What is a virtual host?

To have a full-time Internet presence, your organization needs to have computers that are connected continuously to the Internet. When you add up all the costs of buying the hardware and software needed and maintaining a full-time high speed connection to the Internet, this can quickly become quite expensive. Furthermore, you would need to hire full-time computer professionals to manage all these Internet related activities.

Our regular virtual host services relieve your organization from the burden of dedicating costly hardware/software and valuable human resources to your web presence effort. At the same time, we will give your organization a realistic and full-fledged Internet frontage. Since your electronic frontage actually resides on our computers, not yours, it's virtual. This is where the name "virtual host" comes from.

Specifically, our virtual host services provide the following:

1. www.yourcompany.com - a virtual Web server for your company, to publish your custom web content, e.g. regular web pages, audio/video clips, PDF files..
2. ftp.yourcompany.com - a virtual ftp server for your company, to transfer files from your computers to AZC's servers and vice versa.
3. email services - you can have your email address as yourname@yourcompany.com, thus giving you and your correspondents a stationary and easy to remember address to use, no more joeblow1234@isp.net etc.

   Please note, the above address can be either forwarded to your email address(es) at your current ISP (e.g. Earthlink, ATT Worldnet, AOL), a freemail provider (e.g. Yahoo!Mail), or stored in a POP account hosted on AZC's POP servers.

   Two virtual mail servers are provided by default to each regular virtual web site hosted at AZC.COM:

   • smtp.yourcompany.com
   • pop.yourcompany.com
   You can optionally use the first one to send outgoing email messages, although its use is not mandatory. Furthermore, some ISPs may not allow you to use such third party mail servers to send outgoing messages anyways.

   If you have POP accounts hosted on AZC's POP servers, you need to use the 2nd one to retrieve messages stored in your POP accounts.

   As a special service, AZC may substitute the two aforementioned virtual mail servers with either your in house or third party mail server(s) of your choice.

The above three comprise a true Internet presence package.

NOTE:

• the AZC WebCard Services is not part of our regular virtual hosting services.
• in our current email forwarding setup, you can have arbitrary email aliases. For example: support@yourcompany.com, sales@yourcompany.com, info@yourcompany.com, webmaster@yourcompany.com, personnel@yourcompany.com can all be forwarded to your email address(es) at your current ISP transparently.
• the creation of aforementioned virtual servers is accomplished via Domain Name Services (DNS). Please note that AZC's DNS is implemented to service the above 3 categories (i.e. web, file transfer, and email) in a fully automated (i.e. hands off) and consistent manner, and therefore by design is limited in its scope. AZC does not and will not provide general purpose, custom, or ala carte style DNS to its hosting customers, e.g. for naming hosts on your company's internal network (with the exception of mail servers, see above). For such services, you may either run your own DNS servers or use a third party DNS service provider. Some such providers can be found via a Google search.

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