ConceptLane has been in the industry since 2000, serving niche customers with high demands on quality, reliability and support. Gradually, we started offering affordable solutions to other SMEs like ourself, before finally venturing into the budget sector and reaching out to end consumers. We are not price-setters, but we keep pace and provide that extra bit of service to every one of our customers, regardless of what level our cooperation stands. However, we will be honest to say that we do offer bias to our VIP clients, but only in terms of priority.

ConceptLane takes pride in offering personalised services. With our whole range of services, we aim to become your one-stop shop for all your IT requirements.

General hardware specifications of our servers are available in the relevant services' pages. We own our servers. We are not resellers. We do not purchase cheap overseas server space.

We use IDE/SATA harddisks and not SCSI harddisks. SCSI harddisks are, on average, at least 200% more expensive than IDE/SATA harddisks while providing at best a 50% improvement. This had been, and still remains, a widely discussed topic. For more information, you may refer to this discussion on Slashdot.

Utilising RAID 1 (Mirroring), and with the chances of multiple harddisks failing at the same time being low, rest assured that your data is safe. We monitor our RAID devices' status every day, and alarm bells are rung should a single error or warning be reported. Should the worst scenario occur, the nature of Linux software RAID offers relatively easy methods to recover and reconstruct the arrays without too many other dependencies.

All our servers (including colocation customers' servers) are housed in Ascenix, one of the newest datacentres in Singapore.

The datacentre (in Kallang) is connected to their core routers in Equinix (Ayer Rajah), with Starhub and NTT as the uplinks.

ConceptLane is not a technology chasing company. We keep abreast of changes and new products in the industry, but we keep an arm's length in terms of deploying them. We are of the belief that new technology will always remain largely unstable during the initial launches, and when disaster strikes, the intangible losses in terms of time and anguish suffered by our customers are, in most cases, just not worth it. If and when we offer a product, it means we have sufficient knowledge of the product and have full confidence in performing at least medium-level troubleshooting should anything go wrong. With Europe and USA remaining the powerhouses in new software technologies, reaction time to resolving out-of-ordinary situations will be increased.

We believe in knowing first hand how things work. Having created our own in-house control panel, it is currently used to ease the setup of new web hosting accounts. We are looking at refining it further to open it to all web hosting customers for their use. Sure, popular hosting control panels make everyone's lives a lot easier, but we are not comfortable with having to rely on another party, especially one overseas, for technical support. We prefer not to take a software package, install it via the provided script, and thereafter simply market the product.

While not wanting to doubt our potential customers, we choose to err on the safe side of protecting our current customers. An errant subscriber with an intent to wreak havoc may make payment via a credit card, have his account activated, and thereafter run malicious scripts before performing chargebacks. Such intangible losses are just not worth it. However, we are looking at a few possible solutions to make this option available soon.

Just contact us (whichever means you prefer, email, phone call, or even a personal visit)! After receiving your business/personal information and clarifying your requirements, we will proceed to setup your account. We will send the invoice to you via email or snail mail (whichever is your preference), and you may then make payment via cheque or internet banking transfer. However, if you wish to meet up just to put a name to the face, cash payments may be made at our office or by arranging a meetup with us!

First, choose a Domain Name (see next question for more information). Next, take a look at our web hosting packages and pick one that suits your budget. Lastly, get in touch with us and we will then take it over from there. It is that simple!

All hosting accounts come with a FTP account which allows you to upload files to your account via an FTP Client. Almost all site design programs like Adobe Pagemill, Macromedia Dreamweaver, GoLive HotDog, Allaire HomeSite, CyberStudio, HotMetal Pro, Netscape Communicator and NetObjects Fusion use FTP to maintain your site.

There is no limit to the frequency of updates. In fact, we encourage our users to update their websites as frequently as possible in order to ensure up-to-date content.

Websites such as business sites advertising products and services, personal web logs (otherwise known as blogs) and interest forums are very common. Content sites such as those containing adult content (e.g. pornography, sex-related merchandising), illegal software (e.g. warez or gamez sites), non-licensed music files and terrorism-related information or resources, are prohibited on our servers. All other personal or organisational-specific content that do not infringe the laws of Singapore are welcome.

Definitely! Once you have received our confirmation that your order for a hosting plan has been accepted and setup, all that needs to be done is to change your nameserver settings to point to ConceptLane's nameservers as shown in the Configuration section below. Our Administrator will take care of the rest once we receive an email from you notifying us of the changes made.

Of course! The Internet has no boundaries, and hosting at our servers will not cause any decrease in accessibility. However, we cannot guarantee that the speed will be as fast as local access, due to the fact that the Internet has varying bottlenecks due to different stress loads at different times. However, if you plan to serve content to the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore's infrastructure and centralised location are further plus points for you to consider using our services.

A Domain Name is the easy-to-remember complement to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (which are in the form of numbers). This is similar to the address used by others to locate your home instead of remembering latitude/longitude coordinates. It allows yourself, your company or your organisation to establish an Internet presence, others to use your unique email addresses for contact and liaison purposes, and enable the display of customised information. Domain names are primarily made up of the name and the type (e.g. .com(mercial), .net(work), .org(anisation), .edu(cational)), and may be followed by a country-specific suffix such as .sg for Singapore. An example would be conceptlane.com, meant to be interpreted as the company ConceptLane.

We suggest a domain name that is both easy to remember and spell, with 2 or 3 syllable domain names remaining popular to date (e.g. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Amazon.com). Of course, using your organisation's name, or a variant of it, would make it even easier for others to remember and associate with. Do note that the main domain name (not including the type) must not be more than 22 alphanumeric and hyphen characters. After listing your preferred domain names in order of priority, we will then check their availability and register the first domain name that is available.

You will be registered as the owner of the Domain Name. ConceptLane will be listed as the domain's Administrative, Technical and Billing contact, unless otherwise instructed by you.

You should consider a .sg domain name only if you have a registered office in Singapore, and/or primarily serve Singapore businesses. Organisations or education institutions in Singapore are advised to register a .org.sg or .edu.sg domain name to reflect Singapore as your country of operations. You need to be registered with the appropriate legal body in Singapore before approval will be granted to register the respective .org.sg or .edu.sg domain name. Accessibility to your .sg domain will not be affected. Using the same example of addresses, your foreign counterparts can still send regular postage mail to you in Singapore! Some companies also choose to register multiple appropriate domain names; for example, ABC Company, an international firm with a sales office in Singapore, may choose to register both abc.com and abc.com.sg to differentiate their international business from any Singapore-specific business or product offerings.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is an Internet standard for transferring of files between computers and servers. If you utilise our services, you will use FTP to upload new content for your website to display to all visitors.

You will need software capable of handling FTP transfers. There are a number of good freeware FTP clients for Windows, such as SmartFTP, FileZilla and AceFTP. Once you've installed a FTP client, simply connect to our FTP at ftp.conceptlane.com and enter your userid and password as given to you by our Administrator (click on the image below for an example using SmartFTP).

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) are protocols used to send and receive email respectively.

You will need an email client. Popular ones include Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird (FREE for all platforms). For the record, we are staunch supporters of Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird's spam learning mechanism is now 99% accurate in identifying all spam that reaches our mailbox.

Nameserver 1: ns1.conceptlane.com [203.124.102.66]
Nameserver 2: ns2.conceptlane.com [203.124.102.67]
Nameserver 3: ns3.conceptlane.com [202.150.222.191]
Please try to use the names instead of the IP addresses as we may reassign IP addresses from time to time.

FTP Server Address/Host: ftp.conceptlane.com
Port: 21

SMTP Server Address/Host: mail.conceptlane.com
Port: 25
Alternative Port: 587 (some overseas ISPs only allow local port 25 connections)
* Note: SMTP authentication is required!

POP3 Server Address/Host: mail.conceptlane.com
Port: 110
* Note: Username must include the full domain name (e.g. user@yourdomain.com), and passwords are cAsE-sEnSiTiVe!

Webmail is also available!

Please use our Email Domain Administration tool.

Please use our Webmail interface.

Please double-check the password which you have entered, for it is cAsE-sEnSiTiVe. If you have verified it, and is still unable to connect, please contact us.

Our email server is configured to enforce SMTP authentication. This is in line with industry practice in order to not turn into an unknowing facilitator of spam. Please configure your email client and enable SMTP authentication using the same login settings as per receiving of email.