Hosting

Hosting is the provision of a computer, or part of the resources of a computer, to actually run your web site. This computer can be physically located anywhere in the world.

At Alma Technology we provide hosting as a convenience to users of our other services, not as a profit-making service in itself. For most small to medium enterprise (SME) clients, their website will likely be hosted on a server shared with other websites. We do not impose any storage or traffic limits on our clients, as we do not want to create a disincentive to using their sites to the fullest extent possible.

We review hosting fees regularly to ensure that we pass on the cost of hosting to our clients equitably. Should a client be using so much storage space, or generating so much traffic that smaller sites end up unintentionally subsidising them, we reserve the right to adjust hosting costs accordingly. Given the falling cost of data storage and network bandwidth, it is very unlikely that even a very busy site will have it's hosting cost revised upwards, and we will never make such a change without providing at least two month's notice, and a range of options to help keep your costs down.

Domain Registration / Transfer

The Domain Name System (DNS) is used to translate numerical Internet addresses (such as 209.135.157.86) to a name more easily remembered (such as www.almatech.net.au) by human beings. In most cases, the assignment of these names is performed by agencies known as "registrars". These are usually commercial organisations which have the authority to allocate domain names for a limited term to individuals and organisations for a fee.

As with hosting, we provide domain registration as a free service for our clients, passing on the costs from our domain registrar without a markup.

If you are registering a domain as part of an Alma Technology Website package, a portion of the cost is included in the package, meaning the effective cost of domain registration above the base cost of the package is:

2nd Level Domain	Price
.com.au	$55.00 (inc. GST)
.net.au	$55.00 (inc. GST)
.asn.au	$40.00 (inc. GST)
.id.au	$30.00 (inc. GST)
.org.au	$FREE

There are policies regulating which second-level domains an organisation can use, so regardless of cost if, for instance, you are a commercial organisation, you will probably need to register a .com.au domain, or if you are a non-profit organisation, you will need a .org.au domain.

All domain names are licenced for a period of 2 years, at the end of which you will have to renew your registration.

If you have already registered a domain name and wish to use it with a new site, we can transfer the domain name to our name servers at no cost.

News / Syndication

News

Don't hide your achievements, no matter how minor. Not everything you do needs to be highlighted on the front page of your site, but if it only takes a minute or two to write a paragraph about something you've done that you're proud of, why shouldn't that information be available for anyone who may be interested?

Syndication

News feeds can be used to syndicate your news for automatic reuse on other websites, providing your business partners, industry publications, and other services with the ability to spread your news to interested parties at no cost to you. Drupal automatically creates RSS feeds of the content on your site.

Aggregation

Syndication also goes both ways. You can aggregate the news feeds of related organisations to provide a "one-stop" source of information on what's going on in your industry.

Update Your Site Yourself

The WYSIWYG content editor TinyMCE is installed by default with all our packages, making updating your site as easy as composing an email.

Contact Form

Drupal's built-in contact form allows people to contact you via a form on your website without exposing your email address to abuse from spammers.

You can create numerous categories for different purposes (eg. "enquiries", "sales", "bookings", etc.), and assign one or more email recipients to each of these categories.

Search Engine Submission / Optimisation

We will submit your site to the major search engines. All of our sites are designed to be standards-compliant, simple, and useful, and consequently tend to be highly ranked by the leading search engines. See this document for our approach to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Site Statistics

Drupal's statistics module keeps statistics for anywhere up to the last sixteen weeks of site activity.

You can keep track of which pages on your site are most popular, where vistors on your site have come from, and the address of the computer which has made each page request (which may or may not be useful). Because of the open nature of the Internet, the inferences you can draw from this data are vague at best, but this can be useful for identifying trends in the usage of your site.

Discussion Forum

A discussion forum can be useful as a channel of commuication between not only youself and your customers, but between your customers and each other. In this way many successful businesses have defrayed support costs by building a self-help community of users around their products, as well as gathering useful feedback and direction from their user community.

Emailed Newsletter

Using the same WYSIWYG interface as you use for creating other content on your site, the "simplenews" module can be used to create bulk emailed newsetters. You can also allow people to subscribe themselves to your newsletters via your site, and site administrators can easily manage subscriptions.

Event Calendar

The Drupal event module enables an event calendar that can be viewed in a number of useful ways. Event data is also syndicated in iCalendar format, allowing people to regularly synchronise their own calendaring software with your calendar without even visiting your site.

Polls / Surveys

Particularly useful for organisations with a strong community of repeat customers is the ability to gather feedback via Drupal's simple poll module.

User Registration / Access Control

Drupal's access control system enables websites to allow access to certain resources on a site in a very flexible way to all the different classes of user within and outside your organisation. Alma Technology can help you configure this system to precisely suit what you want to achieve with your site.

For instance, as well as one or more site administrators within your organisation, you may want to give other people limited access to create or update site content. Or you may want to restrict some of your site's resources to certain classes of customer (eg. paying ones).

Email Accounts

An email account from an ISP's domain, or a free webmail account looks very unprofessional, and can be a real hassle if you change ISPs. Alma Technology can provide inexpensive email hosting for our web development customers, using your own domain name. Our mail servers use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), rather than the older Post Office Protocol (POP), which enables you to store an manage your email on the mail server, so it remains accessible wherever you happen to be. We halso have a web-based interface for your mail, for when you're really on the go.

Google Sitemap

Google Sitemaps is an initiative designed to allow site administrators to provide Google with information to assist them more intelligently index your site, in order to direct users to the areas of your site most relevant to them. Drupal's Google Sitemap module provides you with a simple interface to create and fine-tune the information you send to Google.

Graphic Designer

We work with a number of talented local graphic designers. We can select the designer most suitable for your site and work with them to apply that extra layer of gloss to give your site a world-class finish.

Managed Updates

We like to get the best technology right into the hands of our users, but if you are more comfortable with an arms-length relationship with your online presence, that's okay too. We can manage all the content on your site on your behalf; all you need do is get material to us in some kind of digital format (or even paper in a pinch), and we will handle the rest.

Our written English skills are second to none. As well as creating content for many customers over the years, we have had a number of articles published in respected online magazines. We are more than happy to mediate your online communication for an hourly fee, or a periodical maintenance contract.