Hosting Frequently Asked Questions

A. While web pages are designed and developed on a single computer, they must be transferred to a server, or host, so that they are available to the rest of the world over the Internet. A host is simply a computer that has a constant, high speed connection to the Internet.

A. Yes. The rest of the world cannot view your site unless it is hosted.

A. No. Gaining access and permission to servers that are not Silvergear's may cause the price of some services to increase.

A. SSL is short for Secure Socket Layer. This is an encrypted certificate that you will need only if you are accepting secure information at your site.

Reasons for having an SSL
-You have a merchant acount that allows you to accept credit card or check payments at your site.

-You want your customer to feel safe as they submit personal infromation.

A. No matter where you host, if you have an SSL, you will also need to have a unique IP address.

An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet.

A unique IP address is simply an IP address that is unique to your own web site.

For example... if you were to sign up for one of Silvergear’s hosting plans today, you would be sharing our server with other Silvergear hosted Clients meaning you would have the same IP address as them, much like a home street address is set up. But if you have an SSL you would need your own unique IP address or "Home street address" you can no longer share an IP address even though you are still sharing a server.

A. This is the "address" of a website - the name that visitors type in to the location window of their browser to get to a website; example is
www.silvergear.com. You can check for domain name availability then let us know what you would like to register.

A. Customizable email accounts are included with every hosting package.
Example: you@yourdomain.com.

A. Email is simply the easiest, fastest and most cost effective way for you to communicate with your acquaintances, customers, and employees.

Having multiple email accounts allows you to provide several channels of feedback for your customers or clients. For instance; you can have one email for support, one for sales, and one for each employee. That way you will always be in touch with your customers and employees.

Please see Silvergear’s hosting packages for the amount of email accounts that are offered with each plan.

A. After you have purchased a hosting package, we will send you a confirmation receipt, and ask you what email accounts you would like created. We would then create your new email account(s) and send you your email account updates including your new web-mail login address, usernames, passwords, and other helpful hints about your web mail settings.

You may make email account creation requests at anytime.

A. We generally host for small businesses that do not have any in-house IT talent or equipment available.

We take the worry and high cost out of hosting by offering simple and reliable plans on servers that are maintained and operated on a full time basis.

A. Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), PostgreSQL or MySQL (database), PHP, Perl or CGI (web application development).

A. Please alert us immediately, using our contact form, if you find that you cannot access your website or web mail. We will work hard to find the problem and resolve it quickly! Normally if a site does go down it will be back up in a matter of minutes.

Some server downtime can be expected no matter where you plan on hosting due to equipment maintenance and updates. We always try to inform our clients when we have a scheduled server downtime.

A. First you will want to check for domain name availability. Once you have found a domain name that you would like and that name is available you can contact us and we will register it for you!

A. Disk space 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.

If you go over your available bandwidth or disc space we would alert you and let you know your options. These may include upgrading your hosting plan or purchasing more bandwidth or space separately.

A. No. Provided that the domain is registered in your name (as it should be), you can simply update your namservers (from where you manage your domain names) to our servers.

A. We generally charge your credit card a monthly recurring amount.
You may request to pay on a yearly basis by check or credit card if that is more convenient for you.

A. Consider subdomains as an extension of your domain. For example, your site is www.example.com. A subdomain would be test.example.com, and another could be services.example.com.

Subdomains are usually treated as separate sites from the main domain site.

A. SQL database is a type of database technology that is the most widely used in today's computing environment. Here the data is stored in a very structured format that provides high levels of functionality. SQL databases are generally more robust, secure and have better performance than other older database technologies. It provides for 'SQL' access to the data.

A. An FTP account is something we would setup for you which would give you the permisions you need to access your sites files for updates ect. if you have the capabilities and would like to do so.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocal.