Shared Web Hosting |
This order form is provided in a secure environment and to help protect against fraud your current IP address (213.175.215.209) is being logged.
Choosing a shared hosting package can be a great first time solution as it is the cheapest and easiest to setup. Most professionals and businesses start off with a good shared hosting solution and stick with it for a while before looking to upgrade to the more high powered and expensive hosting setups. We offer three different shared web hosting solutions which are all flexible and upgradable at a months' notice. If you are not sure which one to choose, why not choose our 'Startup' hosting package and then see how you get on. Alternatively feel free to get in touch for some advice on which hosting solution you might need.
When visitors come to your site, your website hosting package serves up your images and web pages for users to view and interact with. This happens in two stages, upload and download. Upload is when your site receives data from the user and download is when the user receives data from the site. Your websites upload and download over time form its bandwidth which is measured in bits per second (bps). Many web hosting companies will put limits on this or charge you for spikes in your bandwidth. When you sign up for a shared hosting package through DDS, you get unlimited bandwidth. This is especially handy if you will need your hosting solution to cope with promotions which bring large numbers of traffic to your site.
Web space on a shared hosting setup refers to the hard disk space allocated to you and your website. The files which make up your website, whether static html or fully built within a content management system (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, have an associated file size. As your website grows and you add more content your requirements for web space with grow with you. We recommend that first time webmasters get setup with our Startup hosting package and test the water, if you find you require a more advanced hosting deal such as our Benchmark or Business packages we can easily upgrade you upon request. On the other hand, if you are an already established business, require the upmost in service and stability whilst expecting a higher level of traffic, then of course we suggest going straight for our Business web hosting setup.
Many content management and eCommerce systems rely on storing and processing many megabytes worth of information. A database is a means for storing and sorting this information, and it comes in many forms. All of our shared hosting solutions come with inclusive MySQL databases which can be accessed and updated through your control panel (cPanel). MySQL is the type of database we provide you. Generally you will only need one MySQL database per solution, for example one for Wordpress or one for the Magento eCommerce platform. If this is your first time choosing a hosting package, you will be likely to only require the single database. Sometimes, especially as you grow and for larger businesses you may integrate two or three databases together and configure them to work in tandem.
Your shared web hosting account comes with an inclusive email service. This means that you can have a professional online email address such as yourname@yourbusiness.com. Depending on whether you are a one man (or woman) band or a large organisation consisting of many hundreds of employees, your email requirements will differ. Basic portfolio websites for individuals will, in all likelihood require just the one email address. How you set this up is completely up to you and can be changed whenever you like through your cPanel. We recommend using email addresses for departments, even if it only yourself managing the site. This will allow you to delegate the management of those departments at a later date and scale your growth.
As well as being provided with professional email accounts and storage, all of our webhosting deals include a fast email forwarding service as an alternative. If you use a web-based email service such as Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or Gmail then this could be the ideal setup for you. It will take all email sent to an address of your choosing i.e. anythingyoulike@yourdomain.com and route it through to your web-based service. If you are used to using Gmail for example, then nothing needs to change and you can continue working in the way you are used to. Some email services such as Gmail and Yahoo mail also have the facility to send email from your domains; this means that once you are fully setup with your shared web hosting service you can forget about the jargon and get on with your life and business.
If you don't have an account with Gmail, Hotmail or any other web-based email service and you don't use a mail client like Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook combined with POP3 and SMTP to check and send your electronic messages then this service will come in handy. With any of our shared hosting packages you can access, read and write email directly through the included RoundCube client in your cPanel. RoundCube is a fully featured client which allows for html emails, message threading, signatures and features spam filtering. Now through DDS Hosting you can access your business emails from anywhere, at any time.
POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol 3 (the third version of POP) and SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It is the POP which allows you to receive mail and the SMTP which allows you to send it. Hosting packages linked to domain names are automatically setup to receive and send mail through these internationally recognised methods. Configuring your POP3 and SMTP email addresses through your web hosting cPanel is very easy with clearly marked instructions providing, in detail how best to setup many of the various mail clients available including Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook.
Administering your website can be a tricky process and the idea of it is rather daunting to many people. At DDS we provide and use cPanel hosting with our shared hosting products to give you the easiest interface for getting what you need from your package with us. cPanel is incredibly popular and used throughout the world by many large and professional organisations. The best thing about using cPanel to change your website settings is that become a member of a very large online community, spanning many dedicated forums who support and help each other to work out the many options which are available to you as a user. Of course you can always ask us too and if you need a hand we are always glad to help.
Many hosting companies online like to sell and promote that they offer Wordpress hosting. Do not be fooled, it is very possible to install the latest version of Wordpress on pretty much any shared hosting setup. With a minimum of one database and a few hundred megabytes of allocated web space, you can happily blog away with a self hosted Wordpress website for years. If you need help installing Wordpress on any of our packages, just ask and we'll do it for you free of charge. This applies not only to Wordpress, but to any content management system or eCommerce system, paid or free. If you need a hand we make it our business to be here for you.
