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 .info 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, if you decide to maintain your website yourself, our current charge for hosting and registration is £75 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.
In the past, we have charged the same basic rate for hosting regardless of the size and popularity of a site (technically, of disk space and bandwidth required): ibn exceptional cases, where a site offered large sound or video files, we have agreed excess charge. As broadband has become more widely used, this sort of content is not longer exceptional (read what Roger Cornwell says about this in our blog). An increasing number of our clients are now including sound or video clips on their web sites, or simply displaying images which are larger and less compressed than would once have been advisable. Yet many of our sites still consist mostly of text and small images, and convey a large amount of information in a small space.
As of April 2007, we will therefore charge for hosting according to a three-tier structure.