Web Hosting FAQ

Many people who contact Croan.ie have become confused by all of the industry jargon used to describe the hosting requirements of their website or when comparing web hosting packages. We hope that this simple web hosting guide will be of some value to you as you select the Web Hosting package which is right for you.

Here are the key components of a hosting package, and what they mean to you and your site:

Hard Disk Storage
This is the space on a webserver where your website will live. The Web Server makes your site available to the Internet and also provides space for your email and the log files (stats files) associated with your website. Only files which are on the web server will be visible to your site visitors. Your hard disk storage is how much space you are allocated on that server's hard drive.

Most simple brochure type sites will be less than 10MB in size. Obviously more than this is a nice luxury for storing pictures, videos, email and graphics. Our hosting plans offer 100 MB to 500MB of storage.

Monthly Transfer (also called bandwidth)
This is the total amount of data (including graphics, HTML web pages, video, etc) which can be downloaded from your site each month. In some cases if you have reached your monthly limit then your website will no longer be available to visitors. The price of bandwidth is dropping all of the time and we strongly recommend that you do not allow your website's performance to become limited by a small bandwidth allocation.

As a rough guide, a simple brochure site of average size will require 1000 megabytes (MB) of bandwidth to accommodate approximately 5,000 visitors in a moth. Remember that as well as accommodating human visitors, your website will also have to have enough bandwidth to facilitate the Search Engine crawlers as the index your website. It is crucial that your bandwidth restrictions do not hamper this work! We can ensure that your site always has enough bandwidth to serve your site visitors.

POP3 Email Accounts
These are email accounts which can be used with your account. They allow you to send and receive email. With a POP3 email account you can pick up and read email via the most popular email clients (outlook, etc.). Our website hosting packages also provide access to email via a simple to use Web interface so that you can pick up your email from anywhere in the world.

Please visit our support center for more information on configuring your email client of choice.

Unlimited updates via FTP
We allow you to update your site 24x7 using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Client. If required Croan.ie can also develop a robust Content Managemtn System for your website which will allow you to edit your site content directly online.

PHP, ASP, CGI, Perl
Scripts, PHP and ASP allow you to add interactive content to your site. All of these technologies require server side execution to enhance your web pages. We provide hosting packages with support for all of these server side technologies.