrer Logs. Media House LiveStats Log Analyzer will analyze the log file of a web server and will create a comprehensive summary report from the information gathered.

Bandwidth Consumption Meter
The Bandwidth Consumption Meter will tell you how much bandwidth you have used so far during the current month and give you a projected figure for the total which will be used by the end of the month.

Disk Usage Meter
The Disk Usage Meter will tell you how much disk space you have used and how much free space remains.

Microsoft Development Software (Windows servers only)

Visual Interdev 6.0 (Windows only)
Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 empowers web application developers to rapidly build fully interactive, dynamic web sites. With visual development features and powerful database tools, Visual InterDev provides the most complete and technically advanced development system for building both intranet and Internet applications.

Microsoft NetShow (Windows only)
A Multimedia application for streaming audio and video.

FrontPage Subwebs (Windows only)
You are given administrator permissions to your web site allowing you to create and delete sub-webs on your own. (ie: www.domain.com/company1) Each sub-web can have its own home page. This is very useful if you would like to organize your web site into different sections or you would like to have multiple web sites within your main account. There is no limit to how many sub-webs you can have as long as you stay within your designated hosting plan's storage and bandwidth guidelines.

FrontPage 2002 Web Site Creation Tool
The Microsoft FrontPage 2002 web site creation and management tool gives you everything you need to easily create and manage great web sites. You are required to own and install the FrontPage 98, 2000 or 2002 software on your home system.

MS Index Server (Windows only)
Microsoft Index Server is a full-text indexing and search engine for Internet Information Server. It allows any Web browser to search documents for key words, phrases, or properties.

Drumbeat 2000 (Windows only)
Drumbeat 2000(tm) is the fastest, easiest way to build Web interfaces to databases and applications using Active Server Pages (ASP) - without manual coding.

Active Server Pages (Windows only)
ASP (Active Server Pages) is enabled on all of our shared Windows NT / Windows 2000 web servers. ASP can be used to create, complex, consumer oriented web applications such as shopping carts and personnel oriented databases. This is usually accomplished in conjunction with MS Access and MS SQL Server.

ASP Components (Windows only)
We install the most commonly used ASP Components from ServerObjects.com

Hardware and Network

Server Hardware
Each shared server is Dual Pentium III-850 MHz or faster with 512 MB + of RAM. Our servers are custom built to our needs and spare parts are kept in inventory in case of hardware failure. We keep 10 pre-built machines in inventory at all times ensuring that if the entire server fails we can swap the hard disk into another server and have it back online within 5-10 minutes.

Server Operating System
Each of our shared Unix servers runs a custom version of Red Hat Linux with Apache Web Server. Our Windows NT servers run either NT 4.0 or 2000 with MS Internet Information Server.

Network Connectivity
Your web site will be hosted within our primary state-of-the-art data center - CDC-01 in Bedford, Texas. This site has fully redundant power, air-conditioning and fiber connectivity. CDC-01 has 5 multi-homed backbone providers of DS-3 and OC-3 connections (directly to the Internet backbone) each connecting thru OC-48 or OC-192 connections for fast and extremely reliable connectivity. It also has 10 backup T1 connections used in case of emergency fiber cuts.

Uninterruptible power with UPS and backup generator
Every server is connected to a 3000W Compaq UPS device and our data center power is backed by a 245,000W Diesel-powered generator ensuring that even during the longest power outages your web server remains online.