YOU NEED US TO BE YOUR WEB HOST! You spent money, time, and effort developing an exceptional website. Now you've got an interview on a national radio show, a chance to give your website the exposure it deserves. The last thing you want to hear is the host saying, "We're sorry but it looks like we've killed your website by sending too many potential customers to it at once." You can obtain services economically without sacrificing performance, reliability, or features by hosting with Eskimo North. Your web pages are served by a reliable robust platform with as few pieces of equipment as possible, using the most reliable equipment and operating systems possible, in the critical path between your web pages and the Internet backbone carriers. This is important because every piece of equipment in the critical path between your web page files and your audiences computer screen is a potential bottleneck or point of failure. Minimizing these and using the most robust reliable components is key to the fastest most reliable service possible. Your web pages are blasted out at blazingly fast speeds by a customized Apache web server running under the Linux operating system on 64-bit X-bus based Sun UltraSparc systems. This combination provides good stability and extraordinary I/O capability to handle peak loads. These systems are capable of moving 2gbit/second to/from memory. Most other hosting companies use ordinary PC servers which PCI bus architecture that is only capable of approximately 133mb/s transfers. This allows us to handle peak loads without bus contention slowing things down or causing stability issues. Your website is served quickly and reliably even during power failures and bad weather because our equipment is located at a facility with UPS diesel generator backed power in a dust and temperature controlled environment to minimize service interruptions and maximize speed. See just how fast your website can be served by signing up for a Free Trial Account. Select "Shell" for the account type unless you would also like to sample our dial access offering in which case you should select 56k dial access. Once your free trial account is established you can upload your website pages and try it under our domain absolutely free. Individuals, businesses, and other organizations may host web pages under our domain or optionally under your own domain name using our Virtual Domain service. Eskimo North is privately owned and has been since it's beginning as a single line BBS in 1982. We incorporated in 1995, but it still remains under private ownership. Consequently, I answer only to my customers, my responsibilities are not divided between customers and shareholders. We care about each and every customers needs. While we do our best to provide packages that will suit everybodies needs, if you have special needs please contact us, we will do our best to accomodate your needs. Questions or Comments? Please e-mail support@eskimo.com, FAX (206) 812-0054, or call (800) 246-6874 or (206) 812-0051.

World Wide Web Home Pages

Web hosting is included with all dsl, dial-up or remote shell accounts using Apache. We offer virtual domain service for those who wish to receive mail and make their web pages and ftp files visible under their own domain.

Go Fast! Go Even Faster! Don't Let Your Audience Get Bored!

Internet applications in general and web hosting particular is strongly I/O (input/output) intensive. We use hardware and software specifically designed to address these high I/O requirements. Combination of the best hardware for the application, excellent backbone connectivity, and fine tuned customized software make your web pages come up fast keeping your customers coming back for more. Most other ISP's use hardware that is computationally strong but weak in the I/O department. Their hardware is well suited for atmospheric modeling, or solving protein folding problems, but not particularly well suited to web hosting. It's all about getting bits from the magnetic surface of a disk to your audiences display as fast as possible and that's what we do extremely well.

Platform

We use Apache 1.3.x web server with some additional security and performance modifications running on a UltraSparc (tm) 64-bit X-bus platforms under the Linux operating system. The CPU-to-memory path is 64-bit but the memory controller-to-memory path is 584-bit allowing multiple devices to access memory simultaneously.

The X-bus architecture has a 584 bit path to main memory and allows multiple peripherals to DMA to/from memory concurrent with CPU access while avoiding wait states. The X-bus has a peak bandwidth of 2GB/s and a sustained bandwidth of 1GB/s. Most ISP's use inferior PCI bus machines which have a sustained bandwidth of only around 133MB/s.

These X-bus based machines have the ability to translate peripheral DMA devices through the MMU. PCI bus machines used by many other ISP's only translate CPU addresses through the MMU. On those PCI bus machines, DMA devices first have to load data into kernel address space, and then the CPU has to copy that block to user address space. Our hardware enables data to be read from disk or other peripherals directly into user memory bypassing the need for the CPU to get involved and substantially improving performance.

Our hardware uses super-scaler CPU's have multiple instruction execution units and can execute more than one instruction simultaneously.

Our hardware has 4096 hardware context registers. This allows switching from one task to another to happen very quickly. This is particularly important with Apache because it uses several hundred processes to serve requests and a busy platform running Apache typically will switch contexts several thousand times a second. On PCI bus systems used by many other ISP's, this can consume a substantial portion of the platforms CPU cycles preventing those CPU cycles from being available to Apache.

Our disk subsystem uses fast Seagate ultra-fast/wide LVD SCSI disks in a stripped partition which distributes the I/O load across multiple drives to achieve extremely fast disk I/O and low latency. Generous amounts of main RAM allow the most frequently accessed files to be cached in memory for even faster access.

We have made several important modifications to Apache. Our modified version of Apache runs with no root processes. Even the main parent process does not run as root on our version. CGI and php4 applications run with the owners UID preventing one users application from being able to access or modify another users files (unless that user gives permission to do so). We have also increased significantly the size of various buffers that Apache uses internally and our testing has shown that subtantial performance improves result when large files are being downloaded. We have made similiar changes to Linux defaults in order to prevent the operating system from becoming a bottleneck.

Backbone Connectivity

Our servers reside in a co-location facility which has dual SONET rings to the SIX at the Westin building in Seattle, as well as peering with most other major carriers at that location. In addition the carrier has fiber running to other major peering points. We have dual ethernet connections between the router at this facility and our own router both for redundancy and load sharing is enabled to allow the combined bandwidth to be available to our servers. The peering is excellent and as a result, we are less than 10ms away from most well connected locations on the Internet. The dual SONET rings means a single fiber cut will not isolate us from the Internet. Our own LAN is N-way switched 100mb/s ethernet.

Power, Environment

Our servers are in a secured environment with diesel generator backed UPS power. The air is filtered and the room positively pressurized to prevent any dust contamination.

CGI Scripts

CGI scripts are allowed and can be executed under your own private "cgi-bin" directory. CGI programs execute with your user permissions. Perl5 and a number of other languages are available for CGI programming. There is also a system "cgi-bin" directory and an assortment of CGI programs already installed there for your use.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

Server Side Includes (SSI) are supported, however, exec is not allowed. If you need to execute an external program you should use either the CGI or PHP interface. Either CGI or PHP will execute external programs with your permissions. We have the X-bit hack in Apache so you can tell the web server to parse your document for server side includes by setting the execution bit (chmod u+x file.html).

PHP4

PHP capabilities are provided. The following capabilities are presently implimented:

• Open SSL
• BC precision math
• Bzip2
• Calendar Conversions
• MySQL and Postgres Database
• Database Manipulation Routines
• Jpeg, Tiff, and PNG routines
• NDBM and GDBM capability
• Direct I/O
• Sockets
• Zlib compression routines
• System-V Semaphore and Shared Memory
• FTP capability

If you have other capabilities that you need, please let us know and if we can include them without jeopardizing security or performance we will certainly try to accomodate your request.

SSL Web Server

An SSL (secure socket layer) web server is available to allow secure transmission and reception of sensitive data such as credit card numbers, passwords, etc.

E-Commerce Solutions

Click on the banner below to learn about the credit card processing system that we've been using for years and which we can now make available to you for your own online store shopping cart or point of sales terminal system. Please note that this link may not work with some older browsers such as Netscape 4.x.

If you are creating online stores for clients, you can join the E-Commerce Exchange Affiliate Program and earn commissions on the sale of E-commerce solutions to your clients.

Website Creation

For additional information regarding website creation, please see http://www.eskimo.com/support/www.html

Content Restrictions

We have two major web sites that all users may place material on. One is intended for general viewing and the other is intended specifically for adult content. Additionally, if you purchase a Virtual Domain, your website will be visible under the root of your own domain name. If your virtual domain will contain adult material please let us know in advance so we can map it to the correct directory. There is no additional charge for adult material and the server platform is the same.

Material placed in the directory "public_html" will be visible at the URL http://www.eskimo.com/~login where login is your account login. Material placed in this directory should be suited to viewing by ALL audiences.

Nudity, sexual content, graphic violence, or anything else not suitable to audiences of all ages should not be placed in this directory. Material placed in the directory "adult_html" will be visible at the URL http://adult.eskimo.com/~login. Material intended for an adult audience should be placed in this directory.

Do not use this site in any manner that is not consistant with all applicable local, state, and federal laws. Doing so will be considered abuse and grounds for account termination.

For more information on creating or uploading your web site to Eskimo North, please see http://www.eskimo.com/support/www.html.