X h o s t   S u p p o r t   P o l i c y

For details of our standard support policy, please see the Service Description page on the Xhost Website.

Some more specific technical details are described below:

Resource Utilisation

Please note that we reserve the right to suspend service for any resource-intensive applications which have an adverse effect on shared resources such as processor, disk or memory on shared servers or network resources on dedicated services. This right exists only to protect our customers and would be enforced only in extreme cases after all other alternative solutions have been considered.

Nursery / Development Servers

Although Cold Fusion and ASP are quite stable products, during the development phase, application code can occasionally cause failure of either the scripting language, or even the Web server. In order to avoid affecting other customers, we do not permit development on shared production servers, but instead insist that development be performed on either our Nursery servers or within a personal development environment.

In the event of failure, we will reboot nursery servers during normal hours. Although this does inconvenience other developers, it allows us to maintain maximum availability of our development environment.

Application Scalability

Most of our customers use either Cold Fusion or Microsoft Activer Server Pages (ASP) to connect to Microsoft Access Databases via the Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers.

Whilst using an Access database file is very convenient for developers and administrators, as Microsoft Access was not designed as an industry-strength multi-user database, there are limitations on the number of concurrent queries which can be serviced.

Microsoft recommend that the application should generate no more than 5 simultaneous ODBC connections.

Note that this figure refers to simultaneous connections. Hence, in practice Web-based applications can handle user-bases of hundreds or even thousands of users provided that they do not exceed the simultaneous user limit.

For scalable applications, we strongly recommend that  you use SQL Server as your back-end database. See the sections on SQL Server elsewhere on this website for further information.

Backups

As specified in the Service Description page on the Xhost Website, we aim to be able to restore files to the image backed up on the previous day.

However, if for reasons beyond our control (eg. tape errors or network faults), this specific backup is not available, we will restore to the previous successful backup.

Mail-Enablement

Our service allows developers to produce workgroup applications which generate mail messages routed via our SMTP Gateway.

Although we can verify that mail messages heve been sent, we cannot guarantee delivery and do not provide a service to trace onward message transmission.

Hence, although in practice, SMTP delivery is very reliable, we recommend that mail-enabled applications should not be entirely dependent on SMTP mail and should include a backup notification mechanism.

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