Site hosting - What and Where

For a summary - see Summary and comparison of Site Hosting plans.

Unless your company is a "dot com" or a medium-sized corporate then it is likely to be best to have your Web Site hosted on an offsite computer that is in a large, secure data centre with very high speed connections to the rest of the Web. Even if you have an "always on" connection to the Web there is a mass of time, energy, effort, cost and risk in trying to set up a Web Server and a very, very significant amount of time from very skilled people required to keep it running securely, reliably, responsively etc..

You connect to your Web server from your own computer (or just a PC) as and when needed to refresh the information on both of them. This task can be automated and our own services are available to assist but it is not common to connect more than twice per day.

We provide a very high function hosting service at a very significant discount to our design and deployment customers because:

• we recognise the customer need for a one-stop shop and
• we can justify the reduced fees on the basis that we also remove a layer of communication and bureaucracy that arises when we provide just one of those services

Bands of service

To keep the buying (and selling!) simple we only have two levels of service:

• The Full Monty (For non-UK visitors = "everything") : this includes all you need to run interactive Web Sites that are driven by Data and DataBases.
• Your Starter for Ten : this includes all you need to run a static Web Site plus a subset of utilities and facilities that are commonly required even for simple sites. Note that Secure form submission is included.

The pricing for each of these when purchased as part of a design and deployment (D&D) engagement will be quoted in your (D&D) proposal but you can expect that they will be around 50% of the List Prices below with a price cap guarantee at that same rate.

Price List for Services - UK Pounds Sterling (£) excluding VAT

Full Monty - £195 per annum or £19.50 per month.

Starter for Ten - £120 per annum or £12 per month.

Discounts are available for new sites - click here for 15 - 30% off the above.
Also see Domain Management and Security and Authentication of your (Business/) Web Site for additional offers.

As part of the ordering process you will be required to confirm that you have read, understood and will comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use, you may wish to read them now at Terms + Acceptable Use.

Hosting - the Full Monty

Our aim is to offer you all you need to have a very dynamic, intelligent site at a reasonable cost.

For those that want to check that statement, the Full Monty includes:

• 300MB of disk space
• 30 Mailboxes(Users)¹ ² - note that is not a limit on access to the site, merely how many of your own staff could have their own mailboxes. This is an ideal way of keeping Junk e'Mail out of your primary mailbox.
• Any number of Sub-domains¹
• 2GB of Data Transfer
• Client (eg Outlook - POP3) and Web Browser access to e'Mail when away from your PC
• Ensim control panel to control email accounts, sub domains etc.
• User access control for pages and data beneath Home Page
• SPAM Filtering by source - e'Mail address, domain (ie all at badserver.com) or IP address

and for the technologists:

• MySQL - multiple DataBases¹
• PHP4
• Perl 5
• SSI
• FrontPage 2002
• Linux / Apache
• Modern Intel servers attached with 100mbps burst mode connections to more than 6 Internet backbones

And if your success exceeds the limits?:

• Additional 30 Mailboxes: £3UKP/month¹ ².
• Additional 300MB Disk space: £3UKP/month
• Additional 1GB Data transfer per month: £3UKP/month
• Unique SSL Certificate and IP address for your own domain: £90UKP/year

  This is necessary if your site wishes to have substantial dialogues with your prospects and customers in a Secure manner. Basic form submission in a similar Secure manner is included in either of the above packages.

Notes:
¹ Normal use of these facilities consume a small amount of your allocated disk space.
² Normal use of these facilities consume small amounts of your allocated bandwidth.
Also see Price List.

Hosting - your starter for ten

Our aim is to offer you a very affordable entry cost to having a prescence on the World Wide Web but allowing you to upgrade to a more substantial site as and when it makes sense for you and your business proposition.

For those that want to check that statement, the Starter for Ten package includes:

• 150MB of disk space
• 15 Mailboxes(Users)¹ ² - note that is not a limit on access to the site, merely how many of your own staff could have their own mailboxes. This is an ideal way of keeping Junk e'Mail out of your primary mailbox.
• Any number of Sub-domains¹.
• 1GB of Data Transfer
• Client (eg Outlook - POP3) and Web Browser access to e'Mail when away from your PC
• Ensim control panel to control email accounts, sub domains etc.
• User access control for pages and data beneath Home Page
• SPAM Filtering by source - e'Mail address, domain (ie all at badserver.com) or IP address

  and our own code to support the following:

• Secure (SSL) submission of forms
• Counters of visitors

Also see Price List. Recommendations to add to the list are always welcome, particularly if that is what will make you decide to join us!. However - please do not ask us to do anything you know to be illegal such as making copies of code that would violate any licensing restrictions. If you don't know then ask!.

New sites - why pay for what you don't need

Any new site will take time to get established and for the traffic to grow. No credible web professional is going to predict what resources you will need without some history to analyse. What we do is to let you buy what you need to start and allow you to flexibly expand your resources when you know what you need.

Get more of the resources you want in exchange for those you don't!

Unless you request otherwise or you tell us your requirements in detail then we will set a threshold-notification trigger at 50% of the quantites listed above with our complete committment to set your allocations to the limits of your plan on your request at any time.

Even if you exceed the thresholds set, the site will continue to work perfectly normally - you will be notified automatically by e'mail and all you need to do is forward that e'Mail to us to confirm that the usage was not an "accident" or other unusual incident and we will increase your allocation of that resource. Sooner or later you will reach the limits of your plan in one of the resource groups but it is quite likely that another resource you bought initially is still below it's original 50% setting! - that's where we both become flexible!.

As you understand the resource needs of your site by this time, we will offer you a plan which is balanced to meet the resources you need and those that you don't - within the same charge. An example might be that you don't need 50% of your mailbox allocation but you do need 40% more bandwidth because you have a very popular and graphically intensive site - no problem.

We are not offering to do this balancing act on even a monthly basis but at each anniversary of your contract we will try to offer you the deal which best suits your resource usage. You can then factor in any promotional or other expansion plans and decide the trade-offs.

The benefit to you is that - as you can see - our prices remain low even when one of the resources you consume is high because other customers may use more of a different resource but less of the one that you need.

As part of the new site deal you also get a 15% up-front discount off the annual prices shown in the Price List above and 30% off your 2nd and subsequent years subscriptions if you remain below our initial settings. So even if your site does not become an overnight "Google" the good news is that you will have your prescence on the Web with lower cost as well as pain and most importantly when you need to expand, the capability is there without question and in a completely non-disruptive manner.

Or choose to take it all up-front

If you prefer to have us pre-allocate all the resources of the plan that you choose when we set up your site then we will be pleased to do so with no "quibble" whatsoever. Additional resources can then be purchased at very reasonable rates indicated in 'extras' - above.

Domain registration and managment

We recommend that you either:

1. register your domain name yourself online with a reputable registrar who is likely to be in business for the next decade or
2. We can manage the acquisition and management of your .com or .co.uk domain for a nominal £15 per annum to minimise the effort and time-wasting that can easily occur. Other domain TLDs - prices on request.

If you choose anything but the second option then we reserve the right to make administration charges of £15 per hour resolving any issues that arise.

Exclusive Secure Site Connectivity

We can manage the process of acquiring and deploying a unique Certificate for your Company which will give Web Users secure connectivity from their browser all the way to our server. For the majority of Small to Medium Businesses who are not conducting significant financial transaction we can supply this for £90 p.a. payable annually in advance. This will give 93% of the total Web population access without any intervention and the other 7% using very old or unusual browsers will have the option to accept your credentials dynamically.

There are many alternative suppliers of certificates for which we would then simply charge an installation and administrative fee to manage this facility. GeoTrust would be our preferred 2nd-tier supplier at a charge of £60 p.a. in addition to the annual payment for the certificate. Geotrust currently charge 149 USD for QuickSSL™ and True BusinessID™ is 249 USD. Both can be seen at: the GeoTrust Web Site.