Glyphgate Hosting is currently offered as part of larger projects, and not as a standard option - see below

GlyphGate is server-side software that provides support for many of the facilities that are otherwise missing or unpredictable in browsers and users' operating systems:

• typeface support becomes independent of the fonts the visitor has installed
  
• typographic features such as ligatures, genuine small caps and alternate forms are supported
• open type support
• Unicode support 
• complex script support
• near-full CSS 2.0 support
• As a by-product, it optimises and caches your site so that it is delivered faster.

Why Glyphgate?

You particularly need GlyphGate

• if you wish to use complex scripts such as Arabic, Bengali and Devanagari on your site and have them appear correctly even in systems which provide no operating support for them
• if you wish to reflect your corporate image accurately on your website, delivering the correct fonts, for example.
• If you want to be able to use the full css2 feature set, and still have your pages appear correctly across a wide range of browsers, without having to use work-arounds and kludges.

At a professional level, a great deal of time and effort, and therefore money can be spent on customising a website to deal with the vagaries of various browsers and operating systems. GlyphGate makes much of this work unnecessary, since it knows about these capabilities, and how to use what the user's system can do to imitate what it cannot.

GlyphGate works across many browsers, ensuring that your site is seen as you intended it to be.

The designers and engineers of your site can write to a known standard ( a considerable superset of the functions of most browsers), and GlyphGate will take care of the congruence of the display.

GlyphGate works within the parameters which apply to font embedding. Normally, therefore, provided you have a license for a given font which allows installation to an additional CPU, you can install the font on the GlyphGate server and use it to generate an unlimited number of impressions of pages within the terms of the font license.

Be aware, however, that fonts which are supplied with operating systems such as Windows, and applications such as Microsoft Office, are frequently not licensed for use on additional CPUs. In such cases you would need to purchase additional licenses for the fonts you wish to use on your website. We can assist you with this if required. 

Availability

Glyphgate sites can be provided immediately by outsourcing the hosting. We would organise this as part of a project including consultancy and development.

If your budget and project extends to having a dedicated server (minimum approx £100-00 +VAT per month, including management), or if you already manage a dedicated server yourself, a Glyphgate commercial license adds a one-off cost of approximately £1200, plus VAT. This option would be available immediately.

With regard to offering Glyphgate hosting as an option ourselves, we are currently experiencing a chicken and egg situation, since to offer Glyphgate as a hosting option, we need both to dedicate a server to it (which is not not too expensive), and purchase a multi-user license (which is expensive).

To make the project worthwhile, we need only four Glyphgate sites confirmed, so please contact us if you are interested.

Costs

Glyphgate hosting has costs in 3 areas:

• One-off cost of license for Glyphgate: £300 + VAT
• On-going hosting fees: £20-00 + VAT per month for our standard package, which includes a TYPO3 installation (if you want it)
• Occasional upgrade costs as new versions of Glyphgate are released.

This cost includes installing GlyphGate for your site, but not configuring it to work with your site, nor does it include the costs of licensing typefaces to be served from your server.

GlyphGate licenses are potentially available free of charge to bona fide charities and not-for-profit organisations. This is an offer made by the developers of GlyphGate, and applications for licenses have to be passed by the developers. The offer may be withdrawn without notice. Please contact us to discuss if this offer applies to you.