Hosting Services

 

A good hosting service is important because there will be technicalities to resolve from time to time and you need to be sure they are resolved quickly.

You need a fast host so your website loads faster but it doesn’t have to be cloud hosting unless you’re extremely popular and have a global audience.

What is a Managed Hosting Service?

Hosting can be quite easy to set up on your own, but there is a fair bit of administration and technicalities to get your head around.

So instead of doing it yourself – you could let us handle your hosting for you. Talk to a human instead of a ticketing system.

Our Basic Managed Hosting Service

All website packages based on WordPress come with 1 year’s free hosting. This means that you can talk to us and we will deal with your hosting issues.

Third Party Hosting Installation

If you’ve already purchased your hosting and you prefer to use your hosting provider. Starfish charges a charging installation fee.

Basic hosting term definitions

Here are some terms to help you understand hosting.

What is web hosting?

Hosting is the service of keeping your website on a “server” so that users can have access to the pages on our website. Hosting companies charge a monthly or yearly fee to website owners.

What is email hosting?

Where people store their emails. We give 10 emails addresses with our hosting but you can host your emails with Gmail or somewhere else.

What is a server?

A server is a computer that hosts one or many websites.  It’s different to a normal computer because its job is to “serve” information to another computer (your computer) that displays the information.

What is a domain name?

The name of the website (e.g. www.facebook.com). The domain name is owned by the client. Not usually purchased by Starfish since it should be under the ownership of the client. Ownership of domain needs to be renewed every year or so with Domain Name Registrar

What is a Domain Name Registrar?

Company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. Where you buy your domain name from: could be GoDaddy.

What is FTP / FTP Access?

A username and password needed by developers sometimes so that they upload files to the host.

What is CPanel / CPanel Access?

Developers may ask for this too. Password protected dashboard that lets developers use to administer a website stored in a hosting company.

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is fancy hosting where your website is stored on a network of servers or where you can choose which server location you want.

The idea behind this is that the location of the server is closer to the user meaning the information has less distance to travel, making the website load faster.

It’s more expensive, more difficult to manage but a lot faster. It’s a good option for web application but not needed for normal websites.

Choices in cloud computer

We’ve worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud in the past. We have no preference; having said that – for most startups that approach us, AWS seems to be more attractive because of the price. We can help you evaluate the best choice given the application.