Web Hosting FAQ

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is the act of renting space and bandwidth through a company so that you may publish your web site online.

You can either opt for free hosting that is usually supported with banners and pop ups, or may opt to get paid web hosting, which gives you complete control over your site contents.

What is Virtual Hosting?

Also known as shared hosting, this form of web hosting should suffice for most everyone.

Virtual hosting simple refers to the fact that your site is on one server, and that this server hosts multiple sites. You are virtually shared - your site will not be the only one on this specific server.

Very few sites would actually need the power of a dedicated server, so this option provides to be a reliable and cheap solution.

What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is a word along with a TLD that uniquely identifies your website.
Please visit our domains page for more information.

How Do I Register a Domain Name?

Registering a domain name is very easy.

First you will have to make sure that the domain you want is available - using something called a WHOIS lookup at sites like Register.com or Whois Source you can make sure the domain you want is available for registration.

Afterwards, you simply need to visit a registration site such as DirectNIC or Register.com to purchase your domain name.

My host offers unlimited bandwidth/space/transfer

As we explained on our scams page, it is not possible for a web host to offer 'unlimited' bandwidth or diskspace. Such hosting plans always come with clauses that restrict how much bandwidth you can transfer at a given moment, how much CPU usage you can use (which is arbitrarily decided), and so forth.

What exactly is space and bandwidth/data transfer?

Diskspace is the size your website can be. Every single letter on your website has to be stored somewhere on your web host's server. Each letter is one byte, and a megabyte is roughly one million bytes. HTML pages are usually very small, but it is the extra images, scripts, and even databases that can take up large amounts of disk space.

Bandwidth/Transfer is the amount of data the server will allow your site to send in a month. Transfer is usually measured in gigabytes - billions of bytes. Once you go over your monthly limit, a host may either shut your site down for the remainder of the month or it can charge you 'overage.' This overcharge is usually about $2.00-$5.00 per extra gigabyte of transfer.