Hosting FAQ

How much web space do I need?

This really depends on how big your website is and what it will contain, for 99% of our clients our standard package is more than sufficient.

How do I access the web statistics for my site?

To view the statistics for your website you will need to login to your control panel.

You have given me more web space / traffic than I need, can I have a discount.

Unfortunately not, the cost of our services are calculated based on many different factors involved in maintaining a professional and reliable hosting service, space and traffic are just two aspects of the whole service.

How much traffic can my website use per month and what happens if I go over.

Each hosting package has specific bandwidth limits, these are detailed on the products page which can be found on our hosting page.

If you use in excess of this limit we may temporarily suspend your account or invoice you in arrears for the excess usage at a rate of £8 + vat per 1 GigaByte (GB) used.

We recommend that if you do or anticipate that you will use over your limit, that you upgrade your account to a package that provides sufficient bandwidth for your expected usage.

How do I send email as [email protected]?

As a general rule if you are using an email program such as Outlook you will need to contact your broadband provider and ask them for an ‘Outgoing SMTP Server’. If they cannot provide this service we recommend that you use a third party SMTP service such as https://www.authsmtp.com but please note we cannot provide support for those services.

What email programs do you recommend?

• Outlook
• Outlook Express
• Mac Mail
• Thunderbird

Which type of web forwarding should I use?

• If you are redirecting to another domain name / website that you own you should use a header redirect, they avoid confusion and search engines favour them against frame redirects.
• If you are forwarding to some free web space and want to hide the true website address you should use the frame redirect although search engines do not favour these types of redirections.

Email Addresses

As part of the web and email hosting services you can use as many email addresses as you like @your-domain.com.
For example if you are ‘Joe Bloggs Consultancy Ltd’ you could register the domain name bloggs-consultancy.co.uk and you could use the email address [email protected].

Mailboxes

A mailbox is a password protected container on our server for your email to be delivered to, so if someone sends an email to [email protected] it is delivered to one of our servers and then to your mailbox. You will then collect the email from the mailbox using either an email program such as Microsoft Outlook or our Web mail system.

Spam / Virus Filtering

All of our current web and email hosting services include spam and virus protection.

Virus

If an email is sent to you that our system decides is an virus it will automatically quarantine the email and send you notification, if you were expecting the file and it has been incorrectly identified as virus you can request that it be release from the quarantine.

Spam

All email that is sent to your email address/s is processed through a spam scoring system using many different rules so identify if a message is spam or not. Each message is given a score and the higher the score the more likely the message is to be a spam email. If the score is above a certain threshold it will flag the message as spam and this can then be auto-filtered from the rest of your valid email.

Control Panel

For the web and email hosting packages you are given access to a control panel where you can do the following:

• Change passwords
• Add/Edit email addresses
• View web stats
• Check disk usage
• Change Spam settings

Web Mail

The Web Mail system allows you to go to a web page from any Internet connection and view any emails that are in your mailbox, this is particularly useful if you are away on holiday or work from different locations, there is many features too numerous to mention here.

Web Forwarding

Web forwarding is where you forward your domain name to another web address, for example if you registered multiple versions of your domain name such as bloggs-consultancy.co.uk and bloggs-consultancy.com you can setup web forward so if someone goes to www.bloggs-consultancy.com they will be redirected to the website you have setup on www.bloggs-consultancy.co.uk.

There is two types of web forwarding:

Frame Redirect

This is where the redirect is done using an ‘HTML Frame’, if someone goes to www.bloggs-consultancy.com the address bar at the top will not change until but they will see the website on www.bloggs-consultancy.co.uk. This is more useful if you decide to forward to some free web space that you may have with your ISP.

Header Redirect

This type of redirect means that if someone goes to www.bloggs-consultancy.com they will instantly be redirected to www.bloggs-consultancy.co.uk and the address bar in your browser will change to reflect that.

Web space

Web space is an area on one of our web servers where you can upload your website to so that if anyone on the Internet goes to www.bloggs-consultancy.co.uk they will see the website you or your web designer as created.

FTP Account

An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is a username and password that you will allow you and you only to connect to your web space and make changes to your website.

PHP

PHP is an open source web scripting / programming language that is used for creating dynamic and interactive web pages.

CGI / Perl

A CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script is a program / script that is used to process information sent from a web browser to a web server, they can be written in a number of languages including Perl and are most often used to process the information submitted by a contact/order form. We only support Perl at this time.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

Server Side Includes is a server side web scripting language mainly used for adding simple dynamic elements to a webpage such as including the contents of another web/HTML page.

Web Stats

Every time someone visits your website or a particular web page this is logged by our server and is then summarized on a daily basis so that you can see how many visitors come your website, which pages are most popular and where visitors come from etc.

Monthly Traffic

Whilst few website's reach this limit each package does have a cap on the amount of traffic it can use on our network per month, for example if you have lots of high resolution photos or MP3 downloads on your site you are more likely to use up your monthly traffic quota than a site that just contains text and web optimised images. The reason we impose such limits is to prevent very busy websites using up all the resources that are intended to be equally shared with other websites on the same server. Monthly traffic is measured in GigaBytes of 'GB', if you use in excess of your bandwidth limit you will be invoiced for that excess traffic.