Ferguson Photography & Design
Hosting Options
Ferguson Photography and Design includes a full evaluation of your hosting needs with all custom design sites, e-commerce sites and site redesigns. So, if the following is confusing or intimidating, you can just ignore it and let us do the worrying!
A website residing on your, or our, computer can not be seen by the general public. In order for a website to be shared with everyone else on the web, it must be "hosted". The host then "broadcasts" the site to the entire world wide web.
Some web design firms sell hosting on a personal server, a single computer in the company office. If this computer crashes, needs repair or looses power then your site is off line. For the security and reliability of our sites, we resell space on a large server farm with multiple backups. Ferguson Photography and Design offers three levels of hosting. We only host sites we have designed or updated. We are not in the hosting business for the general public.
We are also happy to work with your existing host. You are not required to change hosts in order for us to design or modernize your site. You can save a bit of money by setting up your own hosting account and having it billed to you directly (rather than having us bill you). Please note that some webpage features (primarily e-commerce and database features) have very specific host requirements that may not be met by your current host.
If we are designing a new site for you, the "under construction" site can be temporarily hosted for free on our server. This free hosting will have a long "customer unfriendly" URL (www.ferguson-photo-design.com/temp/yourname/). You will need your own hosting account when the site goes "public". Public meaning that the site is submitted to search engines or has a live payment link or is widely distributed or is using more than 40MB per month of data transfer or has been under development for more than 9 months.
Full Hosting Service $200 per Year:
- One URL included at no additional cost
- 500 MB Storage
- 9 GB RAM max, a minimum of 4.5GB always gaurenteed
- Page load Speed: Two upgrades from basic
- "Unlimited" transfer per month (in reality, it is peak limited by RAM, but you don't get charged for transfer)
- 50 email accounts (2 MB limit per account, updated for additional fee)
- 50 FTP drop boxes
- 50 databases (1 GB max per databse)
- 640 MB PHP memory limit
- SSL (security) Certificates
- Free shared "Wildcard" SSL certificate (perfect for most sites, but not acceptable for e-commerce)
- Optional: E-Commerce SSL Security Certificate $30 - $80 per year, in advance.
- Control panel and useage statistics available to client
- HTML5, PHP7, HTTP/2, MySQL5
Medium Hosting Service $140 per Year (our most popular plan):
- One URL included at no additional cost
- 100 MB Storage
- 2.5 GB RAM max
- Page load Speed: One upgrade from basic
- "Unlimited" transfer per month (in reality, it is peak limited by RAM, but you don't get charged for transfer)
- 25 email accounts (2 MB limit per account, updated for additional fee)
- 25 FTP drop boxes
- 25 databases(1 GB max per databse)
- 512 MB PHP memory limit
- SSL (security) Certificates
- Free shared "Wildcard" SSL certificate (perfect for most sites, but not acceptable for e-commerce)
- Optional: E-Commerce SSL Security Certificate $30 - $80 per year, in advance.
- Control panel and useage statistics available to client
- HTML5, PHP7, HTTP/2, MySQL5
Small Hosting Service $80 per Year:
- One URL included at no additional cost
- 10 MB Storage
- 512 MB RAM max
- Load Speed: Basic only (rather limiting for displaying video)
- 100 GB transfer per month
- 10 email accounts (2 MB limit per account)
- 10 FTP drop boxes
- 10 databases(1 GB max for all databases combined)
- 256 MB PHP memory limit (rather limiting for WordPress)
- SSL (security) Certificates
- Free shared "Wildcard" SSL certificate (perfect for most sites, but not acceptable for e-commerce)
- Control panel available to client
- HTML5, PHP7, HTTP/2, MySQL5
All Prices are subject to change.
Registering a URL and getting a web host are two different services. They are both needed before people can use your website on the world wide web.
Ferguson Photography and Design includes a full evaluation of your hosting needs with all custom design sites, e-commerce sites and site redesigns. So, if all of this is confusing or intimidating, you can just ignore it and let us do the worrying! We only host sites we have designed or updated. We are not in the hosting business for the general public.
Some explanations
GB indicates "gigabytes" and MB indicates "megabytes". There are 1,000 MB in one GB.
Storage is hard disk space on the host's server. This determine how big (how many pages, pictures, animations) your site can hold. This website (Ferguson Photography and Design) uses about 70MB (0.07GB) of storage.
Transfer is the total of all the bandwidth your customers use. If one customer per month looks at one page with a 0.1MB image, your transfer is 0.1MB. If 1000 customers per month look at that same page, your transfer is 100MB. This website (Ferguson Photography and Design) typically uses 3500MB (3.5GB) per month of transfer.
Email service from a host can allow you to have "name@sitename.com" type addresses. This is often perceived by the public as more professional than "name@gmail.com" or "name@aol.com" email addresses. You can link any email address you have on your website, you are not required to use the host email.
Our hosting services offer complete email plans. You can use the "name@sitename.com" accounts on your website, and from your own computer, to send and receive email. You can also access your email remotely by webmail, a great way to check your company email while on vacation or away from your office. These plans offer the client a control panel to add, delete, or change email accounts.
FTP boxes allow you to transfer files too large for email. Both you and your recipient must have FTP software (some web browsers will work) and an understanding of File Transfer Protocol.
Databases are primarily used for e-commerce and blogs. A database is not needed for an e-commerce site selling a limited number of products with PayPal as a credit card service.
SSL Certificates are needed for e-commerce using a bank or ISO credit card service, or any site that collects personal data. Many modern browsers will mark ANY site without an SSL certificate "Not Secure", even sites that don't sell or collect personal data. This can worry viewers.
Control panels allow you, the client, to directly access your site for updates, uploads, downloads, email account changes and reports. Managing your company email accounts can be advantageous if you have numerous email names and regular changes.
File types supported indicate the programming languages available on the host. The primary restrictions within our hosting options are in our 2 smallest offerings. Due to storage and transfer limits there are restrictions or limitations on Flash and/or video.