Hosting

Hosting

Introduction

Whether you create your own website or pay someone to do it, your site needs to be placed on a machine connected permanently to the Internet if you want other people to find it. Cyberporte can provide this service, known as hosting.

Our server is in a large server park in the North of England, with several high-speed connections to the Internet, and the hardware is maintained by a full-time team of specialists. We handle all the system administration ourselves via secure Internet connections. We are therefore able to offer the security of a large hardware installation coupled with the personal touch of a small company.

We offer most standard server features, including FTP, CGI, PHP, SSH, MySQL and SSI. If you need something else, ask! The accounts also include POP3 mailboxes and an unlimited number of email redirects. You can manage most aspects of your server via a private website, or, if you prefer, we can set it up for you.

Prices

The price depends on the amount of disc space required, and, especially, the monthly bandwidth, ie the amount of information that passes via the Internet per month. The minimum annual costs for a non-commercial and commercial sites are given below: the allocations are more than most users need, at least initially:

Non-commercial site, with 20Mb disc space and 200Mb bandwidth per month: £25 inc per year
Commercial site, with with 50Mb disc space and 500Mb bandwidth per month: £50 inc per year
We can quote for other configurations, up to and including a whole server to yourself that we manage on your behalf.

FAQ

What is the spec of your server?

It's a Cobalt RaQ4, which is one of the most common servers currently in use. In terms of hardware, its spec is relatively modest: 450MHz processor, 128Mb RAM. However, when comparing with other offers, it should be noted that some companies with fast machines put hundreds of sites on them. In practice, our server performs quite respectably, and the system reports say that it thinks it is 'lightly loaded'. When this changes, we'll get a second server!

How many options are turned on by default?

None of them! But we can enable whichever options you need as and when you need them. In general, it is good practice from a security point of view not to enable more features than are necessary.

What about Telnet?

We do not offer telnet, but we do offer SSH, which is the secure equivalent. You also need a good reason for us to turn it on, as you shouldn't need shell access to set up and run most websites.

What about FrontPage?

Sorry, that's the one option we are not willing to turn on, as FrontPage is widely considered to constitute a security problem.

Does that mean I can't use FrontPage?

Hard to say, we don't know anyone who has tried. :-) But, as far as we can tell, the basic package should still work, but the extensions won't.

How reliable is your machine?

So far so good! The only problems we have had to date have been due to a spate of Denial of Service attacks directed randomly at several hundred machines at once. There is nothing anyone can do to prevent this happening, but the server park team tend to get the machines back up pretty fast. At the time of writing (11th June 2002), the system has been running for 85 days, 16 hours, and 48 minutes.

What sites won't you host?

We won't host 'adult' sites, sites proposing bootleg music, software, or sites which we consider to be offensive. We will also close any account used for spamming immediately.