What is Hosting?

When you have a website you wish your customers to be able to view it 24/7. To do this you “host” your website files on a internet server that is connected to the internet so that your site will be available 24/7.
With hosting there are many options and features that will help enhance your website. For information click here.

What are Domain Names?

A Domain name is a unique address which states the location at which your website can be found on the internet.
Domain Names come in the form of

Your-domain-name.com
Your-domain-name.net
Your-domain-name.biz
Your-domain-name.info
Your-domain-name.co.uk
Your-domain-name.ie

What are the different hosting options and features?

WEBSPACE- Amount of space you have to store your website files.

E-MAIL ACCOUNTS- An e-mail account is a mailbox for e-mails. Each e-mail account has its own unique address e.g. someone@your-domain-name.com

E-MAIL ALIAS’S- These can be otherwise known as e-mail forwarders they are e-mail addresses without a mailbox. They are used to forward e-mails onto another e-mail account with a mailbox.
There are many uses for e-mail aliases for an example they can be used to forward e-mails sent to your new info@your-domain-name.com address onto your existing your-name@hotmail.com mailbox. This enables you to save time as you only have to check one e-mail account.

E-MAIL AUTO RESPONDER- This is an automatic reply sent by your e-mail server to whoever sends you an e-mail. This reply can inform the user that you have received their e-mail and any other information you wish to include. You can write your own reply for the server to send.

FRONTPAGE EXTENSIONS- If you use Microsoft FrontPage to design your site you will require FrontPage extensions to be installed in your hosting account. All of our hosting plans include these extensions.

CGI, PHP, PEARL, TCL, SSI- If you have a fairly advanced site or wish to make your site more dynamic you will require some of these features, an example of what these would be used for is something as simple as creating a contact form, which allows your customers to contact you more easily, or setting up an online store. These features can be expensive extras with other hosting companies!

WEB BASED E-MAIL- Allows you to check your someone@your-domain-name.com e-mail from any computer with internet connection throughout the world. You don’t have to be in the office to collect your e-mails with this feature.

WEBSITE CONTROL PANEL- It’s an online program that allows you full control over your account you can do things like add e-mail accounts, create sub domains and upload your website files

WEBSITE HIT STATISTICS- It allows you to see how many visited your site where they come form, what pages they looked at and what key words were used to find your site.

MY SQL- This is a powerful database program, typically used as data storage for dynamic content websites which can use scripts (e.g. cgi) to retrieve information and add information to the database. This feature is usually an expensive extra with other hosting companies!

24/7 FTP ACCESS- FTP Access allows you to connect to your website using an FTP program such as CuteFTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which allows you to upload your site very conveniently.

TELNET- Allows you to access your server on a command line level (for advanced users only)

NO BANNER ADS- We don’t place any ads, banners or pops on your site so that you have full control over the web content, watch out for other companies who charge large fees to remove their banner ads from your site.

UPTIME- As we have a high quality back up system on our network your site is available 99.9% of the time.

PARKED DOMAINS- If you park a domain a user who tries to access this domain name will automatically be transferred to your website. An example would be if you set up your-domain-name1.com as your website but also owned your-domain-name2.com you could ‘park’ this domain onto your existing account. Should users use your-domain-name2.com they would automatically be forwarded to your-domain-name1.com.

SSL- Secure Socket layering, this allows you to send personal information over the internet securely e.g. credit card numbers.

TRAFFIC PER MONTH- Is the allowed data transfer per month measured in megabytes. We find 99% of sites do not break this limit, but additional megabytes are available at a small charge.

MAILING LISTS- Allows users to set up a mailing list to store customers e-mails. This is a useful service to have if you wish to send out bulk e-mails or advertise a new product etc.

SPAM FILTERS- Allows you to filter your e-mail to get rid of any unsolicited e-mails.

PASSWORD PROTECTION- Allows you to apply password protection to certain files or pages on your site.