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GETTING STARTED

Web Hosting Guide

Confused by web hosting industry technical jargon and terms? This web hosting guide provides valuable information to help you make an informed decision about your web hosting requirements. If you are just getting started with hosting, one of our value hosting plans will deliver outstanding features at an affordable price.

Here are the key components of a hosting package, and what they mean to you and your website:

Hard Disk Storage

This is the space you have to store your website. Every website is stored on a web server, which is the computer that broadcasts your website to your visitors. Your hard disk storage is how much space you are allocated on that server's hard drive. Even most robust websites don't require more than 10 megs of space, but having more is a nice luxury for storing pictures, video, and graphics. HostMySite plans start at 2 GB of storage.

Monthly Transfer (also called bandwidth)

This is the total amount of data (including graphics, HTML web pages, video, etc) which can be uploaded and downloaded from your website each month. It is a rough estimator of how many visitors your hosting plan can accommodate. For example, on an average website with a moderate amount of graphics, it has been our experience that 1000 megabytes (MB) of transfer can accommodate well over 5,000 visitors per month. Some web hosts claim to offer "unlimited bandwidth" which is not really possible. Not only are they likely to pack your website on an overloaded server and connection, but if you read the fine print there are always "excessive use penalties" which are arbitrary and costly. In contrast, we ensure your website always gets the resources you pay for to make it fast and reliable with no hidden charges.

POP3 Email Accounts

These are email accounts which can be used with your account. They allow you to send, receive, and read email via our easy web interface or with a number of popular mail clients. Please visit our support center for more information on configuring your email client of choice.

Unlimited updates via FTP

We allow you to update your website 24x7 using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Client. This is a program which allows you to connect to our server and upload your files. We recommend WS_FTP which is both powerful and simple to use. It can be found at ipswitch.com. If you are new to uploading a website, we provide 24x7x365 toll-free technical support, and an online support center to assist you.

CGI script support with Perl

CGI (common gateway interface) allows you to run scripts and programs on our server to enhance your web pages. Most of these scripts are written in a language called Perl. Unlike with HTML, CGI scripts are executed on the server. You can use CGI scripts to add advanced forms, shopping carts, counters, and many other features to your website.

Active Server Pages

With ASP, you can add interactive content to your Web pages or build entire Web applications that use HTML pages as the interface to your visitors. ASP pages are files that contain HTML tags, text, and script commands. ASP pages can call ActiveX components to perform tasks, such as connecting to a database or performing a business calculation.