We believe that web hosting is more than just providing web space and FTP access. Our aim is to provide individuals and businesses with everything they need to express themselves on the internet, be that through an idea or selling goods and services. Whatever you want to create a website for, be it a small family photo album or a full powered data base driven ecommerce website, your choice of web host is essential. The right web host will make the difference between a slow clunky site that has regular down time and a site that is always available and blisteringly fast!

6 reasons to choose us for your web hosting

Our hosting technology

Managing your website

Our control panel is one of the world’s most advanced web hosting control panels currently available. Here is a quick summary of the great features available to our web hosting customers…

iPhone control panel

Customers can also manage their websites and hosting accounts on the move with our exclusive iPhone control panel which has all the same functionality of the standard control panel. This is free for all our web hosting customers.

We give you more!

We want our hosting customer’s websites to be a success and with this in mind we also provide our hosting customers with one of the biggest CGI script libraries in the UK including one click install WordPress, Joomla, phpBB, BuddyPress, OpenX & Drupal.

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging software available today! It’s easy to install and use and will allow you to have a great looking blog in minutes.

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPressMU social networking plugins and themes to empower you to create your own social network.

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB3 has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ.

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users easily to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

Openads is a hugely popular advert server designed for web publishers. It gives you the tools you need to make the most from online advertising. With Openads you will be able to manage sophisticated advertising programs and stay in control of all the advertising on your websites.

& much more!

Web hosting terminology

New to web hosting? Here are some of the most common terms used…

Bandwidth

A term used by web hosts to describe how much data can pass from the server your website is hosted on to people visiting your web site. This includes the files that make up your website as well as any data downloaded from databases or media files.

ccTLD

A country code top level domain name. These domain names are associated with a country or geographic location e.g. .co.uk (UK), .fr (France) and .cn (China). The ability to register these domain names from another country depends on the registrar’s rules. For example, co.uk has no restrictions whereas .it (Italy) demands you are based in Europe.

Domain Name System

The system that maps domain names to the corresponding machine’s IP addresses. This system is essentially a phone book that translates human friendly names into computer friendly numbers. Because this information is stored across multiple computers any updates to a domain (including registration and ownership details) can take up to 48 hours to work its way across all of them.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Once you are ready to see what your website looks like online, uploading the files to your web space is really easy and is often as simple as clicking, dragging and dropping. The method you will use to get your website online is called File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Don’t be put off by the name, all this does is take the files from your computer and put them on to the web host’s server for people to access. Simple!

In order to do this your web host may offer an upload function though your account with them, but that means you have to log in every time. A quicker alternative that most people use is FTP software. Some HTML editors come with this built in (e.g. Dreamweaver & Microsoft Expression Web) but even if yours doesn’t there is the industry standard stand alone (which is free) to download called FileZilla.

HTML

HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) is the first layer of a web page and deals with the content (the text, any lists, tables, quotes…).

LAMP

LAMP is an acronym used to describe a set of open source software used by many people and businesses to save money and to prevent platform lock-in. Linux: Operating system
Apache: Web server
MySQL: Database
PHP: Program

MySQL

MySQL (owned and developed by Sun Microsystems) is the world’s most popular open source database. It is also part of the open source software stack known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

Sub-Domain

Sub-domain names are domains that are part of the parent domain name. They are free to set up and can be useful if you have areas of your site you want to categorise e.g. dictionary.domain.com, thesaurus.domain.com

TLD

Top Level Domain Names have no association with any countries and were amongst the first to be created. E.g. .com, .net, .org.

Web Space

The amount of space allocated to your website by a web host to store all your files and data. The more web space you have the more information you can store.