Web Hosting FAQs

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting allows you to publish your website. You will need a web hosting service to host your site so people can view it online. A web hosting service is usually the very first type of service to be used by someone new to hosting websites.

You do not need any technical knowledge to use web hosting, thanks to us making our web hosting services accessible to everyone. We include the favourite cPanel Web Hosting control panel, making it easy to manage your domains and web hosting in one place. All support is included in the monthly or yearly cost of the web hosting plan you sign up for.

HostXNow’s Web Hosting plans are easy to use; a total beginner can have a website up and running within 10 – 20 minutes. We have plenty of online tutorials and guides to help you get started; you may even contact technical support, and while you are paying us for the hosting service, we are not your web designer. That said, we will try to help you as best as possible and at no additional cost. But we provide you with all the tools for free, so you can create any website that you like; you are only limited by your imagination.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared Hosting is the cheapest type of hosting as it is hosted on dedicated servers.

If you are new to website hosting or on a tight budget but want the best overall pricing and performance, we recommend using our Shared Hosting service, which uses the latest NVMe SSD to ensure your site load as fast as possible.

What is cPanel Hosting?

cPanel hosting is Web hosting powered by the most loved web hosting control panel called cPanel.

There are other control panels which some hosting providers use. Still, they are not as popular, making it difficult to migrate your websites to other hosting providers if needed. For example, your hosting provider has poor performance or poor website uptime, and you need to move your site to a different web hosting provider. Using a web service powered by cPanel hosting ensures you can migrate your website to a different provider more smoothly if needed, thus giving you more freedom.

cPanel is tried and tested and has the most commonly used features in the web hosting industry, and that is why cPanel is our preferred choice when offering a web hosting control panel. We do not use free control panels as other providers do. cPanel is a commercial product, and we believe it is worth every penny. We know you will love cPanel!

What is WordPress Hosting?

There are different types of WordPress Hosting that some providers now offer. In short, it just means you are set up on a WordPress CMS immediately without having to install WordPress software the manual way, e.g. uploading the files to an FTP account and setting up MySQL databases manually, etc.

Some marketing terms used now are WordPress Hosting Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting. The former is what HostXNow offers, which means the server is configured/optimised to run WordPress at its best, which is all you really need.

The latter usually claims the provider will 100% manage your WordPress CMS for you, e.g. make sure all plugins/themes etc., are up to date, but be careful because many providers will do that on WordPress Optimised plans too. Web hosting providers do not usually help customers update content on pages for WordPress CMS regardless of whether the customer signed up for a hosting plan called “Managed WordPress” or not.

Updates for content are supposed to be done by the website owner/designer/developer. A web host may use the term Managed WordPress to get you to sign up. After you have signed up with them, they may ask you to pay hefty fees to them so that you can get the content updated on your site. It would probably work out cheaper to pay a web designer/developer if you do not have the time or are just not confident enough to carry out such work.

What is Semi Dedicated Hosting?

Semi-dedicated hosting provides a balance of performance, cost, and resource allocation, making it an attractive option for websites looking for more power without the steep investment of a dedicated server.

What is SSD Hosting?

While we could write a massive technical explanation about SSD, we will go for the short and sweet approach here. In short, over the past few decades, the drives used in computers have been SATA and, more recently, SAS (slightly faster than SATA). Still, for the past several years, the latest and greatest drives are SSD which have come down a lot in price over the past few years, which is why now a lot more providers are starting to use SSD for their Cloud Hosting plans.

There are no moving parts in SSD, meaning less chance of data loss, but more importantly, because there are no moving parts, the read/write speeds are hundreds of times better. Because of the increased read/write speeds make things run faster, e.g. MySQL queries, and allow things like cronjobs, e.g., WordPress, to finish more quickly.

But of course, a provider using SSD alone does not guarantee customers will benefit much if the providers limit the read/write speeds, which the provider usually does for Web Hosting and Reseller Hosting by using CloudLinux LVE to restrict the disk Input/Output. The default CloudLinux limits are typically set to 1MB/s, and while that was sufficient many years ago, these days, a lot more is needed these days, and that is why we offer the highest disk Input/Output around up to 50MB/s thus, that is 50x (fifty times) faster compared to our competitors.

Enjoy the speeds from our ultra-fast Local SSD to load your websites blazing fast! Your customers will notice the decreased page load time when they load pages from your site hosted on our hosting infrastructure.

UPDATE We upgraded our Shared Hosting plans using SSD to NVMe SSD! See the NVMe SSD Hosting tab for more details.

What is NVMe SSD Hosting?

Same as our Shared Hosting explanation, with the difference being that NVMe is up to 6x faster than SSD.

We now offer NVMe SSD on our Web Hosting plans which use the even newer, faster storage NVMe. Like traditional SSDs, NVMe is based on Flash memory. However, PCIe-based SSDs can avoid the SATA interface, which has become a bottleneck. Unlike SATA SSDs, PCIe technology allows NVMe SSDs to work up to 6 times faster, resulting in better read/write bandwidth.

Enjoy the speeds from our ultra-fast Local NVMe SSD to load your websites blazing fast! Your customers will notice the decreased page load time when they load pages from your site hosted on our hosting infrastructure.

Want to use NVMe SSD with a lot more Disk I/O? Try our Semi Dedicated Hosting plans which allow you to use up to 250MB/s Disk I/O.

What is Anti-DDoS, DDoS Protected or DDoS Protection?

The chances of being targeted by a DDoS attack are high, and numerous attempts.

A DDoS attack aims to render a server, service or infrastructure unavailable by overloading the server’s bandwidth or monopolising its resources to the point of depletion.

During a DDoS attack, many requests are sent simultaneously from multiple points across the internet. The intensity of this “crossfire” makes the service unstable or unavailable even worse.

What we offer to protect your services

To protect your servers and services from attacks, we make use of the OVH network, which offers a mitigation solution based on VAC technology – an exclusive combination of techniques to:

Analyzing all packets at high speed in real-time Vacuum your server’s incoming traffic Mitigate, i.e. singling out all the illegitimate IP packets, while allowing legitimate ones to pass through

Our DDoS protection covers all types of attacks from L3 – L7.

“It’s not a question of knowing if you need anti-DDoS protection but rather when you will first be the victim of an attack. OVH is committed to protecting your project 24/7 against any DDoS attack, regardless of duration or size.” – Octave Klaba, OVH CTO.

These are some reasons why we use the power of the OVH network to host our infrastructure.

What server locations and data centres do you offer?

You may check our article What are your CloudLinux resource LVE limits?

What server locations and data centres do you offer?

We use the largest network in Europe to host you closer to you or your website’s visitors, ensuring you get the fastest response times possible no matter what project or site you are hosting. Our Test IPs can be found on our Hosting Network page.

Our current available locations are:

Coventry, UK

Shared Web Hosting | Semi Dedicated Hosting | Enterprise Reseller Hosting | VPS Hosting | Dedicated Servers | Website Builder

London, UK

Backup Hosting

Do you include cPanel Backups?

We back up all cPanel accounts of our hosting services Daily and Weekly; Monthly backups are retained for up to 3 (three) months for extra peace of mind.

We can also create custom backups for you on your VPS or Dedicated Server.

Can you migrate my websites to HostXNow? If so, how much?

Yes! We can migrate all of your cPanel Hosting accounts free of charge from your previous web hosting provider to HostXNow. The migration would include all your cPanel settings, such as FTP accounts, mail accounts & settings, databases, subdomains and other cPanel configurations, basically everything! So if you are experiencing poor service with your current web host, rest assured knowing that you can quickly move to us anytime. As we have you covered, you no longer have to put up with your current poor-performing web host!

cPanel to cPanel transfers are 100% free, and we can transfer as many accounts as you like. We do not limit you to, e.g. 10 or 30 transfers as most other providers do. If you are moving from a different panel and your sites are fairly small, we can transfer them for free.

What are the primary hosting features you offer?

We include many add-ons with our cPanel control panel for FREE, the most notable being an Auto Installer called Softaculous. Softaculous contains a huge bundle of scripts which automate the installation (and update of) modern web applications. We include all the most popular software, such as WordPress, SMF, Dolphin, MyBB, Drupal, Joomla!, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Oxwall, Geeklog, PHP-Fusion, Moodle, ClipBucket, WHMCS, and Magento, to name a few.

But that is not all; our servers run on AlmaLinux 8 and CloudLinux to allow your websites and projects to run as fast as possible in the most secure environment. Application-based support includes LiteSpeed with LSCache/LiteMage, PHP version Selector (5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3), MariaDB 10.6 (MySQL) , PostgreSQL, Perl, and BIND (DNS). Email-based support includes POP3, IMAP, and SMTP services. We also include unlimited FREE SSLs for all your domains, thanks to our integration with Sectigo (cPanel) and Let’s Encrypt.

In short, whether you want to host multiple websites with our Shared Hosting plans, host numerous cPanel accounts (separate cPanel accounts) under one of our Enterprise Reseller Hosting plans, or if you want to host multiple Reseller accounts on our VPS Hosting packages, you can do all this with ease on any of our platforms powered by cPanel/WHM Web Hosting control panel.