Wirt,

I've been extremely happy with my webhosting company.  For about $35/month I
get everything I need, 350Mb, PERL, PHP, FrontPage, MySQL, up to 150
subdomains,...., email, chat, Majordomo,... on and on.  Not only do they not
care about www.name.com vs. name.com, they give you direct access to your
DNS records so you can manipulate the whole situation yourself (redirect
domain names and subdomains for both web content and for email).  With
time-to-live you can do a temporary re-direct of your site to another IP
address (like a mirrored site for example) until your regular site gets back
up.

I don't know anywhere else to get this flexibility without running your own
server.

If you are interested let me know and I'll send you a link.

-Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 3:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Keeping the confusion level high enough so that no one feels
comfortable.

I received about a dozen inquiries yesterday and this morning asking if our
web pages had gone off-line again. The answer is no, but that doesn't
necessarily mean you can reach them -- at least not without an explanation.

As many of you know, we switched to Qwest as our web hosting service, simply
to avoid what happened a few months ago: our ISP suddenly and unexpectedly
went out of business, with absolutely no forewarning. By moving to Qwest, we
could be assured that that situation would never again recur.

Although Qwest is a large company, they went out of their way to get us up
and running almost immediately, linking in our two primary web addresses:

     www.aics-research.com
     aics-research.com

and I couldn't have been happier.

However, yesterday, for reasons associated with someone's decision at Qwest
to support only addresses that comply with RFC XXX of the W3C consortium,
they decided that they will no longer support any web address that doesn't
start with the "www". They gave us no forewarning of that decision. They
simply killed the "aics-research.com" DNS resolution sometime yesterday
afternoon.

All of the web pages are still reachable. You just have to be sure now to
put
a "www" in front of the address. Apparently many of you have our address in
your browser's history file (or have linked web pages) without the "www" and
are relying on that form of the address -- and that's how you got your
"failures to find" the web pages you were looking for.

This change also affects some of our internal web pages, but I'll fix those
immediately. In the interim, Qwest has invited me to write them a letter
outlining my complaints with this new policy. I'll do that as soon as I calm
down :-).

Wirt Atmar