Getting started guide - Web
To get your web site going, you need two things:
- a domain name
- web space
You can quickly search for available domain names with our domain name search.
So with your domain name in mind, what size hosting package do you need? Quoting capacity in megabytes or gigabytes means nothing to most people, so let's try and explain in real terms:
Our basic package (personal hosting), provides you with enough web space (storage space on our servers), to store about 20000 web-resolution images, or 500 12-megapixel digital photos, or 14000 average sized e-mails. If you need more than that but not enough to require one of our business plans, please contact us - we are always willing to customise a plan for you.
With our personal hosting package, you'll get one e-mail inbox (the place where the e-mails are collected on our servers before you read them), and as many addresses for that e-mail inbox as you want. For more information, see the e-mail getting started guide.
Traffic allowance is something else you will want to consider. Traffic is the amount of data that can be downloaded from your site by visitors in one month and our personal hosting plan gives you 1 GB. How quickly that gets used up depends entirely on how popular your site is and what size files visitors are downloading. Large images and PDF documents are the biggest culprit of high traffic usage. If you exceed the 1 GB, we won't cut your site off but we will contact you to help decrease the throughput or regrade your hosting plan to cater for the additional traffic (see our hosting services terms & conditions for details).
The final consideration is support. We always strive to help our users in any way we can, especially when they are new to having a web site. Our personal hosting plan comes with all the technical support you need to get your e-mail configured and web site uploaded. If you need further help setting up web software (forums, shops, blogs), custom web server or PHP settings, database help or a faster response to support requests, please consider our business hosting plan or contact us about a custom plan.
When you're ready, head over to our hosting plans, click one of the "Order this hosting" buttons and fill in your details and the domain name you want. We will get back to you with confirmation before you commit to anything.