General Questions
How long does it take to set up a new account?
Accounts are manually created and will be set up within a maximum of 12 hours of receiving payment but usually are ready for you within 4 hours or so. You will receive a receipt for payment immediately upon payment and a welcome email with login details and instructions on getting started will follow shortly after, once the hosting account has been created.
What billing cycles do you offer?
In order to be able to price our plans and services at a competitive level we only offer quarterly & yearly billing at this time. For even better deals we offer existing customers an upgrade option of purchasing 2 year terms with 3 months free hosting or 3 year terms with 6 months of free hosting before the first year expires. Contact us for further details.
Do you offer a shopping cart?
Yes. We build sites using WooCommerce which is a complete and versatile shopping cart solution that is suitable for most businesses.
Can I upgrade my account if I need to?
Absolutely, you can upgrade or downgrade your account at any time. If you need extra disk space or bandwidth you will likely remain on the same server and see no difference except for new quotas in your cPanel website dashboard.
How do I set up my email account(s)? (me@mywebsite.com)
Hosting plans comes with a certain number of email accounts. You can create the username and password yourself through your sites cPanel interface or simply contact us with details and we can set them up for you. You will find that other mail related services like mail forwarding, mailing lists and autoresponder are also set up within your cPanel user admin dashboard.
Do you offer a money-back guarantee?
Yes, we provide a no questions asked 30-day money back guarantee on any shared hosting fees. If you registered or transferred a domain name, the domain registration fees would not be refundable, but you would be able to use your domain with any other service provider until it expires The Dedicated hosting plans have a $80.00 non-refundable Unique IP charge associated with them.
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, eTransfers, Debit Cards & cheques.
Is your support 24×7?
We provide fast reliable support 24x7x365.
Hosting
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the service of storing and serving the data that keeps websites up and running. Every website online has a host server, and almost all of them use a web host to manage that storage and transfer of data.
What is shared web hosting?
A shared web hosting service is an agreement where multiple user gets a certain portion of the total available resources of a server. Multiple domains share the same IP address on a server with web users being directed internally at the web server level. This type of shared service is fine for most small to mid-sized sites. High traffic, ecommerce functionality, and other factors may require hosting services with a dedicated IP address.
Why don’t you offer ‘unlimited space’?
Although some hosts claim to offer ‘unlimited’ space, the reality is that unlimited space is just a marketing gimmick. Hosts have a number of other ways to restrict accounts to prevent them from actually using large amounts of disk space or bandwidth. We want to be up-front about disk allocations, with no surprises. We use high speed SSD block storage, which is significantly faster than traditional SATA based storage, or even standalone SSD drives. We also have RAID drives for full redundancy.
You likely don’t need ‘unlimited’ disk space. Over 95% of sites we host on our shared platform use less than 10GB. If your priority is for unlimited space, hosts that offer this type of service will do so by using cheap disk drives on old overcrowded servers. We want our focus to be on quality, and ensuring that our customers always enjoy the best possible speed, security and reliability for their websites.
Can I install software into my account?
You can set up any software that runs on PHP/MySQL or Perl.
Can I see how many people visited my site?
You can see how many people visit your site through a number of different third party apps such as the popular Google Site Kit (formerly Google Analytics)Analytics. Your cPanel interface also has some useful data including the Webalizer log analyzer on your site traffic located in the Metrics area of your cPanel dashboard.
How do I back up my site?
You really should back up your website regularly & after any major charge or software. To do this you simply need to log into your cPanel control panel. There will be a backup and restore section that will allow you to do either. With one click of the mouse, you can save all of your files including email accounts and databases. Your backup file will be relatively large and will take up part of your disc quota. It should be removed from your server space as soon as possible to ensure you do not run out of space.
You can also back up your site through FTP by simply copying your public_html folder over to your computer. This very basic FTP method will give you files but will not copy over database or email info so it is of limited use.
Do you offer SSH Shell Access?
SSH or Shell access is available free of charge on all of our hosting plans. This feature creates a secured shell environment that is locked down to your specific hosting account. It is only for advanced users that understand the structure of web sites and web hosting. Please contact us after setting up your account if you would like us to enable SSH on your domain server space.
Can I get root access?
Root access is not available on any of our shared hosting plans but it is one of the advantages of the dedicated hosting plan with a unique IP address. If you require root access, you would need to purchase a Dedicated Hosting plan on a unique IP address, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan or a dedicated server plan. Contact us with your requirements for a detailed quote.
Will my account be backed up?
We take an automatic backup of all servers daily, but these are full server restoration and can not be used for restoring single user accounts. Your cPanel interface has a backup function that you can use to create your own backup. You can restore your files, email and database from the same area of cPanel where you create backups. We do not make backups of individual sites. It is the users responsibility to back up their site on a regular basis. cPanel offers you the tolls to handle this task easily. You must plan your own backup strategy.
Can I subdivide my space and resell it?
We offer Reseller accounts, VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans as well as dedicated servers. Contact us with your requirements for a detailed quote.
Domain Names
What is a domain name?
A domain name is required to have a website. It is the internet address of your website. To obtain a domain, you need to purchase it through a domain registrar. Every domain name points to an IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is a series of numbers identifying its location on the world wide web. Domain names serve as easily-remembered alias for visitors.
Do I need to transfer my domain to you?
No you don’t, but there are advantages. We offer very competitive pricing on domain names in Canadian dollars that is often much cheaper than at most other registrars. If you prefer, you can still host with Ottawa Website Solutions and keep your domains at any registrar you choose. You would simply need to update the nameservers settings within your existing domain registrar account.
Disk Space
What is disk space and how much do I need?
Disk space is the total space available for a user to store files. Files can be any type such as HTML, images, videos, pdfs – and at any single given time, the total file size may not exceed the disk space. Disk space you need is dependent on what type of media and interactions you’ll be hosting through your site. Your email account’s storage is also counted in disk space, so if you have large amounts of files that will sit in the account, that will increase your disk space needs. Remember that although you might not need much space now, you will want some wiggle room to expand and grow in the future. Also keep in mind that in order to serve your site on the web, your disk space comes configured with operating files that also take up some of your site quota.
Bandwidth
What is bandwidth and how much do I need?
Bandwidth is a measure of the amount of traffic to your website. It is the amount of data accessed while viewing a website. Each time a user loads a website, data is being transferred, and the measurement of that data transfer is what is called bandwidth. Images, audio files and video files consume higher amounts of bandwidth than text. Optimizing images is important in maintaining a lower bandwidth consumption. A site using a lot of video and streaming audio will be using more bandwidth than one with a simple text-only design, or a website with only a few low-resolution images.
Control Panels
Does your hosting come with a control panel?
Yes, your hosting plan comes with a cPanel administrator dashboard. cPanel is the world’s leading control panel interface. You can read more about the cPanel dashboard interface by clicking here.
Miscellaneous
What is SSL?
SSL is the abbreviation for Secure Sockets Layer. This is a common protocol used to communicate encrypted information securely over the internet. This protocol provides a secure encrypted connection between two internet connected machines or two machines on the same internal network. It is used by web browsers to encrypt data and to enhance security on ecommerce sites and other high value assets. SSL usually works with little or no interaction from the person visiting the web site. The browser typically displays a padlock symbol icon at the address bar.