In all instances given below, 'shore.net' and 'primushost.com' are interchangable. If you have any entries that are otherwise correct, but say 'shore.net' rather than 'primushost.com' (for example, 'relay.shore.net' rather than 'relay.primushsot.com'), you may leave them as they are without affecting your service

Dialing in:

If you have a dialup service from PRIMUS, the settings on your computer for dialing in do NOT have to change in any way. The changes reflected below are in regards to picking up email and accessing your services that are located on the Shell server.

Email:

If you are using a local email client such as Eudora, Outlook, Netscape, etc., there are 2 important settings for the sending and receiving of email. The setting for outgoing email does NOT change. This setting is usually referred to as the 'Outgoing mail server' or the 'SMTP mail server'. The recommended setting is 'relay.primushost.com'. If you have a different hostname set, we ask that you change it to this.

The setting for incoming email does need to change however. This setting is usually referred to as the 'Incoming mail server'. It should currently be set to your current Shell server. You need to change this to be 'pop.primushost.com'. This is the recommend hostname for accessing your email with a POP or IMAP email client the new Shell server.

The software PRIMUS runs on shell.primushost.com to service POP email clients is different than that on the older Shell servers. This may cause some abnormal behavior the first few times you pick up your email from this new server with a POP email client. The most likely symptom is that all of your messages will be picked, even if you have 'leave mail on server' turned on in the email client. This should only happen once or twice and then should behave normally.

telnet, ssh, rsh and rlogin:

If you service includes shell access, then you will need to connect to 'shell.primushost.com' in order to login. You then use your username and password to authenticate yourself and gain shell access to the server.

Home directory:

The path to your home directory will change. On shell.primushost.com the new path is:

/home/shell0/1stletter/2ndletter/username

where:

1stletter = the first letter of your username
2ndletter = the second letter of your username
username = your username

eg: homedir for 'username' = /home/shell0/u/s/username

This may affect any scripts and/or crontab entries you are running.

ftp:

If your service allows access via ftp (to upload html files for example) then you need to connect to 'shell.primushost.com' and login with your username and password.

public_html:

Most PRIMUS dialup services include free web space. The html files must be located in the directory 'public_html' which is a sub directory of your home directory. This service should behave exactly as it did on the older Shell server.

However the URL to your website will change. The new URL will be

http://users.primushost.com/~USERNAME

Where USERNAME is your username. It is possible to forward traffic from your old URL to the new URL if requested.

public_ftp:

If your service includes public_ftp space, then this has migrated over as well. However the physical path to the directory has changed as well as the URL to your ftp space. The new path will be:

/home/shell0/ftp/1stletter/2ndletter/username

where:

1stletter = the first letter of your username
2ndletter = the second letter of your username
username = your username

The new URL will be:

ftp://users.primushost.com/members/1stletter/2ndletter/username

Unlike public_html, we will not be able to forward any ftp traffic from your old URL to the new URL at this time.

Disk quota:

Disk quota or disk usage is handled differently on shell.primushost.com than on any other PRIMUS server at this time. shell.primushost.com makes use of a new system that allows the customer more flexiblity. It works like this:

Your service includes a quota value with it. For example, your service may come with 30MB of disk quota. This is still your limit without being charged for extra disk usage. The added feature is that you may go over the service limit and still be able to save your data. There is still an upper limit which is 2 * QUOTA + 50 MB; where QUOTA is the quota value of your service. But now you can safely go over your normal limit temporarily and not risk losing any information.

Because of this new method, we have changed how we bill for extra disk usage of your service's limit. Each day PRIMUS will take a sample of your current disk usage and store that sample in our Billing database. When your invoice is generated, we will use the 95% percentile method on these samples to calculate any extra disk usage charges.

The 95% percentile method will sort all of the daily samples from the last month from highest to lowest. It will then remove the 2 highest samples from this list. The next highest sample is then used to determine the disk usage for this billing period. In essence PRIMUS ignores the 2 days when you used the most disk usage and then bills based on the next highest disk usage day. The rate is $0.10/MB beyond your service's disk quota.

We are currently updating our document describing this system in more detail that is located on our website. The current and updated page will have the URL:

http://www.primushost.com/company/quota_policy.html