Dot Dash Splash: web hosting

Packages

Dot1

Our basic package costs £200 per year. This includes: 250MB of storage and 2.5GB of bandwidth.

This will be sufficient for many small businesses.

Dot3

Our next package costs £300 per year. This includes: 500MB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth.

Dot5

This package costs £400 per year and includes: 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth.

Custom packages

If your site's needs are greater than any of the above packages then we will design a package specific to your needs.

Hosting clients

We only provide private hosting for clients who have bought a website from us. This means that we are sure of the quality of the pages and scripts which run on our web server.

As we host only a limited number of sites that we have built, we can guarantee that your website will not be slowed down by other sites hosted on the server.

Be wary of shared hosting

If you take out a shared hosting package from another web host then you will probably be sharing a server with webpages written by many different people with varying levels of competence. If any of those websites have inefficient pages in them they may consume much of the server's resources and slow the response of your website.

To see an example of how respectable businesses can unwittingly share servers with many other sites, go to this hosting lookup and enter "askdave.co.uk" in the Search box.

Additionally, some spam filters will block all emails which come from a specific server, so if your site shares a server with a spammer you may find your emails do not reach their destination.

Our hosting

We do not permit spamming and any client found to be so doing will have their account terminated.

Through the above approach, Dot Dash Splash offers a premium hosting service to its clients.

Web Hosting

Dot Dash Splash have web servers based in a modern data centre in Berkshire. These are monitored 24 hours a day. This results in an average 99.95% + uptime. This means that for all but 2 hours a year your website will be available. It is not realistic to expect 100% uptime. Even the largest sites such as Ebay have problems resulting in downtime. Be very skeptical of a web host claiming to provide 100% uptime.

Webhosting packages have two characteristics, bandwidth and storage.

Storage

This is measured in MB (megabytes) and represents all the space that you have available on the servers to store your files. This includes:

Your webpages (as an example this webpage ("hosting.php") is 4KB in size (or 1/250th of 1MB)). Having a standards-compliant website helps to reduce file size.
Your emails which you have not downloaded onto your computer
Your databases which power such things as e-shops and bulletin boards.

As the files being stored remain on the server until deleted (or emails are downloaded to a PC), the storage is a constant limit. So if you have 250MB of storage in your web hosting package you can store 250MB of data.

Bandwidth

This is measured in GB (gigabytes) and is a monthly limit. Each time someone views this webpage the web server sends 4KB of data to their computer and their browser displays it for them to see. That uses 4KB of bandwidth. So if a webhosting package had 1GB then this page could be viewed 250,000 times in a month.

Other costs

Depending upon the needs of your business, the other costs involved in hosting a website will vary, but may include:

Domain name registration: £10 for a ".co.uk" name for two years.
SSL certificate. This provides users with a padlock when entering the secure area of your website. This is unlikely to be needed unless you have a online shop. As there are many SSL certificate providers costs vary but well-respected certificates cost up to £1000 per year.
Payment Processing Portal. If you have an e-shop a PPP will handle the business of debiting the customer's credit card and passing the funds to you. Again costs vary. They usually have a monthly fee in the range £10-£50 and a per-transaction fee ranging from 20p to 5% of the transaction total.

Dot Dash Splash specialises in websites that do things. So whether you want a website with a online shop, an RSS feed, a bulleting board or want to stream live radio, please contact us.