FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Web Hosting?

There are a lot of ways to define web hosting that are very application specific. In simple terms web hosting is the act of providing space on a server connected to the internet for hosting websites.

Web hosting services provide you a dedicated corner of the internet for your website files and applications to reside. KnownHost takes web hosting services one step further with our fully managed platform. What this means for you is that KnownHost is a full partner in your web hosting experience and stands by you every step of the way.

Do you offer a money-back guarantee?

Yes, all our hosting packages excluding Dedicated Servers include a 30 day money back guarantee. Only new customers are eligible for our 30 day money back guarantee. If the TOS/AUP agreed upon when ordering is violated this also makes you ineligible for the 30 day money back guarantee. We also reserve the right to not accept a refund request on a case by case basis if we feel our services were abused and/or taken advantage of.

Do you have an uptime guarantee?

Yes, we offer a 99.9% network uptime guarantee back by our SLA, though in the real world we average over 99.99% day in and day out over the past decade.

How long does it take for my account to be activated?

VPSs are provisioned immediately upon successful payment and automated fraud check completion.* The system may take up to 5 minutes to deploy your VPS and send the welcome email. Dedicated servers are generally delivered in 12-24 hours.

* Orders failing automated fraud checks will be subjected to manual order review by our staff and will cause your order to be delayed.

What type of payments do you accept?

We accept credit card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover & American Express) as well as PayPal and ACH/eCheck payments. We do not accept mailed checks.

Will you migrate my hosting account/websites from another provider?

Yes, we provide free migrations from supported control panels and we offer professional services paid migrations for any custom needs. Once you receive the welcome email please submit a support ticket through our support portal and we will be glad to assist you.

Do I need my own domain name when signing up for a hosting package?

Yes, in order to purchase a hosting package you will need your own domain.

Can you register domain names for me?

Yes! We offer a full line of domain registration services.

What’s covered under managed services?

To learn more about what's covered under our managed support, please see our Support Coverage.

How do I submit a ticket?

We give you the option of submitting a ticket by simply sending us an email which can be tracked and monitored via our helpdesk. You can also submit a ticket through your billing login.

Do you offer managed VPSs and Dedicated Servers?

Yes we do offer Fully Managed VPSs, SSD VPSs, and Dedicated Servers. For more detailed information please visit our Managed Support page.

Can I upgrade my account at a later time?

Yes, you can upgrade your account at anytime. Please email us at sales@knownhost.com with your customer ID and we will take care of your request. Please note: once your plan is upgraded you can not request a downgrade of the same plan for at least one month.

Where are your servers located?

We utilize TierPoint's facilities in Atlanta, GA: Seattle, WA; and Amsterdam, NL. For more detailed information please visit our Network page.

Can I host adult, warez or illicit sites or content?

No, please see our AUP for permissible and non-permissible content.

Do your prices include VAT / Tax?

Our prices do not include VAT. If you are required to submit this tax, please follow your normal procedure.

How will I receive my login details?

You will receive your login details via email.

Is there any downtime if I upgrade my VPS?

No, upgrades are seamless and involve zero downtime.

When are my renewal invoices issued/due?

Invoices are generated 10 days before their respective due date.

Are there different types of web hosting?

Absolutely. There are various types of web hosting services that work on different platforms. Each service type has different uses and it’s best to do research into which would benefit you the most. Across all of these listed services; there are always varying packages to help you decide what your use may be.

Shared Hosting: This is your basic web hosting. It is usually accompanied with a single domain and a few emails to allow for simplistic operations. This can be used for small blog, personal website or just an informational website. These are usually the most inexpensive and affordable for budget hosting.

Reseller Hosting: Super-charged shared hosting allows for multiple websites/domains each under their own account. This is typically used for those who require isolated environments or are sustaining multiple clients and their websites. Great for developers who don’t quite need a server themselves, but still require the ability to separate development.

VPS/KVM: This is the middle tier of web hosting. These servers allow for larger control over your environment. Different levels of resources can be dedicated to these services to support the wide-array of applications that may be needed. These are great for entry-level websites that are growing such as forums, blogs, etc.

Dedicated Servers: This is the top tier – if you need a dedicated server it’s usually due to resource-intensive applications or large traffic websites that require performance to handle accordingly. Dedicated servers can be customized extensively with different hardware such as Single CPU or Dual CPU. Large quantities of RAM such as 8gb, 12gb, 16gb, 24gb, 32gb. SSD drives in 256GB, 512GB or 1 TB format in either software or hardware RAID. These are just examples of what can be done with a dedicated server that allow it such ample resources. All of these can be adjusted to provide the right platform necessary for your needs to allow the most utmost in performance.

What is application hosting?

Application hosting is built around predefined plans. These plans are developed for specific applications. Some examples of applications meant to be used are blog, cms, wiki, image gallery, forums, or e-commerce related applications. In the event that you need more resources, these plans can always be upgraded. If you start to experience steady growth, you will want to upgrade to a virtual private server plan which is built for larger or more complex projects.

What are SSL Certificates

SSL Certificates are designed to encrypt incoming data to protect your site and server-client communications. Some of the data that is included in the protection is ID’s, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

DV (Domain Validation): DV is designed for entry level server security certificates. These provide the lowest minimum level of validation provided by any of the main commercial certificate authorities. Simply providing control over the DNS of a domain is enough to validate or verify the ownership of a domain. In fact, if you can update whois records or DNS records, receive an email/send a reply, or publish a nonce by an automated issuing system, then you qualify for a DV cert.

OV (Organization Validation): The next step beyond DV is OV. An organization validation SSL certificate is issued when someone can meet the criteria for receiving a DV certificate AND who can prove the organization's existence as a legal entity. The difference being the control of a domain plus the fact it's associated with a legal company that's recognized by the appropriate national governmental agency in a given country.

EV (Extended Validation): The most highly respected and difficult to achieve SSL certificates, EV certs require meeting the criteria for DV plus OV as well as also needing to prove the legal identity of the buyer, who has to run the gauntlet of manual human checks. The green bar of the browser is the gold standard for SSL certificates, where banks and other highly trusted organizations typically tread. Your site can enjoy the incredible trust found with the green bar - something that results in increased conversion rates, decreased bounce rates and overall trust increases. An EV SSL certificate is the gold standard for trust.

What makes KnownHost web servers the ideal choice?

The perfect blend of security, performance, dependability, price and managed support. That’s precisely what you get with a KnownHost Web Hosting account.

Security is more than just offering free SSL certificates, or providing 10gbit DDoS prevention. It also means making software available like Immunify360, plus optimizing the server installations so that they're hardened - giving site owners a starting point that's much more secure than many competitors. It also means hosting on-shore with a USA company that has more than a decade of proven success year after year.

Performance is something that must be designed into the web hosting platform. KnownHost takes brand name, premium components like SSD's and network routers and designs systems which take advantage of the strengths of each component. Firmware is always up to date - new hardware is constantly replacing any aging equipment. On top of great hardware, things like LiteSpeed and LSCache are used to speed up the web server's at the software level. Everything used is high-end, latest and greatest - so you get every possible speed advantage.

Dependability means much more than just some uptime guarantee. Many web hosting companies boast of guarantees - and rarely deliver - hoping few customers will ever notice, complain or exercise their rights to a partial refund. At KnownHost, we plan around downtime by using things like KernelCare - so you get updates without taking down the whole system. We invest in quality components so system failures rarely occur. We spend big on multiple redundant backups, power planning and resourcing so that even a disaster won't take you offline. That's how we achieve better than 99.99% uptime across hundreds of servers across many, many years of being in business.

Pricing doesn't mean a race to the cheapest price. A good price is one that gives you incredible value for your money and includes things you'd pay for otherwise, such as cPanel, Softaculous, backups, migrations, or managed services. At KnownHost, we’ve packaged together some of the most popular, commonly requested, high performance options and included them in our basic pricing. That means we can’t promise you we’re the cheapest, but we can promise you a successful site!

Management is one thing that separates bargain hosting companies from quality hosts. We've been a managed hosting company for over a decade and are proud of our reputation. Overall, we believe it takes years of experience and knowledge to offer matchless hosting plans.

Why is on-shore important?

There's a lot of reasons USA based support is ideal, including things like... Communication. Have you ever had to explain yourself three different ways because the person you're conversing with doesn't have a firm grasp of the English language? If so, you'll know the frustration that we aim to avoid - by hiring people from within the United States.

Education is another matter. Hosting companies can save thousands of dollars each year by hiring people with little to no experience from 3rd world countries, who respond with standard paragraphs out of a script. There's nothing worse than battling a long wait to be served, only to find that the person on the other end knows less than you do about a problem. At KnownHost, we hire experts - and then we train them further on additional topics, control panels, databases, operating systems and more - just to make sure that they can not only solve your problems - but they can do it quickly, without unnessecary trial and error.

Another important matter is regulatory compliance. Whether you're worried about privacy, security, PCI compliance, or other data-related concerns, being on-shore is the best first step to having a responsible, compliant hosting company that you can trust with your important information.

Time zones? Waiting for answers is not something we'd wish on anyone, which is why we're available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. However, you should know that not all hosting companies, especially those in other time zones, will be available when it's convenient for you. We're here to help - whenever you need us. KnownHost, the ultimate professionals in web hosting services.

What is the free backup system like?

A good backup system has certain requirements. It should: be free, dependable, off-server, include regular snapshots, and be all automatic. Which is why, KnownHost includes all of these in our backup system.

Although it may cost us more money, we know backup systems are essential for any responsible website owner, that is why we include ours - free of charge for our customers.

Dependability is something we talk about all the time because we have the proven best uptime in the industry. Our servers are online 99.99%+ of the time and our expert support staff are here around the clock.

Off-server means storing the backups away from the system it's backing up. This is done so that in the event of a catastrophic failure the backups will be far enough away so that both systems won't go down simultaneously.

Snapshots are when the entire account has snapshots taken at intervals. While differential file level backups make sense, and are efficient, in some situations, taking full snapshots is how we can assure you the capability of rolling back a system that may have been compromised, had a database corruption or other major issue. It also means you can restore databases, email, files like images, html, css - everything in one go. It's quick and easy to work with - making restoration a click and go operation.

Are all hosting plans fully managed?

Yes! Every server and hosting account with KnownHost is fully managed by our tech team in Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Why guarantee 99.9% uptime when KnownHost averages over 99.99%?

Simple - we aim to under-promise and over-deliver. We'd rather you be pleasantly surprised than disappointed with anything we do.

Do your cheapest plans have the same management and uptime %?

Of course. We don't provide any second class web hosting services to any of our customers. We aim for 100% uptime and provide full management to all our clients.

Which of your server plans are the fastest?

Generally, dedicated hosting plans are the fastest, with cloud VPS and SSD VPS running neck and neck in 2nd place. With our optimizations, you'll find all our web hosting is lightning fast. The shared, reseller and WordPress plans are also built on premium hardware, with premium networking and are optimized by our expert admin team. Overall, you won't be disappointed by any of our web hosting plans.

Brand X is cheaper than you - why is that?

Every service hosted at KnownHost is 100% fully managed by an on-shore tech team that supports state of the art hardware, software, and networking in a world-class datacenter. We don't cut corners, therefore we can't compete on price with companies that do... If you give our sales team a chance, they may be able to get you a very competitive quote. Just ask!

Does DDoS protection come as a standard part of all web hosting plans?

Yes. We offer FREE DDoS protection on our web hosting plans up to 500gb/s and 700mp/s for bandwidth and packet intensive attacks (the most common types designed to flood your site offline by sending more traffic than it can handle).

What hours is technical support available?

Web hosting support is fully available every day. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We always have staff on duty to monitor, repair and deal with hosting issues of all types and complexities.

I'm considering moving to KnownHost but am afraid of all the hassle in moving my files/databases over - will you help?

Gladly! Our migration assistance is free for most like to like migrations (cPanel to cPanel for example). Check out our migration assistance page for more details.

I have a unique server configuration and will need special assistance to migrate my site over - can you help?

Of course. We offer extended migration assistance starting at $35 per hour per domain, and for that we verify and perform quality assurance to make ensure migration success. Custom quotes are no problem, since every case is different - we'll be glad to assist.