Technical Details Explained

We believe that learning about hosting is an important part of web education. Below you will find some explanations of the major components that make up a hosting account as well as insights into how we have configured them for our accounts.

Disk space

This measurement determines how much file storage you have for your account. In the hosting world, this is usually one of the most expensive components of hosting. Luckily, since data and media is optimized (shrunk or compressed) for the web, even large sites rarely take up much storage space. Most students use less than .25 GBs.

Bandwidth

This measurement relates to the number of visits your site(s) can handle and how much content people can download from or upload to your site. With 10 GBs of bandwidth for example, your projects can get thousands of visits without a problem. If you suddenly get super famous, don’t worry, we can help you get as much bandwidth as you need.

Databases

If you use a CMS or build custom applications you will likely need a database to store your data.  Databases allow you to efficiently store data and easily access it in your application or website. Our accounts come with MySQL, SQLite, PostreSQL.  We also have phpMyAdmin, the popular tool for viewing and editing your databases.

cPanel Hosting Software

A huge portion of hosting accounts online today use the software cPanel for managing the settings and configurations.  We love offering cPanel because it is fairly easy to learn and is also a skill set students may likely need in the future.

FTP, SFTP, SSH, Git

These terms refer to different ways to connect to your hosting account. We support them all and it’s just a matter of what your course recommends or you prefer to explore. When you connect to SFTP or SSH though, we require you to use port 18765.

Addon Domains

This is the technical term for how we allow for some of our accounts to host multiple domain names on a single account. Technically, each domain name has its own folder on the server inside of public_html. Visitors, however see each site on its own url.

Email Hosting

The recommended industry best practice for hosting email is to not host your email and website on the same server. This ensures problems with your site don’t affect your email. Also, the amount of space you have for email comes out of your total disk space allocations. While you can host email with your student account, we recommend third-party services like Zoho Mail and Google Apps.

Content Management Systems

When you get into building websites you will likely come across a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or one of many others out there. Not only do we support most CMS, we also have 1-click installs available. This allows you to quickly and easily install content management systems without needing to know much about databases or programming.

WordPress Specialists

WordPress is the most popular content management system and one we love to support. Our support staff knows quite a lot about WordPress and can often direct you to the best resources for troubleshooting problems with WordPress. We also offer a 1-click WordPress auto installer so you can easily and quickly get up and running with this popular content management system.

Modern Language Support

Web development can involve learning quite a number of different languages. We support most of the popular development languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails and more.

SSL Certificates

An SSL, or secure sockets layer, certificate encrypts the content on your site, allowing you to run things like ecommerce sites. We are now offering SSL certificates for free to all students using the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority.

Dedicated RAM

The RAM is the memory your server uses to process a lot of tasks involved with setting up and operating a website.  We have special configurations on our servers to make sure that other student RAM use doesn’t slow down your site.