Lyno's provide a very efficient way to get your job to us without the delays and expense of couriers. We have installed an inhouse high speed Internet Server. It is connected permanently to the Internet using high speed ISDN lines. It's bandwidth is 256Kbps, which allows you to send or receive at up to 120MB per hour of compressed or uncompressed data. If you use a telephone modem connection, you'll get around 15 megabytes an hour throughput. With an ISDN connection, or one of the now quite affordable cable modems, you can get our full (120MB/hour) bandwidth.

For large and regular jobs the compact PDF (Portable Document Format) file format is a greatway to submit jobs. You'll need to buy Adobe Acrobat 4.0 for your Mac or PC to make PDF files reliably, but it will soon pay for itself. You get better pricing for sending your jobs to us in this format and we can output them faster too. PDF is also very reliable. You just send the one file. All graphics, text, images and fonts are embedded. You can view the job in Acrobat to make sure it's OK.

If you are planning to use PDF to send us jobs, send an email and register on our website and we'll help you get up and running. We have settings for E-Print and for Prepress.

Email attachments vs FTP.

There are two ways to send your job. For small jobs, up to a few megabytes, you can send them as email attachments. This is convenient and easy to do using your email program. However it has disadvantages.

Firstly when you send an email attachment it has to be "encoded" to travel around the internet. This makes it about 30% bigger. So 4 megabytes becomes more like 6 megabytes. Most service providers will block large email attachments anyway. The other thing is the email does not come straight to Lyno's. First it goes to your service provider's "mail server" where it goes in a queue. At peak times this can delay your jobs for quite a while. We have our own mail server here so at least there is no delay at our end! The big hassle is you don't know for sure that we've got it, unless you phone up.

FTP, the smart way

The other way is to use FTP. This stands for "File Transfer Protocol" which is the native "language" of the internet. It's how everything gets moved around the internet. You can download a small, easy to use "freeware" program for your Mac or PC that we have provided here to use FTP. This way you can send us larger jobs and even pick up drum scans. You need to register with us and get a name and password. We provide you with your own folder on our inhouse internet server.

Using FTP you can "drag and drop" your files straight across the internet from your computer to ours. You can delete files in your folder and even make folders in there. Its your job to do the housekeeping and keep your folder cleaned out. If your leave old stuff in there and we accidentally print out the wrong job we get pretty mad!!
There are no delays with FTP and when your computer has finished sending you know the job is here. There are no increases in file size. The FTP programs also provide a "resume" function if you have a connection problem or have to disconnect. When you start again the data "joins on" where it "left off".

There are lots of stories about how the Internet is slow and all gummed up. We have tested throughput using the internet versus a point to point direct connection. The Internet slows things down around 10%, not bad for the convenience, we think. If you experience poor throughput, it's probably caused by your service provider.