Hosting your website
What is hosting?
In short, hosting is the service that makes it possible for users to view your website once it’s been made live, this would usually include hosting of your e-mail accounts. A hosting company would provide you with FTP details (which includes a username and password that grants access to your website) which allows us to upload your website, so it’s up for the world to see. In most cases, the hosting company can also register your website’s domain name (e.g. www.yoursite.com). This domain is linked to your hosting package, so that your website would show up when people type your domain name (or URL) into their browser.
Can you host my website?
We are not a hosting company, and we like to focus on what we do best, so hosting is best left to the professionals in that area. You can trust us when we say that we’ve had a lot of experience with various hosting companies over the last few years, so read on...
Should I just sign a contract with the cheapest hosting company that can match my requirements?
We’ve found that working with a quality hosting company should be a top priority. The choice of a hosting company determines the monthly rate, how well your e-mail works, the speed of your website, how much uptime your site will have, and can have a massive effect on how quickly and efficiently we can launch your website.
We are not affiliated with any hosting companies. We want you to choose a quality hosting company simply for the sake of making our lives (as well as yours) easier, easy as that.
Who should I host with then?
We’ve found Hetzner to be the most efficient hosting company we’ve worked with by a long shot, both locally and internationally. Since we’ve started hosting with them (and advised our clients to do so), we’ve been sleeping a lot better. Their service is lightning fast, and ordering new services can be done without speaking to people, and then there’s the fact that Artificial Intelligence works best on their platform. We’ve never waited for longer than a minute to speak to their tech support, and you have a choice to have your site hosted locally or internationally. In short, it’s everything you want in a hosting company.
How do I sign up for Hetzner hosting?
You have one of two choices:
You can go to www.hetzner.co.za, and sign up with Hetzner directly, be sure to choose the Basic package (that’s what you’ll need in order to host Artificial Intelligence). The basic package will cost you R99 per month.
OR
We can organize everything for you, and load your site on our Hetzner account, we’ll send you a debit order form (as well as a domain registration details form in case you need a domain name), and that’s it. We charge a rate of R150 per month, which includes a management fee, as well as your annual domain fee. If necessary, we’ll organize the transfer from your current hosting company to Hetzner.
I’m happy with my current hosting company, can I continue hosting with them?
Yes, you are more than welcome to host your website with your current hosting company. If they are providing a good service, then it’s best to not create any unnecessary complications. As you can imagine, we do have certain technical requirements to make sure that Artificial Intelligence runs as efficiently as possible, so we can’t guarantee anything with regard to other hosting companies. The following basic requirements can be seen as a guideline to check whether Artificial Intelligence will work with your current hosting company (beware, there's some geek speak coming up, but your hosting company should know what all this means so just forward it on to them):
- PHP & MySQL needs to be enabled on your hosting package.
- We’ll need FTP access & phpMyAdmin access for testing and making your site live.
- We need to be able to set folder permissions via FTP.
- .htaccess files need to be allowed on their server configuration.
Seeing as there are endless ways of configuring a web server, we still can’t guarantee anything even if the above requirements are met. In a worst-case scenario, we’ll need to remove certain features to make your website work with your hosting company (which will also have an extra set-up fee involved).