Hosting is the process of storing your web site (i.e. the text, pictures and animations and other files) so that they can accessed across the World Wide Web. They need to be available 24 Hours a day, 365 days a week.

We can offer you three hosting packages, as detailed below:

We offer the choice of hosting your web site on our servers based in the UK or the USA, depending on your target audience. This means that data is transferred in the most efficient way, making your web site more responsive to load and view, particularly at peak times.

As well as hosting your site we offer facilities that can enhance your web site's usability and functionality. For example we support FrontPage extensions, allowing web designers easier and quicker ways of adding features such as search facilities or guest books. We also support CGI scripting, allowing you to run your own "scripts" - again an excellent way of adding functionality to enhance the browsing experience. Database access is also provided in the form of SQL compatible database connectivity with support for Perl, PHP, etc.

With e-commerce becoming a major force in retailing, we are pleased to provide secure hosting services using the latest encryption techniques, to standards required by most merchant service accounts.

All hosting services include an email forwarding facility. This enables you to have an email address associated with your domain (for example sales@chocolatedirect.co.uk) which is automatically forwarded to your real email address (for example rsmith@hotmail.com). This enables you to provide a unified image to your clients, no matter how big or small your company.

Web forwarding is also becoming very popular, and is a facility which we are pleased to offer.. Essentially it means that any requests for your domain are automatically routed to another, separate, web site. For example you could associate a domain name with the free web space that comes with your Internet Service Provider. The major drawback to this is that, although the initial request would have been to your domain name (for example www.chocolatedirect.co.uk) it's real web address will appear in the viewers web browser (for example www.chocdirect.freeserve.co.uk) which looks less professional and has implications about your perceived image with regards to business size.