HostPrepaid :: Description of Web Hosting Features :: Free Website Customization and Design with Prepaid Hosting

Web based control panel You can control every aspect of your websites, in real-time with our easy to use web based control panel. We have 5 different versions of the customer control panel and you can use all of you free of charge.

From the control panel you can set up email addresses, autoresponders, install free scripts such as hits counter, form mail, message boards, guestbooks etc. You can also add databases, install FrontPage extensions, password protect parts of your website, check traffic statistics in great depth, customize error pages, and much more.

Unlimited email aliases You can enjoy unlimited email aliases with full control over there actions, i.e., say you have the domain name www.mysite.com, unlimited email aliases mean you can have anything@mysite.com, e.g., sales@mysite.com, info@mysite.com etc etc. However, you can also limit how many email aliases you have via your control panel, giving you total control over your account's features in a few clicks.

Via the easy to use control panel, you can have all your email aliases sent to one mailbox, i.e., all incoming email goes to one easy place for you to retrieve and read, or, if you prefer you can set individual emails to go to other people. For example, you can easily set up your email preferences so that everything goes to you, apart from e.g., bob@mysite.com, this can go to another mailbox or even forwarded to another email address. There are no limits to what you can do with your email accounts.

You can even set up mailing lists (name lists/databases) with your email address, e.g., a visitor sends an email to info@mysite.com, this email is then sent to everyone of the list, e.g., bob@mysite.com + joanne@mysite.com + steve@mysite.com - the possibilities are limitless, and it's all set up with a few clicks in the customer control panel.

Unlimited Autoresponders You can have unlimited autoresponders (or you can set a maximum for each customer if you prefer) where the customers website can reply instantly to any incoming emails, e.g., if someone sends an email to sales@mysite.com, your website can instantly reply to you with no human intervention, with a thank you message, e.g., "thank you for contacting us, we will be in touch within 24 hours" etc. Different reply messages can be set up for every email alias, e.g., one reply message for emails sent to sales@mysite.com and a different one for bob@mysite.com.

Autoresponders can also be used for sending information to people without the need for any human intervention. For example, "please send a blank email to: more-info@mysite.com" could easily be set up to send you any information via the autoresponder.

Unlimited email lists We don't just supply 1 or 2 free email lists like other web hosts. We offer you to facility to provide unlimited email lists, free of charge.

With an email list, visitors to your website can join / leave the list at any time. For example, if you had a website about local news, people can join your email list and you can then email them all in one go. The email list is set up and controlled via our easy to use control panel which makes administration very easy.

Customized error pages Have you ever visited a website to find that the page wasn't there, only to be presented with a horrid black and white, windows default "404 error" message? Unfortunately, most visitors will look elsewhere when you see an error message like this.

This is where the easy to use control panel can help. You can create a single webpage, anything you like, then pop the html code into the control panel and whenever someone gets a 404 error message on your website you see the pre-designed page and not the default error message.

The great benefit of this is that the error page could be your website's home page, thus taking the visitor back to site and not forcing them away. It's an easy yet effective method to retain your visitors. For example, say the page the visitor wants to look at is www.mysite.com/my-info.html and they type it in wrong, they will see the home page or whatever you want them to see.

Another brilliant feature of our control panel is our error logs. With these you can see where such 404 errors have occurred, which will allow you to easily find any bad links / code in your website and fix it ASAP.

Free shopping cart systems If you're going to be selling from your website, chances are you'll need a shopping cart. A professional and reliable shopping cart system can cost anything from $200 to $3000. You can simply go to our Add-Ons section to order a shopping cart installed. Or you can install it yourself, and we'll provide you the software free of charge, and you won't need to spend anything.

Full CGI-BIN A CGI-BIN is a special folder on your website that can perform certain tasks. You place CGI a script (slightly more complex code than HTML webpage code) into the CGI-BIN for the scripts to work. Some of other web hosts only allow partial access and some no access to the CGI-BIN. The advantages of having full, unlimited access to the CGI-BIN is that you can search the Internet for free scripts and install them in your website hassle free. We also provide the most popular scripts free which are easily installed via the control panel.

Free secure server A secure server means that the web pages are encrypted for security. It's the same system that all major companies use to take payments over the Internet.

To set up your own secure server you would normally need to purchase a security certificate and have this installed on your website. However, we provide a free shared secure server free of charge, a savings of around $200 a year. This means that you can collect sensitive information (credit card payments, etc.) from your visitors with the same security as the major online retailers. You can have anything you like in the secure area and your visitors system will show that you are in a secure environment. Essential if you are selling over the Internet.

Password-protected directories Password protected directories means that you can place passwords on any area of your website as you wish. For example, you may wish for anyone to look at your webpages in different sections of your website, but only want family and friends to look at other pages. This is simple to do via your easy to use control panel and you have full control over the passwords. Password protected areas can be added, changed or deleted at any time via your control panel.

When a visitor tries to gain access to a password protected area, a box pops up asking for your password. No access will be granted unless this password is correct. There is no limit on how many areas you can make password protected.

Detailed traffic statistics You can access your traffic statistics and see exactly what's happening via your control panel. You can simply view month-by-month information, such as number of hits, number of visitors etc, or go into great depth and see who looked at which page on every day since the site was launched.

You can also see how your visitors found you, e.g., a link from another site, a search engines etc, what page you were on when you left your site, what people are typing into search engines to find your site, plus much more. Traffic information is supplied in graph form and numeric form allowing you to analyze the data in any way you prefer.

If You want to increase visitors to your website, then our traffic statistics are essential in showing you what marketing efforts are working well and those that are not.

PHP PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. When a visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor's browser. This allows you interactive and other functions and can be used for a vast amount of applications.

Unlimited MySQL databases MySQL, the most popular Open Source SQL database, is a very fast, reliable database management system. You can use MySQL as the database layer for your dynamically generated web pages. Like most Open Source programs and languages, MySQL has a very practical set of features developed with contribution from many users worldwide. The connectivity, speed, and security make MySQL highly suited for accessing databases on the Internet.

The MySQL database can be fully managed via our easy to use control panel.

Free unlimited sub domains Having free sub domains is like having free additional websites. For example, if you had www.yoursite.com you could also have www.sub1.yoursite.com - www.sub2.yoursite.com, etc. A sub domain is just like having a separate website and you control you via our easy to use control panel. Another great thing about sub domains is that search engines consider you to be a separate website. For example, if you had www.yoursite.com you could also submit www.sub1.yoursite.com - www.sub3.yoursite.com to the search engines as well, resulting in even more hits to your site.

Free Microsoft FrontPage extensions To upload your webpages via FrontPage, a website needs to have FrontPage extensions installed, something not all website hosts offer. FrontPage extensions can be installed, in real-time via your easy to use control panel.

24x7x365 FTP access FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol which is an easy way for you to upload your webpages to your website. Having 24/7 access 365 days a year, means you can upload / change / delete your webpages at any time.

Your account is also username and password protected so you don't have to worry about anyone getting unauthorized access and altering your information.

FTP software can be downloaded from the Internet, such as www.cuteFTP.com - alternatively, you could try the search engines, such as www.yahoo.com - www.lycos.com and search for "free FTP software".

Unlimited pop3 email accounts A pop3 email account is where your incoming emails are stored, ready for you to retrieve you. The advantage of having unlimited pop3 accounts means that You can separate any email alias with complete privacy, for example, bob@mysite.com could have your separate pop3 account which means you would collect your email with a different username and password. Then, all email sent to bob@mysite.com could only be read by him.

Pop3 accounts are set up via our easy to use control panel and take only a few minutes to set up. Each pop3 user has their own username and password which you set up and have complete control over.

Cron jobs (scheduled events) A cron job is an automated scheduling process that operates certain functions that you define at predefined time intervals. Unlike other web hosting companies, we allow full access to perform cron jobs which are administered via our easy to use control panel.

Free scripts Scripts are more complex piece of website code which can be extremely useful. We have provided the most popular scripts free via our easy to use control panel, such as: visitor counter, FormMail, Guest Book, Message board, etc.

Unlike some of other web hosts, we also allow full access to your CGI BIN, a folder on You websites that is required to run these types of scripts. With full access to the CGI BIN You can search the Internet for free scripts (there are literally 1,000's) and add you hassle free as required.

Email virus protection It seems that every week a new deadly virus is found that can do serious damage to your computer. In a bid to try and help protect our customers, our systems have email virus protection that scans your incoming email before you receive it. However, please note that we highly recommend you still use virus protection on your computer, such as Norton AntiVirus or McAfee Virus Checker.

Server virus protection A lot of our customers have been concerned over incidents regarding worms (a type of virus) gaining access to web hosts servers, infecting all your customers websites. One particularly big example was the "Code Red worm" which caused great concern. These security concerns were in relation to a well know server type which a lot of hosting companies currently use. However, we only use high performance UNIX servers for our customers which do not have these security leaks.

All servers do have protection in the unlikely event of an attack and we were made target for mass attackers (hackers, crackers, etc.) then we could reboot the system within minutes and retrieve your website. To date, we have never had our systems down, but rest assured that we are well prepared for any service attacks if you should happen.

99.9% uptime guarantee Our systems are so reliable that we offer you a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If for any reason You websites are down for more than 0.1% of any month, we will refund you the percentage for which you have over paid, e.g., if your server was down for 5% of the month, we will refund 5% of your monthly payment back onto your credit / debit card.