hostingDifferent has been open to the public since October 2012.

Prior to that, we’ve been hosting friends and family since 2001 and opened up another successful hosting company, powerMonster.net, in February of 2008.

In August of 2010, powerMonster.net was sold so that we could focus on other endeavors, though we kept hosting friends and family privately under the hostingDifferent name.

Our team members bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. All of us have been active in one way or another with web-hosting, programming, or design since 1998.

Don’t let our newness fool you. We are committed to serving our customers and bring tons of experience and expertise to make hostingDifferent the best hosting experience possible.

All new orders are processed manually.

Once the order has been screened, we then begin installing WordPress and hostingDifferent’s pre-selected plugins and then configure your site for optimum performance.

Once that has been completed, we will send you a Welcome Email with all of the pertinent hostingDifferent account information. This email is very important, so please save it in a safe place!

This whole process usually takes less than an hour, but may take longer if an order is placed in the middle of the night.

Yes, we can!

We will happily migrate the number of sites allowed on your plan for free.

Migrations can be a tricky thing and we can only guarantee that files and databases are migrated. Any ftp/email/email accounts/email forwarders/etc may not (read: most likely will not) be transferred.

Once you’ve received your account information, please go to our Help Desk and submit Support Ticket and we’ll get started on it right away!

Yes, with our partner NetEarthOne, hostingDifferent can register and/or transfer .com, .net, and .org domains.

There is a $14.95 per year fee for new registrations and transfers.

By default, when you register a domain, your contact information is made public on the internet. If you’d like us to privatize this for you, there is an additional $10 per year fee.

When you register or transfer a domain to hostingDifferent/NetEarthOne, you are the sole owner of that domain and have complete control over it. hostingDifferent will never hold your domain hostage or prevent your having control over your domain.

At hostingDifferent, we believe that hosting and email are two separate entities and should be handled as such.

With ever increasing spam and spammers, monitoring, administering, and maintaining an email system is a full-time job in itself and we believe that our resources are better spent supporting you, our clients. We leave the email to those who are true experts in the field.

We highly recommend Google Apps for Business or Outlook.com for all of your email needs. We will happily set up one of these accounts or any third-party email service for you. Just submit a ticket at our Help Desk.

Not only do we offer a money-back guarantee, we’ll also pay your first month’s hosting fee’s at your new host!*

How’s that for a money-back guarantee?

WP Intro Accounts have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
WP Plus Accounts have a 60-day money-back guarantee.
WP Premium Accounts have a 90-day money-back guarantee.

ALL DIY Accounts have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

*Please read our Terms of Service for all the details.

Of course we do!

hostingDifferent guarantees that your site will be up and running 100% of the time.*

If not, for every hour of downtime, we will credit your account as follows:

WP Intro Accounts: 5% of your monthly fee
WP Plus Accounts: 10% of your monthly fee
WP Premium Accounts: 15% of your monthly fee

All DIY Accounts: 5% of your monthly fee

*Please see our Terms of Service for all of the details.

hostingDifferent offers two levels of technical support: Standard and Critical.

Critical Support is available 24/7. Critical support is reserved for those true emergencies for example, the server is down, your control panel is inaccessible, or you have been blocked from the server. We answer critical issues within 30 minutes, but often answer much, much quicker!

Standard Support is 24/7 for Premium, Pro, DIY Project, and DIY Pro Accounts and from 5a-9p Pacific Time daily for Personal and DIY Starter Accounts. Standard Support is for most all other technical support. We answer standard issues within 2 hours, but our average ticket response is less than 30 minutes!

Sales and Billing Support is offered 9a-5p Pacific Time, except major US holidays. During business hours, we generally answer sales and billing issues within 2 hours. Outside of billing hours or on weekends, it can take up to 24 hours.

You can access support either through email or our Help Desk. Pro Accounts also have access to a private phone hotline.

No. Unfortunately, adult content is one of the few things that we don’t allow on our servers.

Please read our Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service for more details on what’s allowed and not allowed on our servers.

All is not lost. We use a fraud-screening service called Maxmind. Although it’s pretty good, it’s not perfect. Many things can trigger a false-fraud response including ordering through a proxy, your internet connection is too far from your billing address, among other things. If you still want to continue with your order, please submit a sales ticket. We may ask you to scan and submit some supporting documents including a valid, government-issued ID that includes your address. Once we receive this information, we will gladly manually process your order.

hostingDifferent accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and PayPal. We use PayPal to process all of our payments, but you don’t have to have a PayPal account to use it.  For your safety and security, hostingDifferent does not record or store your credit card information at all.

We most certainly do! Please contact our Sales Department and we will work something out.

There are two ways to move your WordPress site to hostingDifferent.

First Way

1. Log in to your existing WordPress site and under the Tools menu, choose Export and make sure you select All Content and then click on the Download Export File button and note where you save this file.
2. Now log in to your new WordPress site on hostingDifferent. Delete all pages and posts and be sure to empty the trash.
3. Go to the Tools menu and choose Import. Click on the WordPress link and in the popup, click Install Now. On the resulting page, click Activate Plugin and Run Importer. Click on the Choose File button and browse to where you saved the Export File. Click Upload File and Import button.
4. Now go to Plugins and choose Add New and search for, install and configure your desired plugins.
5. Now go to Appearance and choose Themes and then select the Install Themes tab. Either search for your theme or upload the .zip file of your theme and configure and customize as needed.
6. Finally go to Appearance and choose Widgets to configure any widgets for your site.

Second Way

We certainly do! Here’s a short list. You can also google WordPress tutorials or specific tasks along with the word WordPress to get even more results.

• WordPress Lessons
• Free WordPress Tutorials
• WordPress TV
• WP Tuts+
• Top 50 WordPress Tutorials
• 30 Excellent WordPress Video Tutorials
• Advanced WordPress Tutorial

We don’t necessarily blacklist any plugins; however, if we find that a plugin is a security-risk or increases the server load excessively, we may ask you to look for an alternative or uninstall it.

Managed-WordPress Hosting

There are two types of upgrades that WordPress puts out: feature upgrades and security upgrades.

Feature upgrades are major upgrades that add features to WordPress and have the most potential to make things break on your website. These are usually numbered 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc. We generally wait a couple of weeks before upgrading your website to these feature upgrades to make sure all the kinks have been worked out first.

Security upgrades are minor upgrades that aim to fix a security issue found inside WordPress’ code. These are usually numbered 3.0.1, 3.1.2, 3.2.5, etc. These upgrades have little chance to break your website and because we want to protect your site as well as those of our other clients, we apply this upgrades as soon as they are posted.

If you ever experience that after an upgrade your site is broken, please don’t hesitate to submit a support ticket so we can fix it right away.

On our WP Plus and WP Premium Accounts we will automatically upgrade any plugins you may have installed on your website. Once a week we will look over your site for any plugins that have been updated and update them for you.

On our WP Intro Accounts, we don’t upgrade plugins automatically, but will happily do so upon request. Just send in a support ticket and we’ll get right on it for you.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want us to upgrade your plugins, please let us know. We will do our best to accommodate this request as long as it does not affect the security of your site or the server.

DIY-WordPress Hosting

We will happily upgrade your WordPress install or any plugin upon request. Please submit a ticket at our Help Desk.

On our WP Plus and WP Premium Accounts we will automatically upgrade any plugins you may have installed on your website. Once a week we will look over your site for any plugins that have been updated and update them for you.

On our WP Intro Accounts, we don’t upgrade plugins automatically, but will happily do so upon request. Just send in a support ticket and we’ll get right on it for you.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want us to upgrade your plugins, please let us know. We will do our best to accommodate this request as long as it does not affect the security of your site or the server.

We try not to, but if the plugin is a security risk or a resource hog (usually because it’s poorly written), we may have to prohibit it from our servers.

However rare of an occurrence, if this should happen on your site, we will discuss options with you to find an alternate solution. We will never remove or disable a plugin without letting you know first.

We use DirectAdmin. It’s a very powerful, light weight, and FAST, yet easy-to-use control panel that allows you complete control over your hosting space. Check out DirectAdmin.

We will happily upgrade your WordPress install or any plugin upon request. Please submit a ticket at our Help Desk.