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.
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.