Hosting

Domain and web hosting are essential to the operation of any website. Here you will find tutorials and case studies devoted to the ins and outs of hosting and how to get the best setup for your install.

Want more help? Book Silicon Dales today.

What is Web Hosting?

You may have heard the term Web Hosting before. You may have understood that without web hosting you can’t really have a website. But it might help you to make a buying decision to understand what, exactly, web hosting is.

When it comes to “web” there are three different but equally important types of “hosting”:

How hosting makes the internet work

Your domain hosting will contain records – nameservers – which tell browsers (or, rather, their ISPs) upon which physical machine (or section of a machine) web files live for a particular domain. When email is received or sent, your domain host will tell the ISP where to route that email.

Web Hosting is therefore the computer – or section of a larger computer – which contains the files and database required to render your website or web application. Your web hosting server will deliver, on demand, these files to browsers which request them, which will render them. That is how the internet works. It is how you’re reading this page right now!

Domain Hosting

Domain Hosting is essentially the use of a service (usually for a fee) which stores the records about your top level domain (TLD). A TLD is yourdomain.com. For Silicon Dales, our TLD is SiliconDales.com.

Email Hosting

Email Hosting is the hosting on a physical computer, or section of a physical computer, somewhere, of the email which is sent to and from your domain.

Web Hosting

Web Hosting is the storage and serving on demand of the files and other elements which make up the website accessible via your domain.

More information on hosting

You’ll find more information on all kinds of hosting in the tutorials, case studies and news on this page. For further assistance from Silicon Dales, get in touch.

Cloudways Black Friday Offer for 2019 – 40% off

Here at Silicon Dales we recommend Cloudways as the fastest and best performing host for WooCommerce. As a Black Friday treat, they’ve got you covered with this great new offer for 2019: The offer 40% off for 3 Months on all plans Click here to visit cloudways and signup now. Offer expiry This offer runs …

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Cloudways Summer Voucher Code – 30% off

Our favourite WooCommerce hosts, Cloudways, are now offering a summer sizzler – 30% off for 2 months: Code: SCALEINSUMMER Valid until: 8th July 2019 Use code You can read more about how to use your voucher code in Cloudways here. You can also read about why Cloudways is our favourite WooCommerce host here.

Case Study: One-off Big Traffic Optimization for Fairyloot

Fairy Loot booked Silicon Dales to optimize their WooCommerce site for their monthly subscription sign-up, which sees a huge traffic spike over the the course of a few hours. The Client Here at FairyLoot, Young Adult fiction is our forte, and we want each and every one of our boxes to be a special experience …

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Getting your website ready for Cyber Monday

It’s never too early to get ready for Cyber Monday when you’re in business. The annual technology sales event following the US Thanksgiving weekend has become an international phenomenon. Why bother? Cyber Monday is bigger than Black Friday, it’s also bigger than Boxing Day in the UK and outperforms the Click Frenzy sales event in …

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Get $150 Free Credit from Cloudways – Another Black Friday Offer!

Cloudways is our top recommended host for WooCommerce. In terms of value-for-money, it doesn’t get better than this. With a full range of hosting options to choose from, there are even great datacentre selections available for regions such as Australia, which historically have been a little underserved. If you’re looking for a way to host …

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Professional Plan Features on Jetpack – the Official Plugin for WordPress

We’ve recently started testing features on Jetpack – the massive plugin from Automattic (the people behind WordPress).

This mega-plugin does everything from SEO to social sharing, backups and video hosting.

Linda Scott from Silicon Dales has been given a testing key to try out the Jetpack Professional plan features and you’ll see her test environment updating here as she works through the various elements.

Jetpack Professional offers to offload everything from video hosting to real-time backups.

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Why Your Website Needs a Security Certificate – and How to Get One

Introduction Users who browse the web using the Google Chrome browser will now be served with warnings whenever they view a website without a security certificate. Google has said this is because: “When you load a website over HTTP, someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to …

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