Infuseweb Web Hosting - 1-866-663-2973

Frequently Asked Questions

• General and Getting Started Questions
• Shared Web Hosting Questions
• Reseller Hosting Questions
• VPS Hosting Questions
• Dedicated Hosting Questions
• Domain Name Registration

General and Getting Started Questions

Q. I new to this whole hosting thing. I don't even know where to begin. Can you help me?
A. Of course! If you feel overwhelmed by the whole process, by all means contact us and we'll be happy to guide you through the process of getting up and running.

Q. Do you provide help moving my site from another host to you?
A. Yes, absolutely! We will be glad to assist you if you are transitioning from another host to Infuseweb at no charge. We will provide you with guidance and help to successfully transition all your information, if possible, to us.

Q. If I sign up now, how long will it take to setup my account?
A. Once you complete the signup process and your credit card payment has been confirmed, your account will become activated within 24 business hours, but usually significantly less. This is to allow for fraud review and verification. When your account is provisioned and ready to go, you will receive notification by e-mail.

Q. What are your payment options?
A. We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover credit cards. We also accept PayPal payments or payment by check to INFUSEWEB LLC, 9901 IH10 West, Suite 800, San Antonio, TX 78230. Please ensure your Invoice Number is written on all checks and allow up to 7 days for check processing.

Infuseweb is a Windows web host. So when comparing hosts, be sure you are comparing Windows to Windows hosting plans. Linux plans are often significantly cheaper because the operating software is freely available for Linux servers whereas Windows software comes often at a steep price. These behind-the-scenes costs are built into our pricing.

Many cheaper hosts are also fly-by-night with the end result being poor service and poor performance. We invest heavily in a solid infrastructure, have established long working relationships with our customers and are continually upgrading our systems to keep our customers up-to-date with the latest technology.

We don't offer unlimited domains/disk space/bandwidth because we prefer to be realistic in our offerings to ensure our services remain reliable and available. Anyone can tell you they offer unlimited everything to try and get your business. But if you look deeper you'll find they don't have the capacity to handle it.

Q. Will you negotiate your pricing with me?
A. We'd love to, but as we already provide very competitive Windows hosting prices, and since we already offer upwards of 15% discounts the longer you sign up for hosting, we usually don't negotiate on pricing. However, if your decision between us and another host comes down to pricing, please ask and we'll see what we can do (within reason, of course!).

Q. What kind of servers do you run? What are their specs? How are they configured?
A. Our servers are all high-end Dell and HP servers with single and quad core processors, redundant power and memory, high speed SCSI and SATA redundant disk arrays, and up to 24 GB of memory running over a redundant Gigabit backbone. We have a number of balanced servers to mitigate downtime in the event of a server malfunction and we do daily backups to provide file and server recovery in the event of a failure. This gives our customers good reliability at an affordable price, something many other providers don't offer.

Q. Do you own your own equipment? Where is your equipment located?
A. Yes, we own and manage all our equipment. Our servers are located in a first class secure Data Center in Dallas Texas, USA, owned and managed by Colo4Dallas. For more about this Data Center, please click here.

Q. I need help designing my web site. Do you provide web design services?
A. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide web design services at this time.

Q. What is your shared/reseller uptime? Do you offer a guarantee?
A. While we do not provide a guarantee/SLA for shared/reseller hosting our shared and reseller hosting uptime is typically demonstrated at better than 99.95%, excluding any scheduled maintenance or emergency patch updates at the recommendation of Microsoft. This said, we do promise to make every effort to at least meet or exceed 99.9% service/server uptime.

If you are looking for increased uptime, consider one of our Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated servers. Just keep in mind these types of servers usually require extensive knowledge of administering Windows servers, so it may not be for everyone.

Q. Do you offer an uptime guarantee for VPS or Dedicated Servers?
A. Yes, we provide a 99.99% SLA for VPS and Dedicated Servers.

Q. What are your support options/hours? Do you offer 24x7 Support?
A. Infuseweb's phone support hours are currently from 9AM to 7PM Central Time, Monday through Friday, excluding U.S. holidays.

Unfortunately are not able to offer 24x7 support at this time due to the small size of our staff. However, we do respond quickly to support tickets and phone calls so you never have to worry about being left without support. We try to answer support tickets within 12 hours during normal business hours, and within 12-24 hours on holidays, weekends, and non-business hours. This is part of our commitment to you to provide you with great customer service.

We also have a great support section available 24x7 with self-help tutorials, knowledgebase, and support forums located here.

Q. What are your billing terms and cancellation policies? How do I cancel service?
A. Our current billing terms and cancellation policies can be found here. We hope if you are considering cancellation that you'll let us know before you cancel or switch hosts so that we can have the chance to win back your business if possible. We always like to keep our customers happy and want to know what we can do better to keep them happy.

Q. What is your Acceptable Use and Privacy Policy?
A. The following links will take you to our policies: Acceptable Use, Privacy Policy, Copyright Policy

Shared Web Hosting Questions

We are more than happy to help you with the move process if you need it to ensure a smooth transition. Just Contact Us and we can discuss your move requirements to ensure a successful transition.

Q. How long does it take to set up my account with Infuseweb once I sign up on your web site?
A. Once your order has been reviewed to ensure it is not fraudulent, generally we will approve your signup and your account will be created within 2-3 hours during business hours. In cases where we cannot verify your identity, it may take longer as we may need to call you to verify you did actually sign up for the account or contact your bank to ensure your credit card has not been stolen. Therefore, it is critical you provide accurate contact information during the signup process should we need to get a hold of you.

Once your signup has been approved, you will receive an e-mail with your account login and setup information. If you don't receive this information within 24 hours, please contact us and we'll be happy to look into it.

Q. If I sign up for a web hosting plan with Infuseweb, can I upgrade to a higher plan at a later time?
A. Yes, this is easily possible. This can be done through our support/billing system. Not only can you upgrade to a higher level plan, but you can also adjust individual options within your plan if you only need, say, additional disk space.

Q. Can I upgrade to a reseller account if I currently have a shared web hosting account? Will I be able to keep all my settings?
A. Yes, we can upgrade your shared hosting account to a reseller account if you desire. Just let us know by submitting a support ticket and we'll be happy to help.

Q. Can I sign up for a free trial account to see if I like Infuseweb?
A. Unfortunately, we do not have a free trial account due to the potential for abuse of allowing free accounts. However, we have a 30 day money back guarantee so you can sign up for Infuseweb services knowing you can cancel within the first 30 days and get your money back (minus any domain name registration fees).

Q. Do you have a guarantee? How about an Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
A. Yes, we have a 30 day money back guarantee. You can learn more about it here. We do not have an SLA for shared hosting programs but our history has shown we have maintained more than a 99.9% uptime for our services.

Q. What web server do you use? Do you support Apache?
A. We currently use Windows Server 2003 or 2008 configured with Microsoft's IIS6 web server on our Windows plans. We support Apache on our Linux plans.

As a policy, we do not install custom components (DLL's, CFX tags, etc) unless the component is commercially proven, stable, and economically feasible to be placed on ALL of our servers (to ensure standardization). If you need more customization, you should consider a Virtual Private Server which will allow you to install the apps and components you need on your own private machine.

Q. Do you allow anonymous FTP access to users sites?
A. No, we do not permit anonymous FTP access to any of our servers for security reasons. Anonymous FTP sites tend to attract hackers, illegal file sharers, pornography, and many other things harmful to our customers and our servers.

Q. I have a web site that is hosted elsewhere, but I want it to connect to my database at Infuseweb. Can I do this?
A. No, per Infuseweb's Acceptable Use Policy, we do not allow connections from non-Infuseweb hosted web sites to our databases.

Q. Can I access my e-mail over the web?
A. Yes, depending on the Operating System, we offer different webmail clients such as SmarterMail and Squirrelmail free with all mail accounts, and a wireless mail as well (with SmarterMail), so you can check your e-mail from your cell phones or PDA's.

Q. Do you offer Microsoft Exchange services or Microsoft SharePoint?
A. At this time we do not. However, there are a number of features bulit into our SmarterMail server that allow Exchange-like synchronizatoin functionality with a free downloadable plugin.

Q. What are your Shared Hosting backup policies?
A. Infuseweb backs up Shared Hosting servers weekly, and in many cases daily. In the event of a catastrophic server failure we should be able to restore your site to a state prior to the failure. If you accidentally delete your files, we can restore them for a fee (this helps defray the cost of providing continual backup services, expanding data storage costs, and backup software for our servers). While we make every effort to ensure solid backups, we do not guarantee that your data will always be recoverable. Therefore we advise customers to ensure they have an off-site copy of their critical files at all times. Please see this KB article for more about our backup policies.

Reseller Hosting Questions

Q. How long does it take to set up my account with Infuseweb once I sign up on your web site?
A. Once your order has been reviewed to ensure it is not fraudulent, we will approve your signup and your account will be created immediately. This usually takes within an hour or two during business hours. In cases where we cannot verify your identity, it may take longer as we may need to call you to verify you did actually sign up for the account or contact your bank to ensure your credit card has not been stolen. Therefore, it is critical you provide accurate contact information during the signup process should we need to get a hold of you.

Once your signup has been approved, you will receive an e-mail with your account login and setup information. If you don't receive this information within 24 hours, please contact us and we'll be happy to look into it.

When you log into the reseller system for the first time, you'll need to start setting up your hosting plans, customer accounts, domains, and other reseller related items. Once you sign up, you will receive an e-mail with instructions on getting started as a reseller that outlines the steps you need to take to get your account up and running quickly.

Q. Do you have a guarantee or an SLA that my sites will be available consistently?
A. We do have a 30 day money back guarantee which you can view here. However, we do not have an SLA for shared hosting environments like reselling due to the nature of the business. However, our past history shows we have maintained a 99.9% uptime or greater and we strive hard to ensure your sites are always available 24x7.

Q. What level of control do I have over my customers web sites?
A. As a reseller, you have the ability to manage all of your customers domains, including creating/editing/deleting FTP accounts, mail accounts, databases, stats and other aspects of your customers accounts from your Helm control panel reseller log in.

Q. As a reseller, can I have my own resellers?
A. No, our control panels do not support resellers of resellers. However, this may be possible in the next version of the Helm control panel software we use.

Q. Do I get a personal DNS for my reseller account?
A. Yes, we will configure a personal DNS server for your reseller account upon your request. We will then provide you with two name server IP's (at no additional cost) which you must then set up with your registrar so that your DNS resolves correctly.

Q. Do I have FTP access to all my customers domains from one FTP account?
A. No. Due to the distributed nature of our web servers, it is not possible to have one login that provides access to each of your customers FTP accounts. You would need to log in separately via FTP to each domain to transfer files.

Q. Under the reseller plans, how many MS SQL databases am I allowed to create?
A. This depends on the reseller plan you are under. Please visit the reseller plan page for more information.

Q. What are your Reseller backup policies?
A. Infuseweb backs up Reseller Hosting servers weekly, and in some cases daily. In the event of a catastrophic server failure we should be able to restore your customers site to a state prior to the failure. If your customer accidentally delete their files, we can restore them for a fee (this helps defray the cost of providing continual backup services, expanding data storage costs, and backup software for our servers). While we make every effort to ensure solid backups, we do not guarantee that your data will always be recoverable. Therefore we advise that you tell your customers to ensure they have an off-site copy of their critical files at all times. Please see this KB article for more about our backup policies.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

Q. What is a VPS and what's the difference between a VPS and a Dedicated Server?
A. A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a completely independent server operating system designed so it can run side by side on the same physical server as other VPSes.

Traditionally, each physical server has one operating system which is tied to that physical server's specific hardware and resources. With virtualization, the virtual server sits on top of a virtual core operating system which manages virtual resources, and that in turn speaks to the physical hardware. Meaning, to the virtual machine the physical hardware is transparent.

This has a number of advantages. Memory and processor allocation can be adjusted on the fly. A virtual machine can be easily moved to another physical server running the same core virtualization software and won't know the difference, making hardware upgrades and restoring a virtual machine when a physical piece of hardware fails much easier. Backups and restores of entire virtual machines can be done quickly and easily. And many VPSes can fit on one physical machine now, reducing overall power consumption, heat generation, cooling needs, and space requirements.

So, really the only difference is that a dedicated server is a complete physical server and one operating system devoted to you, whereas a VPS shares the server hardware and resources with other VPSes on the same server. Even though your VPS may share resources with other VPSes, because VPSes are very efficient and completely isolated your allocated resources are always available to you when you need them.

For more information on the Virtuozzo core virtualization software we use and how it is able to manage VPSes so efficiently, please visit http://www.parallels.com/virtuozzo.

Q. How do I manage my VPS?
A. VPS management is quite easy. When your VPS is set up, you can log into it as if you were logging into your desktop by using the Remote Desktop Client connection software which comes preinstalled with Windows XP and Vista by default. When you sign up, you will be provided with a server IP and username/password which you can then use to connect to your server. You can also install an VNC client you wish on your VPS.

You can also manage your server through the Web Based VPS Management Console provided with your VPS. The web-based client allows you to stop and start your VPS, transfer files to and from it, view resources, backup and restore your VPS, and connect remotely to it.

Q. How difficult is it to use and manage my VPS?
A. An Infuseweb VPS is pretty much like any other Windows desktop computer and you can treat it as such if you want. However, if you wish to use the more advanced server features, which most people do, then you will need to have some experience administering a Windows 2003 Server. While server management and maintenance is your responsibility, we will be happy to help point you in the right direction if you need help.

Q. Who maintains server updates and patches?
A. Infuseweb will ensure that your servers are consistently patched with the latest Microsoft updates when they are deemed ready to be installed with our Virtuozzo infrastructure.

Q. How long does it take to set up my VPS?
A. We will have your VPS set up within 24 business hours. You will receive an e-mail with your server and login information, and any additional instructions on getting started with your VPS once your VPS is set up.

Dedicated Hosting

Q. How long does it take to set up my Dedicated Server?
A. We will have your dedicated server set up wtihin 48 business hours. You will receive an e-mail with your server and login information, and any additional instructions on getting started with your dedicated server once your dedicated server is set up.

Q. What kind of physical hardware are your dedicated servers?
A. We use DELL PowerEdge servers for our dedicated servers. These are usually single or dual processor servers equipped with single or redundant disk drive arrays (RAID). The current server offerings and specifications are listed on the Dedicated Servers web page.

Q. Do you have a Service Level Agreement for Dedicated Servers?
A. Yes, we have an SLA available here for dedicated servers. The equipment and network infrastructure is guaranteed under SLA. However, this does not cover any software you install or any corruption to the operating system during your use.

Domain Name Registration

Q: What is a domain name?
A: A domain name is a web site address that makes it easy for people to find your web site on the Internet. Examples are www.mydomain.com or store.mycompany.com. A domain name is pointed to a web server hosting your web site using DNS host records.

Q: How do I register my domain name?
A: To register a domain name with Infuseweb type in the domain name you want in the form at the top of the page and click Check Availability. The results page will tell you if your domain is available or not. If it is, you can add the domain to your "shopping cart" and check out like you would any online store.

Q: What is a Registrar?
A: A Registrar is a place where domain names are registered and maintained. There are probably thousands of registrars around the world today. You can register with any one you wish and as long as they are a legitimate registrar, your domain name can be registered for your use only. Infuseweb integrates with a major and extremely reliable registrar behind the scenes to provide domain name registration solutions to its customers.

Q: What is a Domain Name Server?
A: A Domain Name Server (or Name Server, or DNS Server) is a server that acts as a "phone book" translating your domain (i.e. www.mydomain.com) name to the IP address (or "phone number") of the server that has the files for your web site. There are tens of thousands of DNS servers across the world. When someone types your domain name into their web browser, the first thing the browser contacts is a Domain Name Server which looks up the address of servers that know where your web server containing your web site files resides. Eventually, after traveling to numerous DNS servers, the request makes it to its final destination, the web server containing your web files and t:he web pages display in the browser.

When you register a domain name, you'll need to provide the registrar with the DNS servers responsible for your domain. Usually, this is your web host's DNS servers and your web host will provide you with their DNS servers to use (usually something like ns1.webhost.com and ns2.webhost.com). Standards dictate you should always provide two name servers to the registrar for redundancy.

With our registration, you have the option to use your host's DNS servers, or use ours, in which case you would need to provide the correct DNS records to resolve your domain name to your web host. This is an advanced procedure and can result in your web site having problems resolving correctly so you should only do this if you understand the implications and know how to make the changes manually.

Q: Can someone steal my domain name from me?
A: It is possible, though very difficult these days, for someone to steal your domain name without your knowledge. Registrars have a feature called a Registrar Lock or Domain Lock which prevents the transfer of the domain to anyone unless the lock is removed. In order to transfer a domain name today, you need to provide a Domain Key/EPP Code and only the domain's account owner can request this.

Q: How long are domain names registered for?
A: A domain name can be registered in increments of 1 year, up to 10 years.

Q: I'm not happy with where my domain is currently registered. Is it easy to transfer to you?
A: Domain name registrations are fairly straightforward to transfer. However, before you can transfer, you need to ensure you have the Domain Key (also known as an EPP code) which you can get from your current registrar. Keep in mind, any money that you have paid to the current registrar is not refunded back to you, nor do we apply a credit to your account for money not used. Each registrar is an independent company.

To transfer a domain name, type in the domain name you wish to transfer in the box at the top of this page and click Check Availability. Choose the "I want to transfer my domain to Infuseweb Web Hosting Services" and ensure the correct domain name appears in the box. Then, click Add to Cart and follow the directions.

Q: How much does a domain registration cost?
A: Please see the chart above. Domain registrations through Infuseweb are very competitive compared to many other registrars.

Q: What happens if my domain name expires? Can I get it back?
A: If your domain name has expired, you can reactivate it within 30 days of expiration without any penalty. However, between 31 and 60 days there is a $160 fee charged in addition to the domain renewal fee to reactivate the domain. A significant fee is standard at most registrars (though ours is typically less than other registrars) and is not waivable. It is the cost for the registrar to continue to maintain your domain name for you and preventing it from being re-registered by someone else. After 60 days, the domain name is assumed to be abandoned and is released to the general public where it becomes available for someone else to register it.