Labs

With 5GB of web space and unlimited bandwidth, Netcetera's One account is one of the most generously specified packages, but the quoted price is available only as part of a single-fee two-year deal. Charged monthly, the package costs £11.75 including VAT, not including domain registration, which is a lot more than the other packages here.

Unlimited domains, subdomains and aliases, combined with unlimited bandwidth, free you from the prospect of having to upgrade to something more substantial if your site becomes popular. It also means that you can run any number of websites from a single account, as long as you don't exceed the

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storage limit. Together with the 1,000 email accounts, this makes it the most flexible package in the round-up.

Many shared web-hosting deals offer some kind of backup facility, but this is often nothing more than a downloadable Zip file of your site. With the One package you can create a backup point with Netcetera, which you can then use to restore your site in case of failure.

The control panel integrates billing and domain management in a single interface. While it's useful to have all your details in one place, the volume of information available can make the layout confusing. The control panel includes an online file manager, but you can also upload using one of the unlimited FTP accounts and, if you use FrontPage, directly from your desktop. There's a great range of scripting support, including ASP, ASP.NET, PHP 5, Perl and Python. Surprisingly, however, there's no SQL database included, but you can buy space at £10 for 100MB of Microsoft SQL or £25 for 250MB of MySQL space.

Netcetera's One account is one of the few in this month's review that is available only with a Windows operating system. It's a fine package, if expensive without the two-year contract, and lacks only SQL support.