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Net Watch Article - Having A Successful Website 2
Where to Host your Site

If you’ve ever talked to a real estate agent, you’ve heard about the 3 most important things to take into consideration when building, buying or selling property, “Location, Location, Location.” The same applies to where you “build” your web business. There are probably thousands of hosting companies and each of them has prices and services just as varied. How do you know which one is right for your business?

While working at Dog River Business Solutions from 1991 through 2000, I learned the ins and outs of web hosting and email servers. Today things have gotten incredibly technical and security issues arise everyday. I do not see how a web design company can manage both server maintenance and the web design end of the business. Realizing this, when we started Dog River Design in 2001, we had to make a hard choice, continue to maintain our own servers, or sub-contract the hosting of our sites. This was a huge decision as we were not only dealing with our own sites, but also the sites of all our clients. We interviewed dozens of hosting companies and found some common threads. Very few that we talked to understood the complexity of web hosting services. Even fewer were flexible with regards to the services they offered. Finally, almost all were simply resellers for larger ‘server farms’.

These are some of the things that we looked for:
Who answered the phone? If it was not answered by a real person, I was not likely to talk to them any further. If I did get a real person on the other end of the line, did I get that same person the next time I called, or was I passed around the queue? Next, were they willing to make adjustments for the way we do things or did they require us changing our technology to match them? Lastly, did they have any real world experience in web design, ecommerce, and programming?

In the end we found only one company that met our needs. What sold us on our current provider is the fact that no matter what technical problem we threw at them, they had dealt with it before and had a way to make it work. Never did we get “no we cannot do that.” Every time I called I talked directly to the owner of the company, who had a background in programming and really understood the technical end of web design and hosting.

The down side to all this personal service is that it costs more than discount hosting companies. But remember your entire web project rests on the services of your chosen hosting company. Bargain price hosting facilities are inflexible, impersonal, and require you to know everything about how to develop your site. What you need to find is a partner to help you build the best possible web site for your business.

We want to be that partner to help you develop your business on the web. We have the relationships in place to provide flexible, personal, and reliable hosting services for your web projects. If you have any questions about our hosting services, please do not hesitate to give us a call.