Q. Do you take credit cards for payment?

Unfortunately, no, not yet. When we do, we will make it plainly clear. We accept personal (non-starter) checks, money orders and PayPal payments. Please do not send cash in the mail. If you do, and it becomes lost, you are responsible for making another payment.

Q. Do you offer simple shell accounts?

Yes, we do. Please see our services page for more details.

Q. I can't log into Talker.com, did you deny me access?

This question has 2 possible answers:

1. Are you delinquent in your account payments? If so, yes, we may have denied you access. Contact Alisa with when she can expect your payment or your notice of cancellation.

2. Have you stored pornography in your account? Or have you used your account to tamper with others' accounts on the talker.com system or some other computer system? If yes, we denied you; access and you can expect an e-mail soon stating that your account will be terminated.

Q. Can I run multiple talkers on talker.com?

You certainly may. However, the account is treated as a separate entity and requires its own application submission and approval process. Your secondary, tertiary, etc. talkers are given a 10% discount off regularly priced QUARTERLY account payments. The 10% discount does not apply to SEMI-ANNUAL or YEARLY payments, since those options are already discounted by 10 and 20%, respectively.

Multiple talkers may NOT be run within a single account. Every distict talker will have its own account access.

Q. May I change my account information if I need to?

Yes. You may, though we discourage this unless absolutely necessary.

Q. I got a "disk quota exceeded" message. What does this mean?

All accounts come with a given amount of storage for your talker and web files. The disk quota error message means you are over the allotment as provided by your talker plan. You have 2 options at this point: (1) Clean out unneeded talker and/or web files; or (2) purchase more space at $0.50/meg and we'll increase your quota accordingly.

*** You should note that you may experience file writing errors, e-mail writing trouble and possible loss of data to talker files in this condition. We suggest you remedy it immediately. Talker.com is not responsible for the loss of data in this case.

Q. What is your 'downtime' like? Is your server dependable?

Very dependable. In our 7 years of existence, the server (and not the present configuration) has rarely gone down due to equipment failure. More recently (end of 2002) we experienced a mystery disk problem. While it was thought to be other problems, the ultimate purchase and replacing of the largest disk solved the problem. We'll never claim the server will never go down. Computers are imperfect. We monitor system processes carefully, we are immediately paged with any problems and there is always a sysadmin on duty. We do give at least 48 hours notice (an e-mail is sent to the accounts on talker.com) of scheduled downtime where we can. At some points, security concerns require us to make changes sooner than 48 hours.

Q. Speaking of system configurations, what IS talker.com?

Talker.com runs on a dual processor PIII550Mhz Intel system. We have 1 Gig of RAM. A SCSI disk system holds all the data here. 3 Fast Wide SCSI drives gives us nearly 30G of storage online.

We're Debian beatniks here cause apt-get rocks. We also run a very specialized version of the linux kernel for security purposes. Other software includes Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP. We serve the 70,000 - 100,000 DNS queries we get every month by using an outsourced, highly available DNS service. If you have more specific questions about our system configuration, please email Yacko.

More information will be added to this page as the times change and as circumstance dictates. If you have a suggestion for a common question you'd like to see answered, please let Alisa know.