These rates are in Canadian dollars.

Accounts

No setup fees! :-) See below for payment terms.

Reseller Only Accounts

These accounts use the disk space and bandwidth from either a named or IP account, and are only available to folks that already have one of those accounts.

Extras

Volume Discounts

The "IP-1 Equivalent #" is simply the number of IP-1 accounts (what we used to call a Basic account) that generate the same total value... e.g. your total monthly billing divided by the price of a IP-1 account.

Example: An IP-2 and two Starter Plus accounts is $660/yr [$55/mo], so a 15% discount would be applied and charges would be $561/yr [$46.75/mo].

Example2: 20 IP-1 accounts totals $400/mo, and thus gets a 40% discount for a monthly billing of $240/mo.

In order to keep things both simple and predictable, that's a straight discount, which means there are "holes" in the pricing structure where it is actually cheaper to buy more than you need.
(e.g. $49 worth of services costs $49, whereas $51 costs $51 - 15% = $43.35 )

Payment Terms

All hosting accounts may be billed monthly, quarterly, or annually. Discounts of 10% and 15% are given to quarterly and annual payments respectively.

Accepted forms of payment are cheque, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, PayPal.

Unless otherwise specified, all invoices are due 45 days after the invoice date. Accounts more than 30 days overdue may be deleted (although it's more likely they will simply be suspended).

Detailed Descriptions

Forwarding

This service is now provided via our http://domain-dns.com/ site/service. It's a great way to take advantage of the free space at your ISP, and still have a professional looking website URL and e-mail address on your business card. Please ask Support@BareMetal.com if you have any questions.

Named

The Named-1 account is our smallest account, and should be most folks starting point unless they know that they need one of the features of the bigger accounts. Changing account plans is simple, so don't fret too much about picking the right one :).

The named accounts include full PHP, and CGI capabilities, full logfiles and summary statistics by webalizer and wwwstats, a control panel, our vmail system (including spam and virus filtering, autoresponders, webmail), and all our pre-written tools.

Named accounts versus the IP accounts

To a large degree the IP accounts are the historical BareMetal accounts, and given that we started webhosting in 1995, there is lots of history here :). Back then IP addresses were abundant, spam was rare, and almost everyone was on slow dial-up modems.

IP-1

This is the smallest IP based full-featured BareMetal virtual server. IP based means that it has a dedicated IP address. We used to call this a "Basic" account, but that became a confusing name. For historical reasons this account also includes a catchall e-mail address.

Because it is IP based, you can point other domain names at it and serve specific content for those domains. (There are a number of ways of doing this, but we provide a "mapit" tool in the control panel which works well.)

IP-2

The IP-2 account includes all the features of the IP-1 account, with the addition of databases, lists, SSL, and real-server access ... and there's more VMail accounts, disk space, and data transfer!

Starter

The Starter account is supposed to be a low cost solution for our resellers. They are "attached" to a non starter account and share resources with that account.

For the purposes of e-mail, the domain associated with a Starter account is an alias for your main account. Which means that the POP and Forwards for your main account also work for the Starter account.

Disk space and bandwidth for your Starter website comes from your main account.

Starter Plus

This is the same as the Starter account, except that we separate the e-mail configuration for this account from the account it is attached to.

You need this account (instead of a plain Starter) if you want webmaster@clientdomain to go somewhere different from webmaster@yourdomain (or support@, or accounts@, or ...)... or if you need your client to be able to change their own e-mail configuration without your assistance.

See http://baremetal.com/support/email_main.html for information on configuring your e-mail client. Using POP service on the Starter Plus account requires that the domain name be included in the userid field sent to the POP server.

Disk space and bandwidth for your Starter Plus website comes from your IP based account.

Note that you can add the VMail upgrades to this account.

Feature Descriptions

Forwards

A forward is an address that is forwarded to somewhere else, that can be a mailbox of a different name, or an address at a different domain. Some accounts include a wildcard forward which allows you to forward anything "not otherwise specified".

Note that the number of forwards is also the number of supported autoresponders and (unmanaged) mailing lists.

POP

This is a mail storage location which is accessible via both the POP and IMAP protocols (or webmail). That means we will store mail until you fetch it with an e-mail client on your computer like Eudora, or Outlook. Alternatively, you can use our webmail interface to read your mail.

Mailboxes have a default maximum size of 50 megabytes, and that can be doubled from the VMail control panel. If you still need more, we can allocate extra storage for a small monthly fee.

There WILL be total storage limits for all the POP accounts in a domain.

Web Server Type

We have two types of webservers: Named, and IP based.

IP based webservers are virtual servers which are associated with an IP address. All web browsers/robots accessing that IP address are served pages corresponding to that webserver unless they send a special header that indicates they want a page from an attached account instead (see below).

The Named (and starter) accounts identify which virtual server is being accessed by using the "Host" header that all modern browsers send when they request a page from a webserver. This means that visitors using extremely old browsers, or primitive robots will be accessing the IP-based virtual server that the Named webserver shares an IP address with.

IP Address

This just corresponds to the webserver type. Only IP based webservers get their own IP address. A client must have an IP based webserver (from us) before they can order Starter and Starter Plus accounts.

Disk Space

This is storage space for webserver pages. (Currently your e-mail is also stored in this space. It is intended that e-mail will be stored separately with it's own disk space allocation based on the number of POP accounts.)

Note that our charges for extra disk space are ONE TIME charges. They are NOT monthly charges.

Please note also that disk space allocations are quite likely to change.

Bandwidth Allowance

This is the amount of data transfer allocated to your account.

All FTP, e-mail, and web traffic will be added together to get your total bandwidth usage. If your total usage is greater than your Bandwidth Allowance, then you will be billed extra at the rate shown under Extras. (At the current moment all we are only measuring web traffic.)

Hit surcharges. We expect your average hit size to be greater than 6 kbyte per request. If it is smaller, and your site uses lots of CGI (like a banner network, or a statistics gathering site) then you will be billed by the greater of the hit or bandwidth charges according to the rates shown under Extras.

It is not our intention to bill for serving lots of small graphics included in normal HTML pages, as that is just good HTML design. If your site is being billed for hit charges and is not CGI intensive, please let us know -- we will refund the surcharge and configure your account so it is not billed for hit charges.

Supplemental Details for Extras

Subdomain / Vanity Configuration

This service option is in BETA Test.

This option will setup your domain and your webserver such that any page normally served as:
http://yourdomain/directory/somepage
will accessible as:
http://directory.yourdomain/somepage

Unfortunately, e-mail to userid@directory.yourdomain will not work. (That would require a starter account.)

Notes

Inactive Accounts

Please shutdown all accounts that you aren't using, as you will be billed for them.

Accounts will be considered active at the start of the month following the one in which they were created. (We reserve the right to change this.)

Outstanding accounts will be de-activated. Under normal circumstances the following timelines will apply. Over-due notices will be sent when invoices are over 45 days outstanding. Accounts over 75 days overdue will be suspended.

Files for suspended accounts will be kept for at least a month.

Uptime Guarantee

Our uptime guarantee seems to be one of the best in the business: if we don't meet our guarantee, then you get the month for free, and you don't even have to ask for it! The billing department will simply give you the month for free. (If only we could get such a guarantee from our network providers.)

The guarantee is that the equipment that we control will be available 99.9% of the calendar month (e.g. less than 42 minutes of down time). Trouble with equipment and networks outside of our control is not covered.