General

Why won't you host my personal website?

We like to have a firm understanding as to what your websites are doing and what their requirements are. As such, we only host websites that we develop and manage. There are some circumstances in which your website would be welcome, but these circumstances are served on a case-by-case basis. So please contact us if you feel we should be hosting your web site.

How much do you charge for development?

It depends. Basic development can start around $30 per hour, some of our most advanced projects will go upwards of $150 per hour. This depends entirely on the depth of the project and the client needs at project kickoff.

Email, Spam and Virus Protection

How do I access my email?

We support many methods for accessing your email. You may use web mail via your web browser. You may use any email client that supports pop3 or imap. For settings and server names please view the support page.

What's the deal with your Spam protection?

Spam, Spam, Spam. We use Amavis and Spamassassin to monitor spam. Currently we only flag your messages as spam. You will notice this in the subject lines "SPAM:" is added to all mail detected as spam. Although we feel our spam detection is pretty good, spam will still get through undetected. We will try our best to keep our systems as up to date as possible to combat the ever evolving spam techniques. Also, just a stat-for-thought: Over 70% of the email that is accepted by our mail servers is flagged as spam. This doesn't include the quantity of email that is actually rejected by our servers for failing to abide by standards while sending.

What's the deal with your Virus Protection?

We use Amavsid to filter incoming email for viruses. It's combined with Clamd (an open source virus scanner) and does a pretty good job. We would like to claim that we stop all virii that are inbound on our server, but that would be a little bit of an ego boost that we don't need. So, don't forget to keep your own virus scanners up to date. Email isn't the only route for virii, and we'd be very saddened if your systems were compromised by means of a rogue website.

Where's your web mail?

It's at webmail.flatlinesystems.net You can just click the link in our site navigation.

What email clients do you support?

We prefer that you use Mozilla Thunderbird for the sake of security and simplicity. We do however support configurations on Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express.

File Uploads and Sharing

Can I share my mp3, avi, mov, and other formats?

That depends. Do you own the copyrights? This will be handled on a case by case basis. Typically if you plan on sharing Matthew Good's latest album or a copy of Transformers that you bought on the streets of Toronto, we're going to say no.

Can I FTP files to my account?

Usually. If you need to upload files to make available, you will be provided with an FTP account to your site. This is of course dependant on how our management agreement is setup. Please contact us if you need more information.

Web Browser Support

What web browsers do you support?

While developing web sites we develop using standards. Thus, we technically support all browsers. However, there are always some quirks that prevent certain things from working on certain browsers. This is typically handled on a case-by-case basis. We support in order of preference (An opinionated one at that): Firefox (Gecko based browsers), Safari (WebKit based browsers), Opera, and Internet Explorer.

Development Practices

What tools do you use to develop web sites?

Lots. The base of it all is our LAMP configuration. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. We put it all together with an even larger slew of open source utilities and development environments. It can get pretty technical to explain all the tools that are used, so we'll leave it at that.

Is it safe to use open source software for everything?

Of course. We are firm believers that using open source software in a well managed and maintained environment is perfectly healthy and secure. We won't go as far as saying it's perfect, but no piece of software is.