* Who is Aesir?

Aesir Computing, Inc. is a corporation registered (1990) in the state of Virginia. Our headquarters is located in Herndon, VA and is about 20 miles outside Washington, DC. Our contact information is online.

* I found you via a page called Connections - what is it?

Connections is our premier online publication featuring popular travel destinations in the South. Connections has proven to be extremely popular with our viewers and presently attracts over 23000 unique visitors each and every day with a monthly increase of 15% in viewership (figures are as of June, 1999).

* Do you only handle resort-related Web sites?

No. When we first entered into the Web site design market we did focus primarily on resort and property management companies. If we had diluted our focus then we certainly would not have learned many of the key factors involved in attracting online travelers to our clients sites. After 2 years of Web site design, implementation, and maintenance, we have come to understand much about the online viewer. With all of our "lessons learned", we feel comfortable to embark on new frontiers as well as enhance our current offerings. These include new product development to enhance web site development and maintenance, and new topic areas for successful web sites like golf courses and commerce-related sites (i.e. Relocation Central and Cort Business Services.)

* Then is Aesir an Internet Service Provider (ISP)?

Aesir is an Internet Presence Provider (IPP). We have a close alliance with a local ISP which frees us from the difficulties and issues of being an ISP. We feel that this arrangement works best for not only our company but also for our clients.

* Why aren't you located in a resort area? Wouldn't it be better to be located close to your clients?

Aesir existed as a company long before we endeavoured into the Web site development arena. We've always been located in the metro-D.C. area and have found this to be technologically advantageous. We have an alliance with a national Internet Service Provider (NSP) who is directly connected to all the NAPs and maintains 80+ private peering points. This eliminates problems with any upstream internet service provider outages affecting our services. Many of the resort areas we deal with do not have near the capacity nor connectivity to the Internet which we enjoy in the metro-D.C. area. This is very important since a Web site is designed to be online and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And as important, we do embrace technology and utilize the many tools of communication (FAX, phone, email, overnight courier) to stay in very close contact with our clients.

* Do you only do Web site development?

No. The founders of Aesir are computer programmers with many years experience. We are always looking for ways to enhance our web sites and to implement our Web site designs quickly. From our desire to build a better Web site we have developed several Web Site development and maintenance products. Also, if you take a look at our "About Aesir" page, you'll see that we also do work for companies involving Internet security, firewalls, and other technologies. Why even the Web server we use at http://www.aesir.com/ is our own software product. Many times over the last several years, we have evaluated many of the popular Web servers on the market and found them deficient. Our custom Web server allows us to quickly prototype and implement our ideas.

Aesir is not wholly comprised of programmers. We also have onboard a professional sales staff and a marketing/advertising manager with many years experience in the traditional mediums. And after 2 years of Web site development and maintenance, we feel comfortable to say that our experience in advertising now extends into this new medium of the Internet/World Wide Web.

* How many people actually work on and create these Web sites?

We have 2 full-time employees who handle (and have handled) all of our Web site design, development, implementation, and maintenance. Since 1993, we have developed a large number of software programs and scripts to assist in the building and maintenance of our client's Web sites. These tools allows us to generate and build web sites at a lower cost to you and ultilize temporary staff as the need arises without compromising quality.

* So many other IPPs don't manage their own hardware for Web services. Is Aesir similar to these other companies?

Aesir manages and maintains all of the hardware and software engaged in our client's Web site development, implementation, and maintenance. Our Web servers are physically located on separate networks in different offices (T1 and 100Mbs access) for redundancy. Our goal is to provide our clients with a complete solution so that they don't have to deal with the technical issues. Also, by handling our Web servers inhouse we are better able to upgrade and improve the service. As the Web technologies change, so can our services change.

* I would like a true virtual domain. Do you offer that?

Yes. We offer a "true" virtual domain such as http://www.yourcompany.com/ and can point it anywhere you want. This allows you the flexibility of hosting your pages with any other provider including Aesir but the ability to create dynamic pages for tracking purposes. In other words, without changing your current site, or add new pages, you could designate that you have the following pages in print advertising: http://www.yourcomopany.com/WP - (Washington Post) and http://www.yourcompany.com/WSJ - (Wall Street Journal) to track these traditional advertising listings more effectivly. Visitors would be sent directly to your real site and you would have this information on your monthly summary so that you could track how they found your site. See http://www.DesertClubs.com/ and http://www.aesir.com/DesertClubs/ as an example of this service.

Yes. We offer a virtual domain for email such as [email protected] You will have a list of as many names as you would like and a mapping file to forward email to these accounts. This allows your company to change ISP's as often as you wish without changing your real email address. The price for this service starts at $250 per year and included 10 pop accounts and 10 reflector accounts. You are not allowed to perform mass mailings (SPAMs) with this account. We can map the entire domain and all email addresses to your other domains as well with this package.

Yes. $5/month. You are not allowed to perform mass mailing (SPAMs) with this account.

We can solve problem and leave your current site alone and hosted where it currently is. We will provide you with a domain that we will register on your behalf and map your email accounts to this domain. Prices are $100/year. NOTE! An initial $70 fee for 2 years is also required to the internic for registration of this new domain. You are not allowed to perform mass mailing (SPAMs) with this domain.

Yes and No. If the page you want us to link to contains public content and is not an advertisment for any company, we would be glad to add links from our pages where appropriate to your page. We may require a reciprocal link in some cases if you have a similar target audience as ours.

On the other hand, if you are selling something, we would require a $900 (firm) yearly fee (1 year paid in advance) and will locate the link where appropriate for your business. This may be more than one location depending on how applicable it is to our site. We do not require you to offer us a reciprocal link from your web page.

We maintain a rack at globalcenter with two 100MB/s switched handoffs filled with high performance servers such as Sun and rack mounted custom designed web servers. There are no outages and spares are kept online to handle peaks or for normal maintenance. We boast 99.999% uptime measured since 1994. This superior availability has allowed us to maintain and monitor 11 online banks for availability and outages since 1996. We also maintain mulitiple T1 (1.5Mb/s) connections to our offices for backup capability.

Yes. $75 per domain. This includes your mail secondary. We reserve the right to increase the fee substantially for sites that maintain high SMTP outages and therefore use our our backup mail servers as spare disks. You are not allowed to perform mass mailing (SPAMs) with this domain.

First. Do not do it. As you can see from above, we do not allow any mass mailings which is to protect us from acceptable use policies that we have signed with our upstream providers. If you did, you would have violated these acceptable use policies that we have signed and the acceptable use policy with us. You will be required to pay all fees and penalities associated with this act including damages to 3rd party recipients. In some states, there are very high penalites for each instance (recipient) so please be careful of any unsolicited mailings. In general, the fees are approx $500 per recipient not including damages. Please ask if you are unsure.