Web Hosting
Choosing a suitable web hosting plan is a daunting task, some would even say it's as difficult as picking a cellular plan. Typical service providers like to advertise with numbers: Disk space. Bandwidth. CPU. RAM.
Far from painting a full picture of your application's real world performance, these numbers distract you from the crucial factors other service provider don't want to talk about.
Latency
Don't be taken in by plans advertising unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth means nothing when the transfer is slow, a situation made more likely when bandwidth is unmetered. An analogy would be offering unlimited free petrol with a new car, but only allowing you to pump it through a syringe.
Region
Where your physical server resides is another primary factor in determining website latency. We offer servers in each of the Amazon Web Services regions to ensure dynamic content load quickly for a targeted regional audience. The current list of regions includes: Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, North Virginia, Oregon, North California, Ireland and São Paulo.
CDN
For static content, like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, documents, audio and video clips, we offer CDN by Amazon CloudFront, ensuring customers with a global audience download these cached content from the nearest edge server.
Fault Tolerance
Web servers are built on hardware parts that will eventually fail. A power failure, faulty hard disk, CPU, RAM or motherboard can all cause a website to go offline. Our Cloud Hosting plans are engineered to withstand failure of any of these components, ensuring our customers' websites stay online and safe from data loss at all times.
As a reference for the type of latency our customers should expect, the Luminary Studios website is hosted on our own Premium Hosting Plus plan in the Singapore region. You can also visit the Luminary Studios static website for typical latency to be expected of our Static Hosting plan.
Finally, if your website is reliant on search engine traffic, note that crawlers from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft may penalize a website if a page takes too long (more than 2000 ms) to load or give up on trying to index the website altogether. Websites are also judged on where they're hosted (IP address). Simply put, don't host your website in Australia if your target audience is in Finland.
Plans
Premium Hosting
Customers of our Premium Hosting plan run in a shared environment within the Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud. In addition to offering low latency content delivery to each region, we keep a close eye on CPU and RAM resources, ensuring each website runs smoothly.
As email requirements differ from customer to customer, we offer email hosting as a separate product to avoid bogging websites down with your neighbour's email traffic. Be sure to check out our Email Hosting plans for a comprehensive range of email solutions.
Search engines will penalize websites sharing an IP address with a large number of other domains, usually the case with budget shared hosting services (we've witnessed upward of 1000 domains all sharing 1 IP address). Websites may even be banned from search results if another website sharing the IP address is serving up pirated content, phishing sites or viruses.
With our Premium Hosting plans, IP addresses are shared by no more than 10 domains. Each customer's website is continually crawled for inappropriate content that might be flagged by search engines. Dedicated IP addresses are also available as an add-on.
Premium Hosting Plus
Also located within Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud, customers of Premium Hosting Plus can expect all the features of Premium Hosting, with the added security of SSL encryption to protect against malicious attempts to hijack your website and ensure sensitive information like login credentials and enquiry form content are transported to and from clients' browsers safe from prying eyes.
Cloud Hosting
In DNS Hosting, we discussed how an architecture of subnet and geographical redundancy eliminates any single point of failure in a DNS lookup. However, if the underlying resources are unavailable, users will still have a poor experience.
Our Cloud Hosting product aims to eliminate single points of failure in any application by leveraging on some Amazon Web Services building blocks like Elastic Compute Cloud, Elastic Load Balancer, AutoScale, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, SimpleDB and Relational Database Service. These services provide a transparent failover mechanism for common elements of a web application, like web server, session data, database and file system.
Watch our short intro video then migrate legacy applications with minimal code change, or build new ones to experience the Cloud difference today!
Cloud Hosting Plus
Cloud Hosting Plus customers enjoy all the benefits of Cloud Hosting, with the added security of SSL encryption. Highly recommended for e-commerce websites of any size.
Static Hosting
Static websites refer to a group of pages that are simply served up by a web server without any additional processing. This is in contrast to dynamic pages like a 'contact us' form (submitted queries need to be vetted for invalid fields and mailed out to intended recipients), or an e-commerce application (login, shopping cart, order history, etc, require additional processing).
We understand customers' requirements are varied. Sometimes, you may just need a simple informational website: 'Home', 'About Us' & 'Products' (that rarely change). Static Hosting provides an affordable way to achieve this. Used in conjunction with Script Hosting and CDN, you can add simple 'Contact Us' functionality and serve the website from edge servers all around the world with super low latency.
Add-Ons
CDN
CDNs work by making copies of your static content and placing them in a network of servers all around the world. It is also tasked with figuring out which is the best server to handle each request. Not all CDNs are created equal, and while some free offerings exist, there is usually a trade-off like limited download speed or HTML injection of advertisements.
Our CDN is based on Amazon CloudFront and can serve content from each of Amazon's edge locations. Additionally, we employ a latency-based algorithm instead of geographic, meaning content will always be served by the server with lowest latency (which may not always be the closest geographically).
Script Hosting
Intended for use in conjunction with Static Hosting, we can host simple scripts like a 'Contact Us' form at ultra affordable rates.
Backup
Premium Hosting plans were architectured for stability. While it does not come with some of the more advanced redundancy features found in Cloud Hosting, you can opt for scheduled backups as an optional add-on. This ensures effects of hardware failure are minimized and you can be up and running again with newly provisioned hardware in minutes.
Dedicated IP Address
A dedicated IP address should be high on your list of add-ons to consider. As mentioned earlier, an IP address influences how search engines perceive a website. Who and how many other domains you share it with as well as the region of your address all contribute to page ranking.
SSL Certificates
SSL Certificates instil buyers' confidence in a website. This is a must-have for serious e-commerce enterprises. We also recommend full-site SSL encryption to enhance brand reputation where budget permits.
We offer a variety of SSL Certificates to suit any use-case, ranging from free certificates from StartSSL and single domain certificates to wildcard certificates.
Web Hosting Pricing
Web Hosting
| Plan | CDN | Script Hosting | Backup | Dedicated IP Address | SSL Certificate | Price per annum |
| Premium Hosting | Available | Included | Available | Available | Not available | S$150 |
| Premium Hosting Plus | Available | Included | Available | Available | Available | S$200 |
| Cloud Hosting | Available | Included | Included | Included | Not available | from S$300 |
| Cloud Hosting Plus | Available | Included | Included | Included | Available | from S$350 |
| Static Hosting | Available | Available | Included | Not available | Not available | from S$50 |
Add-Ons
| Add-On | Price |
| CDN | S$0.50 per GB |
| Script Hosting | S$20 per script annum |
| Backup (Hourly) | S$250 per annum |
| Backup (Daily) | S$150 per annum |
| Backup (Weekly) | S$50 per annum |
| Dedicated IP Address | S$75 per annum |
| SSL Certificate | |
| Installation | S$50 per installation |
| B.Y.O. Certificate | Free |
| StartSSL Class 1 | Free |
| Other Class 1 | Varies |
| Other Class 2 | Varies |
| Other EV | Varies |
| Other Wildcard | Varies |
