Find Answers to Your Most Common Questions

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is a security protocol that conveys your communications over the Internet in an encrypted form. SSL encoding is commonly employed by eCommerce websites to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers or personal data. SSL certificates ensure that information is delivered to the server for which it was intended, without falling into the hands of third parties who could tamper with the data. You’ll recognize sites that have a SSL certificate by the URL https, rather than the unsecured http, plus the padlock icon that appears in your browser’s address bar.

A domain name is a set of letters and numbers which makes up the web address of your website. Our domain name is srnhosting.net and our web address is www.srnhosting.net.

In order to have your own specific website address or customised email address you need to register your own domain name.

A site builder is a specialized tool to help you build a professional website. Websites are typically built by software programmers who have years of experience in coding. A website biulder lets you do it all yourself even if have you never done it before. It's very simple to use and the results are amazing. You don't need to install anything. Once you sign up, you can login to your account and start creating.

Yes again! The SSL certificate is recognized by Google’s algorithm as a seal-of-quality and assurance, meaning your website will appear higher up in the search engine’s results compared to unsecured websites.

This means that you will enjoy increased traffic to your website from customer’s searching for your services on Google – all you need to do is show them that the security of their sensitive data is your priority.

It’s easy and quick to get a cheap SSL certificate for your website that will get noticed for the right reasons online. So if you are concerned about the reputation of your website or online business, and want to increase the visibility of your site on search engines, then SSL certificates are the right choice for you.

In short – ABSOLUTELY. Here’ why.

Ordering a SSL certificate is a great way to bolster your website’s reputation with customers and search engines alike. Getting SSL validation is quick and offers increased security for your online transactions. You may find a SSL certificate particularly useful if you run a web shop or eCommerce site, since you can protect your customer’s credit card and other financial information from fraudsters. As a rule, however, any website can benefit from the enhanced security and stellar reputation associated with the SSL protocol.

Weebly is a software tool that lets people easily create a unique website, blog or online store. Millions around the world use Weebly to start their own business, sell online, showcase their achievements and communicate with visitors in a thoughtful and meaningful way.

Designed with the first-time business owner in mind, Weebly gives everyone the freedom to build a high-quality site that works brilliantly across any device.

First you need to ensure that the domain name is available. A domain can only be owned by one person at a time, so before you settle on a domain name be sure that it is available. You can check domain availability by visiting our Domains page.

Once you find your domain name, order it together with a web hosting package. Your domain will be usable within an hour of your order.

Yes sure you can. We have helped hundreds of people with no technical skills or website experience build amazing websites.

Our website builder will guide you through the process of choosing a style and layout and then help you load your information. You can load text, images and videos to make your site look professional.

You have the ideas. We have the tools to make them a reality.

There are three kinds of SSL Certificates from SRN Hosting.

Domain Validation, Organization Validation and Extended Validation Certificates. Domain Validation are the most common and easily obtainable type of SSL certificate. They are appropriate for small websites, blogs, forums, and Intranet or mail servers. They can be obtained through an email-based validation process. In this case, the requesting individual verifies that he or she has control of a domain by clicking on an activation link sent to them via email.

Organization based certificates are suitable for online shops, company websites or Webmail since they offer a higher level of encryption during sensitive transactions. The validation process here requires documentation to verify the identity of the person ordering the certificate, in addition to the email verification described above. These documents might include bank statements or proof that your company is registered legally.

Extended validation based certificates employ the most rigorous validation criteria – and also offer the highest level of encryption. However, these certificates are only dispensed to websites found in a public registry, which means they are most often used by public authorities. They are the most easily recognizable type of SSL certificate, since a domain’s web address is highlighted in green in a browser’s address line. In this case, the requesting entity must prove their identity over the phone in addition to providing signed documentation.

Yes. As long as your domain name is registered in your name – so make sure that your web hosting company does this before you signup! Simply update your domain name’s nameservers to your new web hosting company.

Our Support desk will assist you with every step of the changeover process.

Every business and good idea has a website. It's the place where you can share all your ideas easily. Once you become familiar with your website builder from SRN and learn how to make a Website, the possibilities are endless.

Are you a doctor or lawyer, or are you still searching for the perfect job? You can create a Doctor Website or a Legal Website to attract new local clients. If you're a job searcher, you can easily make a Resume Website to show off skills, experiences and references that will help you land that dream job.

Post and share pictures of the kids. Promote your business product line. Websites are so versatile, everyone should have one.

We offer hundreds of different domains for your to choose from. You are probably familiar with the most common domains such as .com and .net, but there are literally hundreds of options. When you search for a domain name with SRN we will try make suggestions for newer domain types. Remember you can register more than one, and you are free to be as creative as possible.

You may want a domain linked to what your site is about such as a .store for an online store, or you may want your domain linked to a location such as a .us showing your site is relevant in the United States.

Yes! Our website builder includes a secure shopping cart in all plans. You can sell digital or physical products and accept payments. This is all built into the site builder software so you can add products with images and descriptions and start selling online today.

Most people looking for goods or services start on the web. Unfortunately, many small businesses can't afford to pay someone else to build their website. That's where our sitebuilder comes in – we can show you how to create a website for yourself.

Design your own website fast to ensure your customers find you early – while they're still shopping around. In this fast-changing Internet age, there's no time like the present.

Don't have a business? You'll want a website to connect with family, friends and others who share your passions. Luckily, it's easy and inexpensive to make your own website.

Unfortunately if you have already registered a domain name, you cannot merely "swap it" for another. The process in changing your domain name to another is as follows:

1. You will need to cancel the old domain name (If you no longer require it).
2. You will need to register the new domain name (at full registration price)
3. Once the new domain is registered, and setup on the server, you will need to upload the content from the old site to the new site.

• There’s no need to feel overwhelmed by the terminology associated with your domain name registration. Anyone can master our web building tools and learn a few new terms along the way. Let’s start with the building blocks of your new domain — your site’s address.
• A web address has three components that are easy to identify; as an example, the three components of portal.srnhosting.net include: a subdomain, a second level domain, and top-level domain (TLD), in that order. So ‘portal’ is our subdomain; ‘srnhosting’ is our second level domain; and ‘.net’ is our TLD.
• You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing domain names and TLDs — what comes before and after the last period in a web address. As you’ll discover, you have the chance to create memorable websites when you use the domain name search with SRN.

• Every domain name is linked to an address on the Internet called an IP Address, which is a long string of numbers. Domain names make it easier for Internet users to visit websites without having to remember this numerical address. When you visit srnhosting.net, your browser and computer read our site’s DNS records in order to locate our website’s files which are stored on a server. This almost instantaneous directing process allows your browser to access and load websites.

• Most hosting providers automatically assign DNS records upon domain name registration. In some cases, you may wish to keep your registered domain with one company, but have your website’s files and email accounts stored on a different hosting server. This is called a DNS transfer, and can be arranged within a couple of days. You may wish to alter your DNS records if your domain registration was completed with an expensive hosting company. In this case, you can keep your registered domain but switch to a more affordable hosting provider.

Our estimated turn around time for registrations is 5 minutes, however it can take between 24 and 48hrs. Delays can sometimes occur, but we do all we can to speed up the process.

Domain forwarding or pointing is the rerouting of a domain name to another web address. You can point any domain name you own to any other domain name of your choice. For example: We have pointed the address www.srn.hosting to our to our website www.srnhosting.net. Thus any requests for your domain name will be automatically forwarded to any website address of your choice.

With the Whois Lookup service, you will receive publicly available information about any registered domain name. The Whois Information is retrieved from a standardized informational source, the so called Whois database. This service may help you find out who owns a domain and whether or not it still available.

The Whois Lookup may help you find out who owns or manages a domain. The Whois Service gives you direct access to available contact information of the respective domain owner. This can be useful in order to get in touch with the domain owner, if there are technical issues with the domain or if any legal rights have been violated. In addition to that, the Whois Lookup can be helpful if you intend to buy a domain name that has already been registered and you plan to submit an offer to the current domain owner.

• When your SSL certificate is issued, we send an email to let you know. What happens next depends on where your site is hosted and the options you chose when you bought the certificate.
• If you chose web hosting, Website Builder or Online Store when you ordered your cert, we take care of everything for you. If you host your website with another company or use our VPS or Dedicated Servers, please contact our support desk.
• To install an SSL certificate on Parallels Plesk Panel, cPanel and Microsoft IIS, please check our knowledgebase.

How you build your website is entirely up to you. In fact, most basic secure websites can be hand-coded using HTML.

When a visitor enters an SSL-protected page on your website, their browser bar displays a padlock icon and the https:// prefix in the URL address. While most Internet users know to look for those SSL indicators, you can also add a site seal to your website to show visitors your site is verified and secured. Visitors can click the seal to view your certificate's status and details, seeing for themselves that it's safe to send sensitive information to your website. Websites protected by GoDaddy's Premium EV SSL display a green browser bar as well, giving users the green light.

All our ecommerce and site builder packages include responsive web design meaning they work great on smartphones and tablets. This technology ensures that your eCommerce store is optimally displayed on every smartphone and tablet, including any changes you might make over time. These changes are usually made using the internet browser of your computer – thanks to responsive web design they are immediately adopted and optimized for every smartphone. By the way, good performance of a web shop on mobile devices is a ranking factor for search engines like Google, making mobile optimization a real opportunity to stand out from the competition. This is especially pertinent if the competition fails to optimize the presentation of their online shop for mobile devices. Optimizing how your eCommerce website is displayed also gives you access to an entirely new group of customers – those that like to shop on the go.

‘SPAM’ or ‘Unsolicited Commercial email’ is e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Some definitions of spam specifically include the aspects of email that it is unsolicited and sent in bulk. We do not tolerate the sending of unsolicited commercial email or “SPAM” at all.

Each of our plans comes with auto responders for Email. An auto responder is an email address that sends an automated response back to every email address it receives a message from. You will be able to define the subject and content of the email that gets sent back from your hosting control panel.

A mail account is a “mailbox” that holds your emails on the server until you view them (download them) with an email program. An email program is software that runs on your computer, such as “Outlook Express” or “Eudora” or “Pegasus Mail”. There are literally thousands of other email programs available; we recommend that you use “Outlook Express”, as it comes free with every Microsoft Windows installation.

There are many free email programs available for download. A few examples of these for Windows are Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Eudora. Thunderbird and Eudora are also available for Mac OS X. Use our related links to download your email program of choice

Email forwarding allows you to forward your email from one email address to another. For example, email@yourdomain.com could be forwarded to your current email address, giving you the ability to receive all email at one address.

Go over to the official Docker page at https://docs.docker.com/compose/faq/

Docker is 100% free. It is open source, so you can use it without paying.

With a virtual machine, the server includes the application, all the binaries and libraries and an entire guest operating system which may be massive.

Docker Containers include the application and all of its dependencies, but share the kernel with other containers. They run as an isolated process in userspace on the host operating system. They’re also not tied to any specific infrastructure – Docker containers run on any computer, on any infrastructure and in any cloud.

Agility Docker gives developers the freedom to define environments, and create and deploy apps faster and easier, and flexibility for IT ops to quickly respond to change. Control Docker enables developers to own all the code from infrastructure to app, and the manageability for IT ops to standardize, secure and scale the operating environment. Portability Docker gives you choice without complexity, from a laptop to a team, to private infrastructure and public cloud providers.

WildCard certificates secure domain names along with all subdomains of the domain. For example, Wildcard certificate issued to *.mydomain.com can be used to secure the following host names:

• mydomain.com
• www.mydomain.com
• login.mydomain.com
• secure.mydomain.com
• support.mydomain.com etc.

Certificate Authority (CA) is an organization that is trusted to sign digital certificates. CA verifies identity and legitimacy of company or individual that requested a certificate and if the verification is successful, CA issues signed certificate.

When server presents certificate to client (for example, your web browser) during SSL handshake, client will attempt to verify signature against a list of ‘known good’ signers. Web browsers normally come with lists of CAs that they will implicitly trust to identify hosts. If the authority is not in the list, as with some sites that sign their own certificates, the browser will alert the user that the certificate is not signed by a recognized authority and ask the user if they wish to continue communications with unverified site. Namecheap offers SSL certificates signed by RapidSSL, Comodo, GeoTrust, Thawte and Symantec Certificate Authorities. These CA’s are recognized by 99% of web browsers. This is the guarantee that browsers will not show any security errors when connecting to the site secured by RapidSSL, Comodo, GeoTrust, Thawte or Symantec.

• Low assurance certificates include only your domain name in the certificate. Certificate Authorities usually verify that you own the domain name by checking the WHOIS record. The certificate can be issued instantly and is cheaper but, as the name implies, these certificates provide less assurance to your customers.
• Medium assurance domain validated Certificates similar to the low assurance ones, but in addition they provide you with a dynamic Site Seal, clicking on which your customers will be able to verify the domain name and validation period for which the Certificate is issued.
• High assurance certificates include your domain name as well as business registration details (company name, address, city, state and country) on the certificate. The certificate authority will verify your ownership of the domain name and business registration (you will be asked to submit a few documents). It can take from a few hours to a few days for a high assurance certificate to be issued depending on when you submit the necessary documents.
• Very High assurance is available only with Extended Validation Certificates which are issued within 10 business days and require more paperwork than OV Certificates. Benefits of this type of certificates are: Green Bar and business name in the address bar.
• Because of the additional validation steps that you need to pass through before high and very high assurance certificates can be issued, these certificates are a significant tool in preventing phishing and online fraud.

• Domain validated certificates only verify a domain’s ownership and are not recommended for web sites with online trade and e-commerce transactions.
• Being a registered Company it’s better for you to enable a secure connection to your website with an Extended Validated Certificate. In this case you will have plenty of advantages that will attract customers. The most significant of them are Green Bar and Company name in the address bar visible to end users.
• As for Site Seals, there are mostly static Site Seals (graphic image) available for Domain validated certificates and only some of them come with dynamic ones. Extended Validation certificates allow you to install Corner of Trust or a dynamic Site Seal which will show Company information, such as domain name, company name, address, city, state and country. For your visitors that will mean that your Company is fully authenticated and validated by a Certificate Authority.
• While domain validated certificates will provide you only with Low and Medium Assurance and Warranty equalling rom $10 000 to $100 000, EV Certificates will give you Very High assurance and warranty from $250 000 to $1 500 000 depending on the Certificate Authority and certificate type.

Very High assurance available with EV certificates is an important tool for preventing phishing and online fraud because of additional validation steps that you need to take before such a certificate can be issued.

The short answer is, yes. Generally, whenever you register a domain name, some of your details are sent to the domain registry. These requirements may vary slightly from registry to registry. However, it is necessary that these personal data are publicly available for two reasons. Firstly, it offers the possibility to find out who is in charge of a specific domain from a technical perspective in case of technical issues. Secondly, it helps to identify a contact person in the event of infringement of third-party rights. Regardless of the requirements stated above, data protection is the top priority at SRN Hosting and we assure you that your data is safe with us.

Depending on the registry that is responsible for the domain name you are interested in, you may receive different kinds of information using the Whois Lookup. The registry defines which records will be kept in the Whois database. Thus, it may happen that for some domain names no data or only a limited amount of information can be displayed. Furthermore, some domain owners use private domain registration where the personal data is kept confidential, hence these information cannot be accessed using the Whois Lookup.

A Whois record contains information about the current registrant of a particular domain. We offer two versions of the Whois Lookup, which differ in terms of the level of detail provided by the service. With the basic version, included on this page, you get the following Whois information: - Domain Name - Admin Organization - Admin Address (Street, City, State) In addition to the information above, you will find the following data: - Registry Domain ID - Registrar - Registrar URL - Creation Date - Registrar Registration Expiration Date - Registrar Abuse Contact Information (Email, Phone Number) - Domain Status - Registrant Name - Registrant Organization - Tech Contact Data (Name, Address, Phone Number, Email) - And many more

SRN Hosting allows you to use any type of sitebuilder software you wish. We offer three main categories of website creation software. Firstly, we offer Weebly, a world class website editor that allows you to do anything from the simplest to the most complex webpage by clicking a mouse. Secondly we offer hundreds of open source website frameworks such as Jooma, WordPress and Drupal. Lastly, if you fancy yourself a coder, we allow you to upload your custom code.

WordPress has a very simple management system. You don’t need to code anything. You can create pages, menus, add pictures and videos with the click of a mouse.

We have many years of experience in hosting WordPress. We have optimized our hosting environment to deliver a superb WordPress experience. So don’t chance it. If WordPress is your platform, then SRN Hosting is your partner.

Here are some points to help you understand just what web hosting is and how it works:

1. The reason to sign up for Web Hosting is to give your website a place to live for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Your website has to be housed on a computer somewhere that is always connected to the Internet. This computer on which your website will live is called a Web Server and is owned by your web hosting company. 2. Web hosting is in essence a subscription service.  In order to continually make sure that your website has a place to live you will have to pay recurring amounts: either monthly or yearly. 3. Some big websites -- such as Google and Ebay -- do their own web hosting. This is the exception rather than the rule. It is usually the best bet to let another organisation do the hosting for your site. Here are some of the reasons why: » Uptime. If your website goes down in the middle of the night for any reason someone else takes care of the problem for you. Generally you won't even know that the site was down. With most web hosting companies your site will have at least 98% or better uptime. » Salary Expense. In order to make sure that the computer your site is on is running smoothly at all times you will have to hire a full time employee called a Systems Administrator. When you use a web hosting company then the cost of the skills are spread across all their clients. » Security. There are hackers out there who enjoy causing havoc. A web hosting company will generally have experience in ensuring their client's websites are as secure as possible. 4. The specific computer on which your website lives is called a web server.  Generally speaking, if the web server that your website is hosted on goes down, your website goes down. 5. A web server typically hosts many websites. Just because your website is stored on a computer does not mean it is the only one on the web server. Generally their are many websites on one web server to produce economies of scale which enable you to get affordable web hosting. 6. An established web hosting company will generally own many web servers which in turn host many websites.  Each web server the hosting company owns will typically host hundreds of individual websites and domain names. 7. Across the world there are many more websites than there are web servers because it is possible to host thousands of small websites on one web server.  8. If you sign up with a web hosting company, your website will be assigned to one of their web servers. 9. Your domain name will be assigned to one of their name servers. A name server is a computer which will connect your domain name (http://www.yourdomain.com) to the web server where your website lives. 10. Your name server and a web server work together to get visitors from all over the world to your website.  This is how it works: Your visitor types your domain name in his browser. Based on information provided by your hosting company's name server, your website is found to live on the specific web server where it was originally assigned to by your web hosting company. A single page of your website is sent to the visitor's browser by the web server. The process repeats when your visitor goes to the next page of your website.

Unfortunately no hosting company can provide 100% uptime. Even the biggest and best multi-million rand and dollar sites go down from time to time due to various unforeseen circumstances. You need to make sure that your web hosting company has done the best they can to ensure the least downtime possible. Make sure that they have systems in place to continually monitor all of the websites they host so that they know if there is a problem as soon as possible. Ask them the 25 questions to ensure that they are reliable and will provide the best web hosting and uptime possible.