SOS Website Hosting

True to our nature, our website hosting plan is very simple. There is just one plan with two term lengths.

We'll set up a hosting account for your domain.  And we'll give you up to 2.5GB of space to work with.

Below are the actual cost details, based on whether the hosting is ordered for an existing domain or during domain registration.

So, no matter how you look at it, your annual website cost is very low.

cPanel, PHP and MySQL...

We use only Linux servers and each hosting account has an integrated customer cPanel. The cPanel provides customer control of a number of tools that help manage website files, traffic stats, databases and more.  PHP and MySQL are available for those who need a scripting language and database.

Wordpress...

You can have someone design and upload your website for you.  Or you can design yourself using any of the common website editors available for your computer.  Or you can use Wordpress to develop your website or blog.

Wordpress is the most popular website building platform on the internet. It's used by many millions of people worldwide - professionals and first-timers. It's full-featured and there's an enormous amount of "how to" information readily available.

However, Wordpress is also the most hacked. It has a vast array of available plugins created by independent developers with varying degrees of coding skill. Hackers are constantly finding new vulnerabilities.

We can install the basic Wordpress setup for you, but you will be responsible for securing the site, and then handling ongoing security updates to keep it safe.

If you decide you want to use Wordpress, please let us know when placing a hosting order. We'll do the basic installation for you and you can pick it up from there.

Mobirise...

Mobirise is an alternative platform that is gaining in popularity. It's easier to learn and use, is quite visual, and it's automatically mobile friendly. There's no coding required, and no plugins that you need to maintain.

There is a free version that will meet the needs of many people looking to build their own site. To use it, you download the Mobirise software and build the website on your computer. Then you upload the website (and future changes) to any webhosting server using that same software.

An advantage to that approach is that you always have the current website files stored on your computer as a backup. It's worth considering and the free version, while limited, is still quite versatile.

Our Hosting Rules...

We've been hosting websites since 1998. We've always offered very simple hosting on extremely reliable servers. We work to keep our servers lightly loaded so they are never bogged down handling the load that's placed on them.

Part of that process is making it clear to customers how to use our services appropriately:

• We don't allow large file downloads/videos/MP3's on our servers. (You can still host your website with us and link to your file downloads in places where that's the norm - venues like youtube, dropbox, etc..)
• Your hosting account with us is NOT a storage depot for backing up your computer files.  We expect you to upload the files that are needed to display your website, and only those files.
• Website image files should be cropped, resized and compressed BEFORE you upload them to the server.  Digital cameras create huge image files.  That's fine for storing on your computer, but they are extremely wasteful on a website.  They use up 1) a lot of server disk space and 2) server bandwidth in sending them to people browsing your website.  Before uploading, all web images should be cropped and reduced to the size you want them to appear.  Then each image file should be compressed to reduce the filesize. You will find a free easy-to-use online image tool to do all that at http://picresize.com/.

The reason for these restrictions is that each of these CAN put a very intensive load on our system.  Either through high usage or misuse.

When either occurs, it can hog up server resources, slowing down server responsiveness for the rest of our hosting customers. That's not acceptable.  We place a high priority on having responsive, lightly loaded servers.

Our years of website hosting experience have defined our hosting niche. Domain customers with normal-needs sites will benefit from our low cost and highly responsive, dependable servers. Domain customers with high website needs are best served by one of the many website hosts out there who promise everything but the kitchen sink in their hosting packages. Either way, you can manage your domain with us. But in terms of website hosting, we want to see each customer end up with a service that matches their needs.

What we don't offer...

We don't design websites for customers.

We don't consult on sorting out your HTML errors or in configuring your scripts.  If we can point out an abvious error, we're glad to do that, but we have many other things to do.  We provide the resources, you supply the input.

Email is not a part of our website hosting package.

Domain Mailboxes...

We provide domain email as a totally separate service. We have found that many website hosting customers don't want domain email, and many domain email customers don't want a website.  By separating the two services, customer pay only for what they want. You can learn about out domain mailbox offering here -
https://www.simpleurl.com/services/email.php

To order...

Just login to your SOS account with us and go to the SOS Website Hosting section.  Your username is your email address. 

If you don't have an SOS account, simply use the Your SOS Account link above and create one.  It's free.