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The choice of how and where your web site is hosted is important to your success, so please give this subject the due care and attention that it deserves.
Web hosting in a nut shell is the process where you pay another company to store your web site on one of it's computers, which has a permanent high speed connection to the internet. You normally pay a monthly rate but most companies offer a good discount or free setup if you pay for 1 year or more in advance.
For a lot of reasons it simply does not make any sense to try and do this yourself, unless you have a major web site staff and deep pockets. So for 99% of us we need to select a hosting company. And we need one that has personalized service from people who have many years experience with the Internet. Remote support from overseas just doesn't work. We need english as a first language and american made business skills to help us make decisions. We need people who understand how business works and what the Internet can do for our business.
First make sure you are dealing with the company that actually operates the servers. There are many, and we mean many, companies out there that are simply resellers of someone else 'e service. It is very easy for a hosting company to prepare one of its sales agents a web site that makes it look like the sales agent has their own hosting company. This is an awful arrangement when you need to hold someone responsible for the smooth operation of your web site. The sales agents are usually just that, sales agents with no technical skills. They usually are somewhat proficent at creating web sites but do not have the depth of understanding of how the Internet works that you need to have a successful web site. They insulate the actual hosting company from you and keep the actual hosting company from having to do support directly to you. Our servers are operated by us and you are talking to front line people when you speak to our support personnel. We can help you with technical problems or answer any other questions you have. The buck stops here. Our successful clients will tell you that.
Most of us also need a web site that has "managed hosting" since there is no time for us to be doing it. Many successful business people have no time to keep up with the Internet and need managed hosting and search engine services. Other small business people just need a small web site that they manage part time while they run their business. We can provide either and we have experience with both.
If you are going to do e-commerce you need to make decisions on what you want from your web site. Do you want full accounting of orders, on line customer order lookup, products that have variations like color or size and different combinations. The choices go on and on. Or maybe all you need is a sales sheet with PayPal selling and you have no accounting built in to your web site. We have the experience to help you select the best Internet fit for you. Read more Read more
Keep up with who visits the web site. This information is in the visitor log files. It does not have personally revealing information but it does have important visitor statistics. These files tell how many people visited your web site and what they did while they were there. Many "free" web hosting plans are there to lure you to their server so they can have access to your log files. A devious hosting company could use the files to identify a successful market and move in on it.
All successful web sites need to have totally confidential web visitor logs or you risk putting your competitor into business with information about your marketing success. Make sure you can trust your web host to keep this information confidential. Check our reputation and you will find our clients say their logs and data are secure at our facility. In fact, they will tell you that we help them analyze the information and make changes to their web site to increase visitors. If you want, you can ask us for a non disclosure agreement if you have particularly sensitive information and want full legal protection. That's something you can't get anywhere else.
If you are running a business on the Internet don't forget a disaster recovery plan. You always need to have a current backup available if you have to recover from a catastrophic failure. Anything can happen. One large company currently selling rack servers says they will 'try to get your computer repaired in 24 hours.' We don't host people who can afford to be down 24 hours. Imaging if your landlord told you you would be closed 24 hours while he fixed the plumbing. Now you know why you need our commitment to your uptime.
Ask others about disaster recovery and you get a long silence. On request, we will keep an off site backup of your web site with a disaster plan that, if needed, would move your web site to an entirely different data center in a different geographical region.
The key factors to look for in a hosting package are:
- Sufficient disk space, monthly bandwidth and email accounts with no bandwidth bottlenecks.
- Personal support from qualified engineers and, if needed, web site managers who will take a personal interest in your success.
- High speed computers with redundant, failsafe hardware systems for 100% reliability
- High speed, multiple Internet backbone connections with state of the art routers
- On site backups, optional disaster recovery plan
- Private visitor logs that only you and your web manager can view
- Private domain name registration to keep all your contact information private
Our managed hosting takes the mumbo jumbo out of the Internet and provides you with professional site management. We can push your site into specific markets for you and monitor the results. We can make updates for you and keep the web site up and running so you can concentrate on your business. Let us make the Internet work for you. We keep up with the Internet, you have time to keep up with your business.
Read about common mistakes people make when buying web hosting.
Read about our facilities and hosting plans for more information .
