Common Questions and Answers

No. We have spent countless hours researching our costs versus income ratio to come up with our plan pricing. We are not a bottom-of-the-barrel hosting company, and our focus is on your TIERRA Web Design and Hosting experience (which will be considerably better than any $2/mo hosting experience).

That depends on what your definition of 'custom' is. We do not offer any plans that you can set the features and/or limits, but our plan lineup spans the web hosting spectrum. Why go through the trouble of creating your own custom package when we have affordable options that have been expertly designed to fit your website.

TIERRA Web Design and Hosting was formed officially in 2006, which means we've been around for a couple of years. We are a privately-held company operating out of the great state of Texas. Over the years we've built up quite a reputation for our dedication to our customers and our custom-made hosting features.

We are not out to be the next 'big thing'. As such we aren't out to host the world, we just want a corner of it. If you take a guess, we would be willing to bet you have guessed too high! It's about service to our customer's. You deserve a low site-to-server ratio and we stand by that statement!

No. Sorry. We keep our prices low for everyone, and are therefore unable to offer additional non-profit or educational discounts. We like to think that buying hosting from TIERRA Web Design and Hosting can be an educational experience in and of itself: In choosing TIERRA Web Design and Hosting, you learn about supply and demand, market leadership, brand differentiation, and you will even get to sit at the virtual 'cool kids' table.

This usually depends on the nature of your website. While relatively straightforward sites (think basic html/xhtml content, most shopping sites, webpages, blogs, etc.) can receive tens of thousands of hits at any given time and work perfectly fine, problems can arise with more complex sites--sites with lots of images, scripts or interactivity with visitors. Tens of thousands of users each accessing a database at the same time can cause quite a strain on a server and might be too much for a shared web hosting environment.

The thing to remember is that the term 'shared hosting' (which is another term for standard web hosting) means that your site will share a server with other users. This allows for plenty of usage while keeping prices low, but certain sites may not be appropriate for such an environment. If you are unsure whether your high volume website will work with our shared plans, please feel free to e-mail our sales department, and we will be happy to assist you in determining the best solution for your needs.

If you need additional space and bandwidth, you can simply upgrade your account to a higher plan. Upgrading your plan provides a much better value than paying for more bandwidth and storage on the side.

However, if you so desire, we can sale extra bandwidth and storage. Contact a staff member for assistance.

Probably. We support just about everything under the sun (and a few things over the sun). Check out our web hosting plan comparison page for information on all the features we offer. One of the best things about having a TIERRA Web Design and Hosting account is that you are going to get the features you are looking for and then some. TIERRA Web Design and Hosting has several exclusive homegrown software developments that are designed to make your web hosting experience as enjoyable as possible.

Sure! We allow you to use your own SSL certificate if you'd like. There is a one time $15 installation fee for all custom SSL certificates. Contact our customer service department for assistance.

The number of accounts hosted on a web server can have a significant impact on how quickly that server is able to respond to page requests. Since all users of a server share system resources such as processor time and RAM, a server with too many accounts can be slow to respond and cause your site's visitors to become frustrated and leave.

Many hosting companies pack too many accounts onto each server in an effort to maximize profit. At TIERRA Web Design and Hosting, we feel that the long term customer satisfaction resulting from providing high performance hosting is far more important than the short term profits made by overfilling servers. Our customers love the extra speed they get at TIERRA Web Design and Hosting, making them more than happy to recommend TIERRA Web Design and Hosting to their friends, family and website visitors.

Join TIERRA Web Design and Hosting today and experience the many benefits of our 'undercrowded' servers!

The amount of server power or server system resources available to each hosting account depends on the number of other websites sharing a given web server. A server's total processor and memory (RAM) is shared by all of the accounts on that server.

All of our accounts are hosted on servers with much fewer accounts than the majority of other web hosts. But, above and beyond that, accounts on our Platinum plan will be on servers with half as many accounts as servers hosting Gold plan accounts.

Servers hosting Gold plan customers will have one quarter as many accounts as the Silver plan. This ultra low site to server ratio means that each individual Gold hosting account has roughly four times the share of the server's processor and memory as does a Silver account. That's a lot of power!

Yes--very. TIERRA Web Design and Hosting's servers are connected to an extremely powerful and fully redundant network (no single point of failure). Our network has over 20 GB/s of available bandwidth from Tier 1 transit providers.

Yes, we perform nightly backups on all accounts, but don't count on our backups alone! Your website is important, and you are the one ultimately responsible for ensuring that your data is backed up!

We make every effort to back up all account data on a nightly basis, but we can not guarantee that our backups will be complete, up to date or even available at all. We are not responsible in the event that some or all of your account data and settings are lost (please see our service agreement for more information).*This note may sound cold and heartless, but it helps reinforce the importance of making your own site backups.

You should always keep an up to date copy of your website on your local computer; by doing this you will always have a copy of your site on hand in the event of data loss. You can easily download file, database and settings backups from the backup area of you sites control panel.

TIERRA Web Design and Hosting does not sale domain names. We have considered the option of doing so, but we would rather put our interest in web hosting and web design services.

We can recommend several domain providers including Yahoo Domains, Melbourne IT and Register.com

You can also search Google for more domain providers.

Domain pointers act like full websites with features like email and can be used as subdomains while parked domain names simply point a domain to your main website (or directory on your main website).

TIERRA Web Design and Hosting has teamed up Yahoo © to be our distributor of domains. You can search for a new domain names through our Domain Search or just visit the Yahoo domain sales page.

We are sorry, but we can not accommodate that kind of support. Our hosting accounts come with an autoinstaller that allows you to install over 50 scripts with the click of a button. In addition to those popular scripts, TIERRA Web Design and Hosting has written a custom-installer for the popular Ruby on Rails based blog system, Typo.

If you need to install scripts that are not apart of our over 50 scripts available, we cannot assist you nor can we provide support for any of those third-party scripts (even if they were installed with the autoinstaller). This policy is not to withhold any specialized information or hoard our team's experience. It is impossible for all of our support staff to be fully versed in every available script, and if we have not tested and included the scripts in question, we would be jeopardizing the shared hosting environment by letting them all run rampant across our network.

Yes. Our technical support team will install almost any Perl module upon request. Simply contact customer service with your request.

We have dedicated IP addresses that we provide to all of our hosting packages.

Once you submit your order, our system automatically runs a series of fraud tests in order to verify the order's authenticity. If the order passes all of these tests, the order is immediately setup and requires no manual intervention by our staff. In this case, you will have your welcome email within a few minutes of placing your order.

If one or more of the fraud tests fails, your order will need to be manually reviewed by a customer service representative, and we may ask you for additional information before activating your account.

Stop, drop, and roll... That is usually a good policy if you are ever worried about something having gone wrong. As soon as you get up and dust yourself off, you will likely find that your order has been flagged for further review and verification by a customer service representative (since our auto-provisioning system would typically have you online within 15 minutes).

You do not need to take any further action. Our staff continuously checks the order queue for orders requiring verification and will contact you via email or phone if additional information is required to process your order.

Orders are only manually reviewed during business hours Monday through Friday. If your order is placed outside of business hours and requires manual verification, it will be performed at the start of the next business day. We appreciate your patience in this situation.

If for some reason you have not heard from our customer service department after a full business day, please let us know.

If you're having trouble ordering, our sales team will be happy to help!

You can contact our sales department at sales@tierrahosting.com or use our 'Live Support Chat' to chat with a friendly TIERRA Web Design and Hosting sales representative.

We're glad you decided to join the growing TIERRA Web Design and Hosting community, and we look forward to providing you with outstanding web hosting service!

Absolutely!

We like happy customers. If for some reason you're not satisfied with our service, let us know. We would love the chance to work with you to resolve any problems you experience, however if you'd rather just part ways, we will give your money back with no hassle.

If you cancel within 60 days of signing up, we will provide you with a full refund, otherwise we will issue a pro-rated refund for unused services.

Yes, we accept payments via PayPal.

TIERRA Web Design and Hosting only accepts payment via credit card (PayPal) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

We currently accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

Upon signup, you will be charged for your first contract period. For example, if you sign up for a six month plan, you will be charged six times the monthly rate for that plan (the six-month discount monthly rate, to be more specific).

Our order form will calculate the amount of your first invoice before you submit your order, so that you can make sure you know exactly what you will be charged.

No, we do not. As we stated previously, we aren't about taking on the rest of the world and over-loading our servers just to make a buck.

We do not currently offer any plans plans specifically catered toward the traditional definition of 'reselling.' Our shared plans lack many features that most potential reseller clients may be looking for (customizable control panel, WHM, ClientExec, etc.), so the shared plans may not fit the needs of a customer looking to enter the 'reselling' marketplace.

In shared web hosting, the ability to use your account is limited not just by your space and bandwidth, but also by how much of your server's resources (processor and RAM) you may be able to use at a given time. Since you are sharing a server with many other clients, each must operate their site within certain limits to ensure that all accounts perform as well as expected.

We also completely understand, however, that webmasters are often unaware of intances where their site is using too many resources, and that such usage is not done maliciously. Our staff is partially dedicated to handling resource usage issues and working with clients to resolve them.

For a more detailed explanation of our usage policies, please see the following page:

Resource Usage Policy

TIERRA Web Design and Hosting was 'made' by our founders, S.T. Stokes and R.C. Havard. You will find that the site is constantly updated (both content-wise and design-wise) since we are always looking to improve every aspect of TIERRA Web Design and Hosting (and because we can never make up our mind on the 'perfect' website).

Yes, Definitely!. Absolutely, positively yes. Making websites is really hard work, but we enjoy the opportunity to take a blank piece of the internet, fill it with a bunch of code and images and see what shows up in your browser! Oh, and if you noticed, our name is TIERRA Web Design and Hosting!

No. We spend countless hours combating spam. It doesn't make much sense for us to turn around and send unsolicited mail ourselves.

If you are a spammer and you are on the fence about sending spam to us, please don't... We can guarantee that no one at TIERRA Web Design and Hosting wants to refinance their home mortgage through some random email they got where the sender's name does not include any vowels, so you can save a little bandwidth by leaving us off of your list.

Our privacy policy can be found here.