Domains and hosting
We are a website design consultancy, based in the City of Durham (England), specialising in personally designed sites for individuals and small organisations: authors, publishers, performers, visual artists and community groups.
A domain name is your site’s address on the Internet. Choosing the right domain name makes your site more visible on the internet: an appropriate name is easier for people to remember, and tends to get placed higher in search engine results.
Having your own domain also means that you can have your own email address (you@yourname.co.uk): emails sent to this address can be forwarded automatically to your existing email address - you need never again change your email address just because you want to change your service provider).
(Note: mail forwarding is not available for every internet service provider: it may be blocked by your ISP’s anti-spam filters).
Registering your own domain is no longer too expensive for individuals and small businesses. We can register your name (if it’s still available) for just £25 for two years for a .co.uk or .org.uk name, or £35 for an international name like .com .org .info or .net. Add £15 for two years if you would like us to set up email forwarding as well. If you want to secure your name now but wait a few months before constructing your site, we will offset the registration fee against the hosting charges.
We can also advise about lesser known options, such as .me.uk, .me or .tv.
Unlike some other companies, we register the domain name to you and it is yours whether you continue to use our services or not.
Once you have decided on your address, you need a web site, and somewhere to host it. When you buy your hosting services from us, our price includes registering your domain, keeping your registration up to date and creating up to four email addresses.
When we quote you for the design of your website, our price is fully inclusive: it covers not only design services but also the first year’s hosting and registration charges.
For the second and subsequent years our basic rate for hosting and registration is £80 per year; if you engage us to do any further design or maintenance work, £25 will be offset against the cost of that work. These prices are for .uk domains, international domains like .com .org and .net are £10 extra.
This basic rate for hosting applies to websites with up to 40 megabytes of storage and using no more than 512 megabytes of bandwidth per month. Currently 58% of the websites we host fit into this category. For websites needing up to double those figures, i.e. 80 megabytes of storage and 1 gigabyte of bandwidth, we add an extra £25 a year taking the fee to £105 a year (£115 for international domains). Over three-quarters of our clients are on one or other of these rates, but for those who need more disk storage or with very busy websites needing a higher bandwidth we agree individual fees tailored to their particular requirements.
Once we’ve set the level of fees we will of course monitor usage but, unlike some companies, if you bust a limit we won’t automatically pull the plug. We’ll investigate the cause and if it looks like a temporary incident we’ll see you through it. If it’s a permanent increase we will probably adjust your allocation for future years when we issue your annual renewal invoice.
Our core business is designing and maintaining websites, and the majority of our clients are happy to let us get on with that and leave them to focus on their core activity. Some clients have a need to update some or all of their websites themselves, and for this we recommend the use of Wordpress. This started life as blogging software, but it has developed and can now be used as a content management system. We can install it and, crucially, keep it current with the latest fixes. We can help you to choose a suitable theme and then tailor it for your needs. For security reasons we do not permit FTP access to the websites we host.