It's easy to think a domain name and a website are the same. While they are closely connected, they are very different things. This video explains how they are different and why you must have a domain name to have a website.

Web hosting is the service of storing data that keeps websites up and running for users. Every single website that is online has a host server, and almost all use a web host to manage that storage. Not all web hosts provide the same level of quality, though. Up time, and data speed and quantity of transfer are the best measures of a host’s success. You can often pay more to get data transferred in higher quantities, faster. Most web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space at a speed that is perfectly fine for small-to-moderate sized businesses or individuals.

You can find out how many people visited your site through a number of different third party resources, such as Google Analytics or StatCounter. It’s important that businesses install some sort of traffic counting tool on every page of a site and regularly decipher the data to make improvements to marketing and sales plans. For personal websites, traffic counters are merely tools of curiosity, but the numbers certainly are fun to keep an eye on!

When you purchase an account with Hostmutts, one of the services you receive is a certain number of dedicated email accounts for any domain hosted on that account. Some packages give you one email account, or 20 email accounts, or unlimited email accounts. Those email accounts are managed from the control panel in our client area. You can set up email accounts, change their passwords, and set up email forwarders, all from that control panel. You can also set up a dedicated email account to send from a web-based email service like gMail or an offline service like Outlook. You automatically get full use of the your own Webmail also.

This is an abbreviation for Secure Sockets Layer. This is a common protocol used to communicate information securely online. This protocol provides a safe path that runs between two Internet-connected machines or two machines on the same internal network. It is an extremely handy tool used by web browsers who need to connect securely to a web server, given the wild insecurity inherent in the Internet. SSL usually operates and sets up a secure session with little or no interaction from the person actually visiting the web site. You may notice the browser displaying a padlock or the address showing a padlock and a green bar – those are the hallmarks of SSL doing its magic.

Unfortunately, the short answer is that without adding in some level of protection, your site is probably not protected from hackers. Hostmutts will give you some of that added protection. For example, some we provide SiteLock Security, which works hard to block hackers and spammers. If you are using WordPress, your site is inherently more secure than many, but it is still extremely important to install plugins focused on boosting security.

You can – and should! – back up your website regularly. From the control panel, there is a Backup function, and with one click, you can save all of your files.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that is accessed while viewing a website. Every time a user views a website, data is transferred, and the measurement of that transfer is bandwidth. In general, images, audio files and video files are higher in bandwidth than text. That means that if you have a more burdensome website in terms of bandwidth – if you have lots of video or streaming audio, for example – you have a higher bandwidth requirement than someone with a simple text-only website, or someone with only a few low-resolution images. Some of our packages offer unlimited bandwidth, and some have a cap on them.