Free Web Hosting Information
Free web hosting is available to students who are currently enrolled in the ROP Technology Center’s Web Design Program. This hosting program will be available to students for the duration of their course.
Since many of you are approaching chapter four of the XHTML book it’s time to sign up for your free account. You can sign up for the free ‘Student’ hosting account at http://www.robinshosting.com. It is your responsibility to read all of the information presented on http://www.robinshosting.com including the terms of service. After reading the terms of service, select the ‘Student’ Plan under the Free hosting option and click Continue. Select ’search for a desired subdomain’ and type the desired subdomain name (subdomain names must be eight characters or less) and click continue to see if the name is available, click continue again. Complete the account details making sure to change your username (I would recommend that you make your subdomain and username the same) Click continue when you’re done.
Once you sign up for your account and it’s approved you will receive an email with important details about your account (login information, FTP details, webmail login, and CPanel access). Be sure to save the account details email.
Your free account will be a subdomain of robinshosting.com. This means that the URL to your site will look like this: http://yourusername.robinshosting.com. I hope to have additional domain name choices in the future.
You should take the time to get to know the features of your new account. Review the guides and resources and the CPanel and Fantastico tutorials.
If you need to update your customer contact information once your account is setup you can visit http://www.robinshosting.com/host/customer.php. You can also submit support tickets from the customer support area. There is a support forum for you to use to post questions and share tips with your fellow students.
Paid Web Hosting Information
When you graduate from the program you can continue to have your accounts hosted on the robinshosting.com servers for a monthly fee, move your files to another hosting company, or close your account. The monthly hosting fee helps to support free hosting for future ROP students. At this time we have two paid hosting packages available:
- Graduate $6.00/mo - 300MB space, 7GB bandwidth, unlimited email and FTP accounts, PHP 5 - MySQL 4.1 (unlimited databases), CPanel, Fantastico, five add-on domains
- Alumni $8.00/mo - 500MB space, 15GB bandwidth, unlimited email and FTP accounts, PHP 5 - MySQL 4.1 (unlimited databases), CPanel, Fantastico, unlimited sub domains, 10 add-on domains
You can learn more about the features of these plans on the hosting plans page.
Both of these accounts support multiple domains. This means that you can host and control multiple web sites with one account. The ‘Graduate’ plan will support up to five domains and the ‘Alumni’ plan will support up to 10 domains. If you decide to upgrade your account to paid hosting you will not have to move files, the upgrade will be handled by me.
If you would like to sign up for paid hosting and upgrade your existing account, let me know which plan you would like and how often you would like to be billed. I will upgrade your existing account and send you an invoice for payment.
Alternatively, if you would like to sign up for a separate new paid hosting account with it’s own domain name follow these steps:
- Visit the hosting order page
- Select the hosting plan (Graduate or Alumni) from the ‘Paid Hosting’ drop down menu, select the desired payment cycle (monthly, quartly, half yearly, yearly, and click Continue
- Select ‘Use a domain name you already have’. Note: If you do not have a domain name, visit GoDaddy.com and purchase your domain name. Type your domain name and click Continue.
- At the customer information page select the ‘Existing Customer’ option and type the email address and password that you used when you signed up for the account. Click Continue.
- Review the Cart Contents and select ‘PayPal’ under the Payment options. Payments will be reoccurring with PayPal. Click Submit Order. Login to your PayPal account and click continue. Make the payment.