Getting The Right Home For Your Web Site
Back in 2001 I started to get “very serious” about marketing high value professional services via the Internet. That meant more domains, more niche markets and more web sites.
It also meant more visitors to my various sites and the need to have reliable web hosting that could handle my “growing pains” and my unique technical requirements.
Well a few thousand dollars, several months and a huge amount of frustration later I realized three things:
1. Web hosts are not created equal. Some want $500-$1,000 per month to give you limited access to your own servers such as 5 or 10 hours per month for updates etc. Did you know you can get the same services for less than $10 per month?
2. All web hosting companies boast of “technical support.” I’ve had web hosting companies not respond to technical support questions for 48 hours or more. And…it’s not a person that you get to speak with, it’s an email with no personalized return address.
3. Most economical hosting packages “promise that they can grow with you.” They don’t and they can’t. They have stuck you in an “econo-buck” package that won’t allow you to have more than one domain, has extremely limited bandwidth limitations and/or cannot support dynamic content management systems.
Ultimately, a few key details made the difference, and although I learned this stuff the hard (read: the very, very, very expensive) way, the good news is that you can avoid these same mistakes.
Here is how I picked the web site hosting company that I am still using to this day:
1. I initiated discussions with others who are heavily involved in the Internet aspects of marketing their services. I got real opinions from people in the trenches…not…from hosting company sales reps.
2. I researched their up-time claims and spoke with current clients as to technical support and bandwidth issues.
3. I examined their ability to host Content Management Systems so that I could maintain dynamic and constantly updated web sites and blogs without the need for a web “geek.”
As you can imagine this took a lot of time…but when you operate over 20 web sites as I do…moving them all is one huge time sucking endeavor that you don’t want to repeat very often in any given decade!
Here’s the web hosting firm that I decided on and have been with ever since.
Midphase Web Hosting.
Here Are The Top 5 Reasons You Should Have Your Web Site With Midphase
1. Here’s the most important number one reason – service and reliability. Hosting has become ridiculously cheap in recent years, and there are plenty of shady operations competing on price. I don’t want to “chase” technical support people. In my time with Midphase I have never had a technical support issue that wasn’t resolved within one hour. In addition to that, you can phone their technical support line, get a real live person in less than 5 minutes and usually get your technical problem resolved right there on the spot. Try calling Microsoft technical support (or your own local “yokel”) and see what happens to you — I think you get my point.
2. Painless transition from your current host. MidPhase will actually move your files and databases, transfer your existing domain for you, and, if necessary, even buy out your remaining existing hosting contract up to $50.
3. You can easily administer your own account and domain with a 24/7 accessible web-based control panel, file uploads and your own branded email allows you to quickly take care of business from anywhere. You can also easily create sub domains and even host 25 additional domains on your account. You don’t to call and pay a web “geek” everytime you want to do something.
4. One-click installation of professional grade content management systems like WordPress, Joomla or for extra heavy duty users Drupal. This makes it extremely simple to set up a blog or a dynamic web site in minutes without “geek” charges.
5. Only $7.95 per month for 3.5 terabytes of bandwidth (ridiculously huge - even for steaming video needs), 350,000 MB of storage, free domain registration and renewals, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. And this is just the base plan! That’s more “stuff” than 99.9% of you reading this well ever need.
Save yourself all the time and effort that I put into this research problem and get the “technical web site” aspects out of the way as quickly as possible.
You want to be marketing your web site — not worrying about the damn thing!
By the way…Midphase offers a full 30 day moneyback guarantee.
There’s another marketing problem solved and one less headache to worry about.