Hello,
Welcome to the forum
I have answered all your questions as follows :-
How easy is it to upgrade a plan once signed up and does it cost anything to change (apart from the increase in annual fee)? (eg if I start with copper and suddenly need more space, is it straight forward to upgrade to bronze)
:- Plan upgrades are pretty instant and don't involve any downtime for your websites. For Copper to Bronze plan upgrade, you will need to pay the price difference between the two plans while the billing term will remain the same.
Are the fees charged as a one off annual payment upfront?
:- All shared hosting plans are priced yearly.
Are there any set up costs?
:- No setup costs.
Do you have uptime stats from a third party to confirm the 99.95%?
:- Even though we guarantee 99.95% uptime, we have managed to deliver uptime over the specified guarantee of 99.95 % most of the times on our servers. We do not rely on any third party software to calculate uptime of our servers as we have our own internal uptime monitoring system.
Do backups and ftp up/downloads count towards the Bandwidth allowance?
:- FTP uploads and downloads count towards the bandwidth allowance of your account.
Do you offer hotlink protection?
:- Yes, hotlink protection is available for use within cPanel control panel.
Can I have a second domain that links to the same homepage as my main domain (didn't quite understand the bit on your plan info about addon domains, sorry - I'm new to this)
:- Parked domains as well as Addon domains feature is available on our hosting plans. A parked domain name makes it possible for you to have more than just one domain name for your website. Using this feature, the second domain (parked domain) will point to the exact same website as the main domain name.
An add-on domain is a new domain that is added on top of your main domain. It creates a sub directory within your main web hosting directory but can show a different website.