Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting
Domain Names
A domain name is essential for web hosting, it should be as easy to remember as possible. For example if the name of your business was "John Smiths", you were based in Christchurch and you sold televisions then any of the following domain names would be ideal:
johnsmiths.co.uk
john-smiths.co.uk
jstv.co.uk
jschristchurch.co.uk
The majority of short domain names have been taken so it might take a few attempts to find an ideal domain name. You can use either .co.uk, .org.uk, .com, .org, .net or .info as the extension of the domain name, but if you are based in the UK it is best to use .co.uk. Use our availability checker below to find a suitable available domain name (results will open in a new window).
Enter a domain name to check availability:
Once your have found an available domain name you can check the price on our domain registration page, but it usually costs less then £5 per year. A UK domain name must be registered for a minimum of 2 years, all other domain names have a minimum of 1 year. Once purchased a domain name is instantly reserved for you and becomes active within 24 hours. All you need to do now is create a web page.
Web Hosting
A web hosting account is needed to host and serve your web site to clients, send and receive emails and handle any transactions should you use your web site for ecommerce.
If you already have a web site you can simply upload your web site through your control panel or through your favourite FTP client once you have signed up for a hosting account.
If you do not currently have a web site you can use our online tool called SiteStudio which is included with all our hosting plans. The program will ask you for some simple details such as company/web site name and contact details, and will let you choose from over 80 web site templates to build a professional quality web site in minutes.
To see the included templates designs click here,you can also have a go at creating your own site on our demo site.
We have three hosting plans to choose from. There are three main aspects to a hosting plan:
Web Space - The amount of space in megabytes the account will hold: Assuming the average web page is 50K then 100MB's of web space will hold around 2000 web pages, 200 average quality images or 33 MP3's.
Bandwidth - The amount of data that is allowed to be transferred per month. 1000mb will allow a 50K web page to be downloaded 20,000 times per month.
PHP/CGI Capability - This allows programs to run on your web site such as forums, blogs and shopping carts. A simple informational website will not need this capability but if you think you will then you will need to chose either the Business or Advanced plans which include this.
The web space and bandwidth figures above are from our base plan "Home", if you think you will exceed these limits then you may need to look at our business or advanced plans. Click here to compare our hosting plans.
Once your web site is up and running you can create an email account to send and receive email through. The email account will be based on your chosen domain name, for example: john@johnsmiths.co.uk. You can have as many email accounts as your hosting account allows (between 5 and 20 depending on the hosting plan).
If you wish to send out newsletters or announcements you can also setup a mailing list, an auto responder can also reply to emails on your behalf with a message such as an 'Out of Office' or "Thank you for your email" message. Anti-virus and anti-spam can be ativiated through your control panel to reduce the amount of unsolicited email being received.
Search Engine Optimisation
After adding your site to Google, Yahoo and other search engines you may find your web site does not rank as high as other web sites. This is normal and there are steps to increase your position known as search engine optimisation (SEO). See the following links for more information on optimising your website. We will soon be offering an SEO service to our customers.
We hope you have found this guide useful, if you require any further information please contact us.