Getting Started

Hosting Terms Explained: A Plain Glossary The three things you buy, the tiers, control panels, DNS record types, resource limits, mail terms, and marketing words. How to Choose Between a Site Builder, a CMS and a Static Site The three options differ less in what they can build than in what happens in year three, who can update it, what it costs to maintain, and whether you... How to Choose a Hosting Provider Starting from requirements, testing support before committing, backups, exit questions, renewal pricing and reading reviews. How to Compare Shared, VPS and Dedicated Hosting What each hosting tier actually gives you, the responsibility that comes with root access, and the three real signals that you should move up. How to Estimate Hosting Costs and Avoid Surprises Reading the renewal price, what is genuinely included, the costs that arrive later, and a realistic annual total. What to Ask Before Moving to a New Host Most hosting regrets trace to something that could have been asked before signing up. The questions are short and the answers are usually given plainl...

How to Activate Your Hosting Service After Payment What to do with the welcome email, and the order that gets a working site without any visitor seeing the work. How to Complete Your Payment Successfully What to check when a hosting payment fails, in order, and what happens when payment succeeds but nothing is provisioned. How to Purchase a Hosting Plan Step by Step Ordering hosting without buying things you do not need, and what the introductory versus renewal price means for year two. How to Read Your Hosting Invoice and What Renews When One invoice usually covers several products with independent renewal dates. Understanding which is which prevents both surprise charges and lapsed ser... Important Information About Our New Product Line and Hosting Infrastructure What the new hosting platform changes, why existing plans cannot be converted, and the three steps to move across. Understanding Billing Cycles and Renewal Options How hosting and domain billing cycles work, what happens when a renewal fails, and why domain auto-renewal is the one to never turn off.

First Steps After Migration Testing Your Website on Ahosting Testing a migrated site before switching DNS, what each symptom actually indicates, and the checks that can only be done after the switch. How to Move from a Website Builder to Your Own Hosting What exports and what does not, matching URLs, the domain and email, images, and the maintenance that becomes yours. How to Request a Free Website Migration from Another Provider Requesting a free migration, what a proper transfer carries that copying files does not, and what to check before and after the switch. How to Transfer Your Domain Along with Hosting Why the two are independent, the order that keeps each step diagnosable, what breaks when they overlap, and a workable sequence.

Getting Started with Your Ahosting Account The five first tasks on a new hosting account, in an order that keeps your existing site live until the new one is proven. How to Prepare a Website Launch Checklist Rehearsing through your hosts file, the certificate-before-redirect order, mail and DNS timing, and the hour after. How to Secure Your Hosting Account Two-factor on both logins, the contact address rule, individual access instead of shared passwords, and a twice-yearly review. How to Work with a Web Developer on Your Hosting Granting the least access that works, staging, agreeing who applies updates, the handover, and closing access at the end.

A Yearly Website Maintenance Checklist What to check at each cadence, restoring rather than checking backups exist, and the alerts that make the list shorter. How to Contact Support for Onboarding Help How to open a support ticket that gets answered rather than questioned, and what support can and cannot do for you. How to Write a Support Request That Gets Solved Fast What to include, describing behaviour rather than diagnosis, one problem per ticket, and what support does and does not cover. What Your Hosting Provider Can and Cannot See Hosting requires trusting somebody with administrative access to your data. Being clear about the extent of that access is more useful than assuming e... What to Do Before You Cancel or Move Hosting Taking a backup you have verified, exporting mail, recording configuration, and sequencing the move so nothing is lost. What to Do When You Inherit a Website Nobody Documented Taking over an undocumented site starts with an inventory, not a redesign. Until you know who controls the domain and where the DNS is, you cannot saf... What to Do When Your Website Goes Down A triage sequence that eliminates categories quickly, the disk check people skip, and what to send support.