Yes, you can manage all your domains externally if you prefer.

Most domain name providers supply you with a control panel to manage, amongst other things, where your domain names point.

A domain name provider will let you specify the server to which your email is sent (MX records) and the server on which your web site lives (A records). These can be entirely different servers.

These settings are the equivalent of saying:

• I want the email for hostingreborn.com to be handled by server 78.31.104.54
• I want www.hostingreborn.com to get my website from server 78.31.104.56

You can by all means use your domain name provider's control panel to point your A and MX records to one of your hosting accounts.

Open up the given hosting account's management screen to find the server IP address you need and follow your domain name provider's instructions.

Yes, that's perfectly fine.

Each hosting account merely requires a unique hostname. A subdomain is unique and is perfectly fine to use as the main domain name on an account.

You are free to use any applications that can be uploaded to the storage space of a hosting account and subsequently accessed through a browser.

That is, you can use any web-based software you wish.

You are not allowed to install any software on the server in the same way you might install software on your home or work computer.

We're not a generic computing service, we're a web hosting service. Any server software you might otherwise install is going to have to compete for server resources (CPU, memory) and ultimately degrade the quality of service that everyone else receives.

Yes, that's perfectly fine.

The Apache web server uses .htaccess files to extend the default web server configuration.

Settings in a .htaccess file are applied to inbound web requests before they are processed by your website or web application. Common uses of .htaccess configuration settings include:

• creating password-protected directories
• controlling access to web sites and web applications based on the originating IP address
• specifying custom error pages based on the returned HTTP status code
• rewriting URLs, allowing you to present friendly URLs to people and data-centric URLs to your web site
• setting file-level HTTP response headers for HTTP cache management

The Wikipedia .httaccess article provides a good overview on the origins and uses of .htaccess files.

The Apache web server documentation for .htaccess files provides a thorough technical guide.

We don't directly limit CPU usage per hosting account. Nevertheless, the use of persistent or long-running processes is not allowed.

The use of persistent processes is a violation our terms of service and may result in your account being cancelled, so please don't do this.

Any other process running for more than 5 minutes may be stopped at any time.

These controls place no restrictions on any reasonable web site or web application where, under normal use, most resulting processes will last just a few seconds. For a process to last just 1 minute is considered unusual. For a process to last 5 minutes is considered either intentional misuse or, more commonly, is the result of a badly written program that is incapable of stopping on its own accord.

Yes.

You will need a static IP address if your website plans to use a secure certificate (HTTPS). Each secure certificate is tied to a specific domain and a specific IP address.

Static IP addresses are available at £1.50 per month. Contact billing@hostingreborn.com to place an order.

We will charge your account for £1.50 per IP address per month at the start of each month. An IP address ordered mid-month will be charged the full monthly fee.

Orders will be completed within 24-48 hours if you account has enough credit for the first payment.

Yes, we provide dual DNS servers for hosting your DNS records.

Our nameservers are ns1.hostingreborn.com, ns2.hostingreborn.com, ns3.hostingreborn.com and ns4.hostingreborn.com.

You must set your domain's name server records correctly for your website and domain email to work.

Yes, all hosting accounts can be accessed via FTP, Secure FTP and SSH.

FTP and Secure FTP are methods for transferring files from one place to another - use either FTP or Secure FTP to upload the files from which your website is composed.

SSH is used to establish a remote command prompt (or terminal shell). You might want SSH access to directly manipulate your files on our hosting servers. Please note that you won't be able to do too much via SSH - access to install programs or manage services and processes is not allowed.

Yes, absolutely.

Through each hosting account you can create any number of email mailboxes and email forwarders. We provide POP and IMAP access.

You even have the option to forward email not only to mailboxes but to executable scripts, allowing you to automatically process and handle queues of inbound mail for certain addresses. This is how we get the Hosting Reborn email into our support system.

No, not at present. We do have plans for integrating domain name registration and purchase but don't currently offer such a service.

Domain name registration is only one small part of the process of getting a website online. You can comfortably register your preferred domain name with any registrar before than using that domain name with Hosting Reborn.

Remember to set your domain's name server records correctly for your domain to work with us.

Yes.

A secure certificate is almost essential if you wish to provide trustworthy, secure access to areas of your website such as user accounts, e-commerce facilities or indeed anything that should be kept private.

A secure certificate enables your website, or a sub-domain, to be accessed using HTTPS, such as https://secure.hostingreborn.com/.

Information accessed over HTTPS is securely encrypted by the browser before being sent to the server and by the server before being sent back to the browser. This is the accepted standard means for ensuring private data remains private when travelling over the Internet.

cPanel hosting accounts are compatible with certificates issued by most major certificate authorities. We use and recommend Trustwave Premium SSL certificates.

We have two ways to help you, one direct and one direct.

• Direct balance emails

  You can opt-in to receive an email notification when your account balance drops below a level you specify.

• Daily/weekly/monthly usage summary emails

  You can opt-in to receive usage summary notifications daily, weekly and monthly.

  Each notification includes your current balance at the top. You should begin to notice when this starts getting low.

We have our own straightforward control panel enabling you to create, manage and monitor hosting accounts.

We let you simply:

• create new hosting accounts
• suspend or unsuspend hosting accounts (useful for resellers)
• set or remove storage and bandwidth limts (for controlling your costs, and essential for resellers)
• delete unneeded hosting accounts
• see what each hosting account is using and what it is costing you
• top up your account with more credit
• see exactly where all your money is going

Each hosting account can be managed internally using cPanel, the industry leading shared hosting control panel.

Use cPanel to manage every single aspect of an individual hosting account, including:

• managing email accounts
• installing forums, blogs and ecommerce tools
• viewing detailed statistics for your website through AWStats
• managing your website's files
• creating MySQL and PostgreSQL databases
• creating FTP accounts
• creating subdomains
• controlling cron tasks

You pay in advance, just like you would with a pre-pay mobile phone. Whatever you pay in is held in your account permanently until used.

Your account credit is debited daily for each separate hosting account you have. Commonly these transactions will be for fractions of a penny.

You can top up instantly from your account at any time. Payments are processed by PayPal, allowing you to pay directly using any major debit or credit card, or through your own PayPal account.

As many as you need. We impose no limit on this.

You can host as many websites or domains as you like. We don't limit the number of hosting accounts you can create or the number of domains you can host.

The annual cost for individual sites hosted with us over 2009, presented with respect to all sites hosted with us.

There is no average site and is no average cost. Nevertheless, our per-site annual costs for 2009 reveal:

• 70% of sites cost £1.00 or less per year
• 50% of sites cost £0.10 or less per year
• 30% of sites cost next to nothing

Use our pricing calculator to determine how much your site will cost to run with us.

Yes (we want it to be).

One of our core aims is to enable the straightforward creation and management of web hosting accounts.

You should be able to create, modify and delete web hosting accounts in minutes. You should be able to get a simple overview of what your hosting accounts are up to.

You shouldn't be bothered or distracted by extras. That's why you need only your email address to register. That's why creating a new hosting account requires only a domain name and your choice of username.

We want it to be easy to get going. We want it to be easy for you to grab a slice of the Internet if you want to host a commercial website, your personal website or just for having a space to put your new web app project.

What usernames are this about?

Each of your hosting accounts has an identifying user name. It is used to log in to the cPanel control panel, as well as for other actions such as transferring files via FTP.

User name rules

To be considered a valid, a user name must:

• be at least 3 characters long and no longer than 8
• contain only the characters a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen (-)
• not start with a number
• not start with 'test'
• not start with a hyphen (-)

Sample valid user names

• bingo01
• my-service
• example

Sample invalid user names

• on (less than 3 characters long)
• my_web (contains an underscore)
• my-service (longer than 8 characters)
• 99hats (starts with a number)
• test66 (starts with 'test')
• -hoopla (starts with a hypen)

Any FTP or SFTP program can be used to upload and manage your website files. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is designed for getting files from one place to another over the Internet. You can find FTP functionality in a dedicated FTP program or built in to most web design/development applications.

Wikipedia provides an extensive list of FTP clients. Two fine free programs are FileZilla and WinSCP. The latter has the benefit of secure FTP which will encrypt your files in transit.

Many web design and development applications have FTP functionality built in. Typically you will provide your FTP server, username and password and files will be uploaded either on request or automatically when changes are made.

You can comformably manage your website using Abode Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage and Expression Web or one of many other HTML editors.

The development of this website is carried out in NetBeans, a software development environment with integrated FTP functionality.

A gigbyte is computing terminology for a volume of data. The definition of the size of a megabyte has varied slightly over time. We take a megabyte to mean 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is 1024 megabytes.

We charge you 50p (£0.50) per gigabyte of data transferred to or from your hosting accounts. For this price you can transfer about:

• 30 million illustrated web pages
• 200 5-minute MP3 audio files
• 15 thousand detailed product images
• 35 minutes of DVD-quality video

A megabyte is computing terminology for a volume of data. The definition of the size of a megabyte has varied slightly over time. We take a megabyte to mean 1,048,576 bytes.

We charge you 0.5p (£ 0.005) per megabye per month for storing data in your Hosting Reborn hosting accounts. For this you can store about:

• 30,000 illustrated web pages
• 1 minute of MP3 audio
• 15 detailed product images

The minimum deposit you can make is £10.

You can add credit to your account in volumes of either £10, £20, £50 or £100 at a time.

Remember that you can claim a full refund if you cancel within the first 90 days, and can always claim back any unused credit if you cancel at any other time.

The exact details of our refund policy can be found in the refunds section of our terms of service.

In brief, our refund policy is that:

• you are entitled to a full refund of all money you ever paid us if you cancel within the first 90 days of joining us
• you are entitled to a refund of all remaining account credit if you cancel at any time
• we will consider any reasonable refund request not covered by the above
• we aren't obliged to honour any refunds in the event of you breaching the terms of service (we might, but we don't have to)

All our hosting servers run Linux. That's about all there is to say.

• Perl 5.8.8

• PHP 5.2.6

• Python 2.5.3

• Ruby 1.8.7

• Ruby on Rails 2.3

Please let us know if you need to know anything more specific, or are interested in using any further programming languages.

• MySQL 4.1.22

• PostgreSQL 7.4.26

We place no limit on the number of databases you create. You can comfortably create one database per application instead of trying to squeeze the data for multiple applications into a small number of databases.

You can easily find companies offering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for amazingly low prices. Such hosting typically comes with contracts that subtlety limit what resources you can use and services will be oversold. This is low quality hosting and not something with which we aim to compete.

You can just as easily find high quality offers such as 1500 MB of storage and 20 GB of bandwidth for £5 per month. We currently charge 250% more than this for the same level of usage. That sounds expensive, and for those usage levels it is.

If you use 200 MB of storage and 2 GB of bandwidth per month you pay £1.98 with us. The above example would still cost you £5.

Consider what you're paying for compared to what you're using. Use close to your resource quota and you have a good deal. The less you use, the less value you're getting.