• WebEmailBriefing

Web, Email and Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

<robert AT cantab DOT SPAMFREE net>

This document aims to explain to small business (and perhaps also private) internet users what services are provided for their use in the context of web and email. I have written it because there is a lot of confusion regarding various internet services like web pages and email. The fact that these services are often bundled together with a dial-up or ADSL internet connection by an ISP has resulted in a lot of companies simply accepting such services without further questions about price or quality - leading to some ISPs charging 10 times the lowest available rate for some services.

In the spirit of allowing small businesses to make up their own minds regarding these issues, this document is intended to explain the various services which give your business visibility on and access to the internet.

A further resource in this field is the online FAQ of my own web hosting provider, 1&1 Internet. Be aware that although I mention service providers throughout this document, I do not endorse or approve of any of their products.

Internet service provision

In order to use the internet, you need a connection to it. This might be dial-up, ADSL, wireless, or perhaps T1 high-speed internet. There is usually competition in the ISP market, so you can choose the best price for the service and connection speed you're looking for. Connection speeds vary from 56kbps (kilobits per second) dial-up at the cheapest and slowest end of the spectrum to metropolitan wireless or ADSL which can run at 128kbps to 2Mbps and leased lines which can run at tens of Mbps and higher, for the largest companies.

Many ISPs will also offer email and limited web hosting as part of their internet connection service. To be perfectly unequivocal: This service is provided in their own best interests, not yours. If your email address is mybusiness@myISP.com , and you've told all your customers this address, it is going to be a major hassle to change this if you decided - for reasons of cost, perhaps, or to get a faster connection - to change ISP.

Of course if email is not important to your business then your ISP's email offering will be perfectly adequate for your purposes. But bear in mind that once you are on the internet through your ISP's connection, any computer on the internet is as close as any other computer, so you're not obliged to use your ISP's email service nor are you restricted to using an email server in your own country.

Your ISP is in a very real sense the least important information service provider in your business, and you should feel able to drop them and use another ISP if service or price are not right.

Domain name registration and DNS entry

By contrast, possibly the most important part of your image on the internet is your domain name. How much more impressive is it to use the web address http://www.widgetsink.com rather than http://comp1.myISP.com/~widgetsink/index.html? And how much more impressive to tell customers to email you at sales@widgetsink.com rather than widgetsink@myISP.com ? The latter email address looks a little amateurish, like you let your ISP dictate the way you communicate.

Domain names can be bought for between $5 and $20 per year (depending partly on whether you're looking for prized .com/.org/.net names, less well-recognised .info or .name, or country-specific domains such as .co.uk), and competition between registrar's agents (the people who sell domains) is fierce. You should therefore shop around, particularly since (unlike book or motor vehicle sales, for example) there is no delivery charge involved, so a domain name agent 10 000 miles away is as good as one next door.

The agent's responsibility is to (a) complete the official administration work which prevents anyone else from using the name and (b) provide Domain Name Server (DNS) services. The DNS system is a sort of online phonebook that allows the computer to translate the human-readable name www.google.com into a computer-readable address like 192.168.2.45 or even a1::ff::54::6c:10:4b. Obviously if you bought the domain name and didn't get any DNS service, nobody would be able to find your web page or send you email, so it is a standard part of an agent's responsibility to provide DNS management.

How the agent manages your DNS entry is important. Can you manage the DNS entry through a web-interface? Or do you have to email someone and wait for them to make the changes? If your agent also provides your web hosting and email, they may offer automatic DNS management, otherwise you're going to need to tell the agent which computer on the internet handles your email (your MX, or mail exchange, entry in the DNS) and what the computer-readable IP address of your web server and email server is (the A, or address entry).

In summary, the most important features in a domain name agent are (a) price and (b) DNS management facility. You can find domain name agents by typing "domain name register" into Google, or perhaps "domain name register za" if you wanted to by a name in the .za (South Africa) top-level domain.

Web hosting

Web hosting simply refers to having a computer that is (preferably) always turned on and connected to the internet, and that delivers your webpages to people over the internet on demand. Web hosting prices start at $10 per year and don't stop; my current provider is 1&1 Internet, whose web page will tell you the sorts of services they offer. A quick look at Google shows you the sort of prices people are asking.

Typically a hosting provider will give you FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access to his computer to allow you to upload the files that make up your website. FTP is a method for moving files to and from a server, as opposed to HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) which only moves files off the server which is what happens when you surf the web. The provider may also offer SSH (secure shell) access or some custom method of uploading pages, like through a web control panel.

The price you pay may depend on things like

• the maximum size of the website in MB
• the amount of data per month (bandwidth quota) that the provider is willing to deliver
• whether you are allowed to run programs to deliver dynamic information (like shopping carts) to people visiting your website
• how fast his connection to the internet is
• how fast his computer is at serving the pages
• what level of service he provides.

The bandwidth quota could possibly lead to a "winner's curse" situation in which, as your site becomes more successful, you have to pay penalties for exceeding your quota.

If your domain name agent is different from your web hosting provider, you will need to find out from your web host what entries need to be made in DNS and convey these to the domain name agent.

Email inboxes

An email inbox is the final destination for any email. When someone writes your email address in the To: or Cc: box of an email, a complicated delivery process results in the email being passed around the internet until it arrives at the computer which is specified in the DNS mail exchanger (MX) entry, which then puts the email into a file called your inbox.

Access to your inbox might be by POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), or through a custom method such as Microsoft Exchange, or through a web interface. Free email providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail typically offer free web access and POP access for a fee (gmail is the exception to this at the moment, since they offer free POP access). The primary difference between POP and IMAP is that POP transfers your inbox contents into the Local Folders on your computer, whereas IMAP leaves the inbox (and any other folders you create) on the server. POP is good if you only ever use one computer to access your email or if you have a slow/unreliable internet connection, while IMAP is good if you connect from multiple computers and would like access to all emails (Inbox, Sent, Drafts and so on) from all computers. Many POP and IMAP providers will also provide web access to your inbox, which is useful if you're on the move and connecting at an internet cafe.

There is no need to have more than one email inbox, but there is nothing preventing it either. Email programs (also known as email clients, because they connect to an email server on the internet and ask for your email) such as Outlook Express, Mac Mail and Thunderbird allow you to set up multiple inbox accounts alongside each other. But since, as explained in the following section, an email inbox can serve multiple incoming email addresses it is not terribly important to have different email inboxes unless you are separating, perhaps for legal or contractual reasons, work emails from private emails.

Another significant reason to use more than one email inbox is while migrating from one service provider to another. If your existing email widgetsink@myISP.com was with your ISP and you wanted to move to another provider, you might want to keep the old and the new email inboxes for a transitional period, in case your old provider refuses to simply forward emails to your new address. This sort of continuity is of course vital to any business, and is an important factor to consider in taking control of your business internet use.

An email inbox account is usually specified by giving the name of the mail server (for example, pop.gmail.com in the case of gmail's POP access), a username (which need not be related to any email address; for example an email address bill@thisaddress.dom might be accessed with username m345287-bill) and of course a password. Extra client configuration information might also be specified by your email provider, like the port or whether to use TLS or SSL security.

Once again, Google can be used to find email providers like this one. Since your email inbox is not ultimately connected to your email addresses (see below) you can use your ISP's inbox and simply forward all your emails to that inbox; if you change ISP, all you have to do is change the forwarding destinations of your email addresses.

Email aliases and forwarding

As explained above, an email address can be entirely unrelated to the inbox account information used to access the email. The inbox is how you access the email, while the email address is how other people access it.

As an example, many universities provide email forwarding services to their alumni. The individual alumnus must provide their own email inbox, and tell the university (usually via a web interface) where to forward email. I went to university xxxxx, and so I managed to get the email forwarding address robert@xxxxx.net . Buried inside the headers in each email that I receive through this address is the information that the email was handled by the mail program at my old university, which forwarded it to me.

Your email inbox provider could provide a slightly different service called aliasing. This is a situation in which a range of "first parts" of email addresses, like bill@yyy.com and bob@yyy.com , point to the same inbox. As an extreme example, you could say that any first part should be delivered to the "catch-all" inbox. This would not work with forwarding, since an unrecognised first part would simply result in the message being bounced back to the sender.

When you purchase a domain name (say widgetsink.com), one of the most important things you want to be able to do is have people send you email at sales@widgetsink.com . This is something that you could arrange either with your email inbox provider through aliases and inboxes, or with your domain name agent through setting up accounts that forward to your real inbox, kinkydude@yahoo.com .

Email sending

One of the strangest notions to do with email is that sending email is somehow the exact reverse of receiving email, and therefore that when you get an email inbox you absolutely have to get a corresponding "outbox" or SMTP (Send Mail Transport Protocol) account. While it is accepted practice among email providers to provide SMTP service along with POP/IMAP access, it is not logically necessary. The fallacy that it is necessary is due in large part to programs like Oulook Express and Mac Mail which do not allow you to set up an email account (i.e. a POP or IMAP inbox) without setting up a corresponding SMTP account.

To be emphatic about it: You never need more than one SMTP server, no matter how many POP or IMAP inboxes you have.

(Technical explanation which can be skipped) A possible exception to this (although I hasten to add I have never come across such a situation) would be if your email provider's SMTP server refused to pass on emails with a From: address that it thinks is invalid, to prevent "sender spoofing" which is common in spam. But since, as I explained above, email addresses are not directly connected to email inboxes and still less are they connected to SMTP accounts, this would not make sense. If the server trusts you because you've entered a valid username/password, then it should not be making judgments about whether you've got the From: address correct.

From this point of view, the best email client program out there is Mozilla Thunderbird, since this divorces the SMTP side of email from the inboxes, allows you to set exactly one SMTP server, and permits you to set From: aliases with different names and different email addresses. So if you want to send an email which looks like it is from "Sales Office < sales@widgetsink.com >" or one that looks like it is from "Bill Gates < bill@widgetsink.com >", you can do it by creating aliases and using the same SMTP server.

And to return to the beginning, this service does not need to be provided by your ISP, although your ISP will typically allow you to send mail via their SMTP server without a username and password (since they know where you live if you try to send spam!).

Online backup

An issue which is sorely neglected in small businesses is the need for regular, secure backups of critical data. The approach taken by many is to burn CDs or DVDs of relevant data on an irregular, approximately monthly, basis - a solution which has clear deficiencies. And I would bet that many small businesses routinely store business information on local hard drives with no backup, relying on expensive technical wizardry to restore failed hard drives in the event of hard drive crash or computer failure.

Note that in the context of backup, IMAP is a better choice of email inbox than POP since your email inbox provider is responsible for ensuring the data safety - and his business depends on nothing but that safety.

Another backup option has become useful as a consequence of rising internet connection speeds and free-falling prices of hard drives: online backup. The idea is very simple: you allocate one or a few directories on your computer for backup and instruct the computer to perform backups over the internet as close as possible to, say 04h00 each day. If the computer is not turned on, the job might be run in the background when you next startup. The backup does not transmit all data in those directories, instead using a simple method of finding which files have changed and transmitting only the compressed changes over the internet - so if you limit the size of the directory being backed up to only the most critical files or files that don't change often then you can avoid having your internet bandwidth being consumed by backups.

This solution might work for businesses on dial-up internet connections, but they must be very careful what data they backup and when it is scheduled to happen, to minimise the time taken and the inconvenience to your browsing.

Another search of Google reveals many companies offering online backup services; the cheapest I have found is 5GB backup for $99 per year, but be aware that there are a few technical details to consider when deciding. Typical services offered are

• convenient web interface to access backed up files
• a program to download that allows you to manage backups and restores from your computer instead of the webpage
• access to snapshots of files for anything up to the last 90 days, in case you inadvertently overwrite important data and only realise 2 weeks later

(Short primer on file sizes and connection speeds) Note that 1GB (gigabyte) is approximately 1000MB (megabytes) and 1MB is approximately 1000kB (kilobytes). A single byte (of which there are, you guessed it, 1000 in a kilobyte) is made of of 8 bits and each bit can take the value 0 or 1. Your internet connection is typically measured in some multiple (k,M or G) of bps, or bits per second. Taking all of these numbers into account, that means that a 56kpbs dial-up connection can download a maximum of 56000 bits or about 7 kilobytes every second - and that's only a theoretical maximum, the real value is probably about 3-4kB per second. So to upload a 1MB file to your online backup server via dial-up connection will take ideally 142 seconds or 2 minutes 22 seconds, in reality it could be up to 5 minutes. You don't even want to think about uploading 1GB. With my turbo-charged 2Mbps connection, that 1GB will take me less than 9 minutes.

Only the operators of small businesses can ultimately determine the monetary value of their data, but I would strongly urge small businesses to implement at least some sort of "no hassle" backup plan to cater for those inevitable times when computers fail. In this vein, I would point out that hard drives typically have a lifetime of 3 years. How old is yours?

Conclusion

To summarise in one paragraph my advice to small businesses, I would suggest they use:

• the email inbox offered by their ISP
• the sendmail (SMTP) server offered by their ISP
• the best (for their purposes) domain name agent they can find (not necessarily their ISP!), and in particular one that offers email address creation and email forwarding
• a webhost (not necessarily their ISP!) that offers the best value for money and can work with your chosen domain name agent

Example 1: My email and web situation. Feel free to edit this page and tell me about yours!