Business-grade web hosting

This is an area which is much misunderstood, because of the way it is often misleadingly marketed.  We don't mind where you have your website hosted - it's a service we provide as a convenience for our clients, not because it is generates a lot of revenue.  In fact, more than anything it saves clients technical support fees, because we know the server is being looked after.  The thing we don't want you to do is to move your hosting thinking you are getting a 'better deal' based on misconception.

There is a big difference between business-grade and consumer-grade web hosting. 

When you put your website on the web it physically sits on the hard drive of a computer server somewhere.  Most often this server will sit in a data center (centre) - which means that building has a major internet connection, massive air conditioning, back-up power and staff onhand to fix any hardware, cooling or power problems.  Our server sits in a data center (centre) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Now when you see web hosting being sold you see two factors:  the amount of hard disk space and the amount of bandwidth (traffic) you can use in a month.

This is misleading for two reasons:

(1)  You will often see it being 'oversold'.   It is being sold in the hope that not everyone will use up all the disk space and bandwidth offered at that price.  So, for example, they might sell their real hard disk space ten times over.  This overselling 'strategy' is not sustainable - ultimately it's dishonest.

(2)  These are not the only two factors involved.  Not even close.

Other factors are relevant too, and these go unnoticed:

(1)  The speed of the connection, and the number of websites sharing that connection.  You can have all the bandwidth in the world, but if visitors can't download your site fast enough you can't use it (and more importantly, this can cost you business if they get fed up waiting for your website to load).  Our server has a direct connection to the internet backbone.  Visitors can generally have any file from any website on our server provided at more than 100 Kb/s (kilobytes per second) if they can download that fast.  (This is 25Mb per minute).  This helps keep visitors happy - they like websites to load quickly.

(2)  The type of computer that is hosting the website, and the number of websites sharing it.  For dynamic websites (like this one) it is essential that the website is hosted on a powerful computer.  Cheap webhosting use cheap (=slow) computers.  Our server is a Dual Opteron with 4Gb of RAM.  It also has ultra high speed SCSI hard drives,  set up with RAID5 redundancy (for data protection).

When we set a limit on hard drive space for your website (most start with 100Mb) this limit and price is not linked to the cost of hard drive space - it is a guide as to the proportion of computer power and the size of the connection you will use.  To keep all of the websites running smoothly, it is important that the number of websites using the computer's finite power are limited - and the amount of disk space you use is an indication of this.

We choose 100Mb to start with, along with 1Gb of bandwidth, because we feel that is a sensible amount for plumbing businesses to start with.   

As we have said - we are happy for you to have your website hosted at a place of your choosing.  We merely provide our hosting as a convenience for you.