Our servers are located at a reliable co-location facility in Pittsburgh, PA, with backup power and redundant internet connections.

We support many different types of users: Whether you are a small company who wants to be able to hang out a shingle on the web, someone who wants to host a personal web site, or a large company looking to host your site with hundreds of thousands of hits a day, we have something for you.

• Will I get any spam if I use your filter?
• How do you know what email is spam, and what isn't?
• Will you bounce emails you think are spam back to the original sender?
• Some filters block legitimate email, what do you do to make sure that doesn't happen?

Yes. There are various options depending on if you want to buy, lease to own, or just rent the server. We encourage Debian Linux, and run the "testing" version, which provides up-to-date applications (as opposed to the "stable" version), yet provides security patches and stability (as opposed to the "unstable" version).

However, we can accommodate other preferences. Contact us for details.

If you are interested, we can implement user mode linux which may be a cheaper alternative depending on your needs.

The reason we got into this business is we like administrating machines, and don't need or want graphical tools to hide the details. We do use usermin, and some custom scripts which let our customers manage their own accounts. 

Lots of other tools make it harder (or even impossible) to administer the specialized accounts that we provide.  When working on systems for other people, we often run into issues that would take merely seconds on our servers to change one line of a text file, but on their server, it takes the technician a long time while the customer is on the phone waiting for him to figure out how to do it correctly.

There are four ways for you to have an encrypted (HTTPS) site while using Lime Daley hosting services.

1. Self-signed certificate 
2. Shared certificate
3. Standard certificate
4. Let's Encrypt certificate

All methods provide the same amount of security and encryption.  The trade-offs are price versus convenience for your site's visitors.

A self-signed certificate will popup a warning when visiting your site for the first time, confirming that the visitor wants to install the certificate into their browser.  Self-signed certificates are best used for sites that are used primarily by groups of individuals that don't change that often, e.g. employees using an intranet site.  A self-signed certificate is free.

A standard certificate is a certificate that is purchased from any vendor that sells SSL certificates (Lime Daley can purchase it for you, so you don't need to deal with the technical aspects of generating and installing the certificate).  These certificates are the most typical on current web sites.  You can pay anywhere from $30 to $400 per year for these certificates, depending on what level of authentication you wish to purchase.

A shared certificate is a certificate issued to Lime Daley, but also has up to three other domains included with it.  A typical visitor will not be able to distinguish between a standard certificate and a shared certificate, but a technical user who examines the certificate will see it is issued to Lime Daley and to your company.  This certificate costs $20 per year.

A Let's Encrypt certificate is a relatively new method, but we've been testing it for the last 9 months, and have started to roll that out to eventually replace all of the other certificates.  They don't support wildcards, so we'll need to continue using those certificates.  The advantages of these certificates are that they are free, auto-renewable, and not shared, so there aren't shared private keys if (when) there are SSL bugs that affect multiple servers.  The only disadvantage is that it is one centralized system that presumably will become a target by hackers.  We're not SSL experts, but it appears that since they don't have the private key, there aren't any serious security implications, unless they were able to replace the client-side code, which goes through validation, so seems unlikely.  If you are more comfortable with the more expensive certificates, that is fine with us.

If you want to be able to access your computer from outside your home (such as accessing your home computer from your workplace, or running a web or game server), but your ISP doesn't give you a static IP address, you need dynamic DNS.

We don't offer automatic credit card charging, but some customers accept credit cards securely with SSL, and then manually charge the cards with their own merchant accounts.

PayPal provides APIs (code) to charge credit cards via your website.

• Business or personal checks
• Purchase orders with 30 day terms
• Paypal account (mass payments preferred, with discount available)
• Credit cards (M/C, Visa, Amex, Discover) via Paypal
• International wire transfers (US$20 fee)

Yes. We offer the ability to remotely manage your email aliases and accounts via a simple HTTP/HTTPS protocol, which allows you to develop your own applications and devices and be able to interact with our servers.

Yes, we offer managed and unmanaged colocation.

Lime Daley is the most customizable web host you will find.  We specialize in hosting applications that you can't find elsewhere.

Do you need access to important medical and legal documents while away from home?  Do you wish that there was a secure way to have those documents easily retrievable no matter where you are?  Lime Daley's secure document hosting service will enable you to upload documents safely, categorize them as appropriate, and then retrieve them later with a PIN number for each category.

• I like getting spam, and I don't want to use your really, really good spam filter, but instead get all the advertisements for enlarging various body parts.  Can I do that?

One customer reported this trouble:

If you are trying to download your Lime Daley email from Yahoo and get the following error:

Unfortunately, there was a problem:
POP server does not support LAST command. You may only retrieve POP mail
from this server using "get all messages."

• I am getting a "530 Login authentication failed" message, but I know I am typing in the correct username and password.

Any existing Lime Daley customer can take advantage of our referral program to reduce or eliminate costs – or even get a check in the mail – when he refers a new customer who utilizes Lime Daley for software development, web site design or web site hosting.

Our current servers:

• Processor cores
  • 2 * 2.4GHz (orange)
  • 2 * 3.2GHz (tangerine)
  • 4 * 3.6GHz (clementine)
  • 8 * 2.6Ghz (ugli)
  • 12 * 2.4Ghz (tangelo, pummelo)
• RAID
  • RAID1 (orange, tangelo, pummelo)
  • RAID5 (tangerine, clementine)
  • RAID6 (tangerine)
  • NAS/RAID (ugli)
• RAM
  • 2GB (ugli)
  • 4GB (orange, tangerine, clementine)
  • 64GB (tangelo and pummelo)
• Passive cooling for reliability (orange, clementine, tangelo, pummelo, ugli)
• Active resource monitoring
• Debian Linux (we follow the "testing" release schedule)

All servers have redundant internet connections as well as battery and diesel power backups.

As you can see from the pictures below, we are in a facility that has plenty of room to grow, but is also already big enough to provide lots of redundancy for your needs.

(click on the images to enlarge)

The most troubling outage in Lime Daley's history occurred this week - causing sporadic outages for a couple of days on one of our servers.  No email was lost, though customers might have seen their web site down, or timeouts when trying to check their email.

It turns out to be a bug in the linux kernel that shows itself on certain hardware.  We are not clear as to why it only showed up recently, but are happy to report that a workaround exists, and the server seems to be stable going forward.

Lime Daley is expanding its servers in the near future, and one side effect of that will be that if any outages should occur like this in the future, we will be better prepared to handle it.