At GSD Digital we think a simple approach to our plans is best, that's why we only have 3, with all the bells and whistles on each of them, no scaled things apart from space and bandwidth!

Let's be realistic about web hosting! Is someone selling you "Unlimited"? That's a selling pitch and also a myth in the reality of what you actually get.  Some hosting providers may offer unlimited but will reduce the resources your website has when a certain number of visits are passed which affects speed, availability, or simply cram you on a server with 1000 other websites. 

So what do you need? Let's look at the numbers and average size of a web page with images etc being 1-2MB :

We have you covered on all the above scenarios with a bit extra, for example, our NRS Small Business plan gives 3GB of space, plenty for 100+ pages and load of visits (If your site is only 20 pages, we're talking enough for 25,000+ visits a month which even large government sites don't get!) It also covers room for additional databases, and your email.  If there are any worries, needing multiple email accounts or using a lot of graphics and such, we recommend the Ready To Grow plan to cover all bases.

Your base hosting is usually setup within 12-36 hours of payment, details and progress are emailed to you as soon as operations are complete.  

Upon receiving confirmation of setup being complete your DNS records will need to be updated with your domain services as follows :  ns1.site4now.net, ns2.site4now.net, and ns3.site4now.net

Your static IP and SSL certificate does take longer as is purchased specifically for your domain after the base hosting is correctly setup.

To explain Cloud technology, let's compare it with the common environment used by most hosting providers — a single server setup. What this means is that hosting providers host all their customers' web server, email, databases, FTP, DNS on a single machine — which could impact your website as it fights for resources between all these functions, not to mention sharing them with more than 500 to 1000 other websites.  This is not the case with out hosting!

We are CloudFlare enabled, which boosts your website speed across the entire globe, caching (keeping copies) in almost every country. 

A secured website is now one of the most important things to have online.  It protects the users of your website, encryptin the data sent back and forth.  Since 2014 Google has been giving ranking boost to secure HTTPS/SSL protected websites and is becoming, or has become, a requirement on other services such as PayPal to have integrations for sales.

Some hosting providers offer shared certificates, however at GSD we believe that this should be provided as a standard part of your website, a dedicated certificate specific to your site for better protection for you and for your customers.  

A shared SSL certificate is shared among many users and websites on a host rather than specifically for your domain name. For end users to access your website securely ia a shared SSL connection they need to visit the secure address https://secure.ssllock.net/your-domain.com.au/ or such.

This "essentially" gives security and encryption however because it's shared by many users, the URL does not look as professional or unique and even though on the same server, is almost a double hop of information grabbing before it is displayed to the user.

We want all our customers to look professional, be better recognised by Google, and be able to integrate into anything, such as PayPal IPN and other services that now require dedicated SSL, that's why we invest for your online investment in individual dedicated SSL certificates for every website we host.  

We have implemented a number of load balancers across our network, so as to not re-direct all traffic to one busy server. This means that all requests are dynamically distributed across our servers to ensure your sites are served faster.

Unique to our hosting is the segmentation of all services within our network, where most services are being served on their own cluster. That is, HTML/CSS and images are served via its own server cluster, PHP is served through another cluster, incoming mail, outgoing mail, webmail, and so on are all on their own cluster. What does this mean? If a server fails or is over loaded, the server is automatically removed from the pool minimising any effect on customers, as websites are dynamically distributed to other servers.

Of course!  You can point as many domains to your website as you want and even redirect them to specific pages with some scripting if needed (we can help you out with that!).   For example, if you have a core website with the domain mybusinessname.com and a product you are promoting with the domain myshineyproduct.com they can both go to the same website.

Each plan also allows for multiple sites (as long as you own them) starting at 2 for the NRS Small Business Plan and going up.  Should you want a business site and a personal site, or have multiple businesses that require different sites it's all fine to host together with different domains as long as within the resources allocated, which 99.9% of the time is plenty of space and bandwidth!

Honestly, you have the space and bandwidth, you can use it.  That said we would recommend using services like Vimeo, YouTube or Vzaar for embedded video, they're built for proper streaming.  We've used Vzaar on corporate jobs for controlled customer submission of videos and have developed integration to databases and much more with and highly recommend it for developers working with video.  

If you need direct access to the MP4 video then consider a Vimeo business plan, it's relatively cheap and gives you a lot more functionality for direct access to videos!