Hosting the Western Slope and
the
Greater Colorado Plateau..
and beyond

The basic question you must ask yourself as you examine these available programs is "Why be online?"
With the low cost of the personal package, you have the opportunity to experiment with the new technology of the internet and see if this form of communication fits your needs aside from the traditional ways of radio, TV, or hard copy advertising, etc.
The moderate cost of the "development package" is appropriate for people like consultants living in a remote area or a rural teacher or doctor in need of access to a supportive body of like minded people and/or data for social media interaction. Another example of use would be for a learning circle consisting of half a dozen students, teachers or nurses who would have a significant impact over their community as to what they learn or have the ability to trade information with literally anybody in the world. This package would drive social networking, media presentation, a blog, databases and the like.
If you have a business concept, then the "business package" would provide all of the following benefits:
1. Increase sales - open for business 24 hours/365 days.
2. Reach new worldwide markets easily.
3. Lower overhead costs compared with physical stores.
4. Dominate online market-share before competitors do.
5. Update information/offers immediately as required.
6. Build stronger, long-term relationships via e-mail newsletters, updates, etc.
7. Automate order, enquiry and support functions - greater cost-effectiveness.
8. Provide central contact/focus point for prospects and customers.
9. Learn more about your customers through surveys, conversion statistics, etc.
10. Lead customers into physical stores.
11. Strengthen business name and product awareness.
12. Benefit from powerful word-of-mouth advertising.
13. Potential to host basic store set up.
Technical terms made simple
Storage space and bandwidth:
Storage space is important because it is the amount of disk space provided to you for storing your website on the HWS servers. The "average" website today may vary, but can range from 5-50 MB. Bandwidth is probably the most important feature to consider, as it influences the amount of visits you can get. When a visitor gets to your website, your site is transferred from the server to their web browser. The higher the number of visitors and page loads, the higher the data transfer.
MySQL features:
Most content publishing applications such as CMSs (Joomla, Mambo, Expression Engine…) or blogging platforms (such as Wordpress) need PHP and MySQL to work on a web server. The MySQL dabatase system is an open source application that rapidly handles server databases, and phpMyAdmin is a PHP script that handles the databases. These features work with each other, so they are very important.
FTP features:
Transferring files to a server through a control panel is difficult and annoying, so you would want a third-party application that helps you through it. To be able to do so, a web server needs to provide you with a special FTP account username and password that you can use with a third party application. Also, you could need something called "anonymous FTP" if you want visitors to upload their files to your web server without having access to all your files, so look out for this if you need this feature.
Email:
It's common for websites to have their own email account for contact and support. This represents a problem if you don't have the proper email feature. Email forwarding is an element that allows you to redirect every email that comes on one account to another. For example, if your website address is john@website.com and you choose to redirect it to john@normalmail.com, every email that gets to the first address is redirected to the second address. Then there are autoresponders, who automatically respond to received emails with a specific message, spam filters, and mailing lists (which are important if you choose to provide a newsletter.)
