We realize that there
are many choices available when deciding where to host your web site.
And we know that you are hopping all over the net trying to figure out
who's real and who's working out of their garage and who's going out
of business tomorrow.. It can be overwhelming. And then you found us:
Okay so what makes us
different. Most of all we've been right where you are, sitting in
front of a monitor, with a AOL connection; trying to pick a hosting
company out the 1.7 million choices you get when you put in web
hosting. For us that was a lot of years ago. Gone are the dial-up
accounts the Pentium 100s and even quite a few of those 1.7 million
listings we got while we were trying to pick. We did this enough times
it qualifies us as experts of what not to do. Our hosting services
were born out of these experiences. What it comes down to is this. We
didn't like the service and products we got else where so we decided
to do it ourselves picking all the things we wanted and liked about
other hosting company and basically couldn't find without a compromise
of some sort. No support, no email, no FrontPage, long hold times, on
and on the list goes.
So if you can take a few minutes, I can save you a bunch of time
trying to figure this all out. I want explain how we got here and why
your search is over. And maybe even answer the why are we so cheap,
what's the catch...I know I hear it every day. Honestly there is no
catch. We just got sick of getting taken by other hosting companies.
In 1997, we decided to start a web design company. Well we signed up
with a company called Simplenet who a bunch of our friends were using
and put up our very first website: our own. We paid them $24 per month
at first, which escalated to $39 by the time we left. At the time,
Simplenet offered unlimited web space, but not much more. No email, no
cgi, no stats. Nothing. But we had a lot of space. Oh we had to use
their domain simplenet.com. In those days we were just starting out
and didn't have the $70 Network Solutions wanted to charge to register
our domain plus the extra $100 Simplenet wanted to charge us just to
set it up. But with a few clicks of a mouse we were open for business.
On a side note that site was shut down in January 2001 Why, well
frankly because Yahoo wanted us to pay them more money and get out own
domain. I'm still a little sore about that because we had some good
search engine rankings on that site and is why we kept it all these
years later...but that's getting a little ahead of my story.
One day someone asked me how many hits our site was getting. After all
we had been open for just under a month, we were sure thousands of
people were looking for what we had to offer. So I went and looked
around on Simplenet's site. I couldn't find statistics anywhere. So I
called. Well I sat on hold for about 10 minutes only to find out they
didn't give you anything more than a head count. No info of where
these people had found us or if our advertising was working. Nothing
but a paltry head count of 50. I think at the time we were so excited
that 50 live people had found our site we didn't even notice that we
weren't getting any type of useful information.
Well we got our first
couple of customers (who I may add are still here with us), and they
wanted stats. So I started hunting around the internet to find that it
could be done with a cgi script. I didn't know much about what they
were but hey I'm a quick study. Well after about 22 hours of trying to
make this thing work I called Simplenet did the sit on hold now for 30
minutes only to find out that they didn't let you run cgi scripts. So
I hit the web to find another hosting company for our site, which we
finally had registered. Infact pretty much any time I called Simplenet
I was put on hold only to find out that they didn't offer what I was
looking for or that they didn't offer useful support other than what
was our username and password. I called way early on about FrontPage.
Silly me of course they don't support that. I had to call Microsoft.
Well there was millions of hosting companies, big ones small ones and
after days of searching and reading about each one, we decided on a
company called communitech.net. What drew us to them was their control
panel. The web space was a decent size, 350 megs, plus we got lots and
lots of extras, stats, shopping carts, auto responders PHP, MYSQL, 100
email boxes. All for $17.95 per month...we thought it was Christmas.
Sigh, if we only knew. We moved our domain first to see how it was
before we moved our 7 others with us. Well we were there for about 2
weeks and bam, our site disappeared. Poof! Gone!. I remember that
Saturday so clearly. I sat on hold for 4 hours only to have someone
hang up the phone. Then sat on hold for 2 hours for someone to tell me
that they tried a new kind of server and it didn't work out so well
and they didn't know how long it was going to be until they restored
service. Well a week later, our site made its reemergence.
It really didn't get
any better around there. You couldn't call them for support. If you
called them without a trouble ticket number they can't answer you. If
you make a trouble ticket, don't expect for anyone to answer back in
under a week. They seem to have alot of customers now. But our
customer number is 1309 and they had the same issues when they were
tiny. In case you haven't guessed I hate being put on hold and I hate
voice mail and automated switchboards, thus why I can say with
conviction we won't every have them. But we liked their control panel
and all the extras we got and even the price. But there was no support
and no reliability.
Anyway, incase you
were wondering we didn't move our other customers there. We choose AWC.
We got everyone settled into their new homes without incident. I don't
really have anything bad to say about AWC except they sold out. Yup
the IPO wave came the owners of AWC sold out to Interliant Thankfully
some one told us long before the management change and we got out of
dodge before it got bad. And from what I heard it got really bad. We
had a man last June call us and tell us his site was down since
February. After the initial question of why did you wait so long to
change? We had is site back up for him in less than day Thankfully we
got out of there. And ironically we have gotten quite a few old AWCers
over the years. In some way its like a family reunion of sorts. And
still they come because Interliant went bankrupt and sold those
accounts off to someone else.
Back to my story we looked around and looked around and even tried to
go back to Simplenet, only to find out that they too had sold to Yahoo
and thus why hey cancelled my website after having it for 3+years.
Plus things around there were way different than when we left. We had
40 customers when we left AWC and were off to get our own servers. We
found out that Yahoo closed off the pipes on the machines so
connections were slow and wanted a small fortune for bandwidth. Oh and
did I mention that I had to sit on hold for an hour only to leave a
message for some guy that didn't call me back for three weeks.
I think it was right
then and there that we decided that we could offer a superior hosting
product to anyone on the market, with all the features that I needed
for our design customers and offer it at a reasonable price. We've
must have succeeded because we don't take any new design customers any
more. I had a $19 price in my head for what we needed for each
customer so I wasn't going to charge $39. I wanted email, a control
panel, auto responders, FrontPage extensions cgi access and most of
all a Stat program that told me how you all were finding us. Mostly
all the neat gagets we had at Communitech with a better pricing scheme
and most of all no hassle technical support. Plus we have added
things along the way webmail, web-based design tools, shopping carts,
search engines, a discount on domain registration based on the fact
that we register so many, NT services, cold fusion. We added as you
ask for it basically.
But most of all we wanted to offer support especially to those who
didn't know any better. We had our fair share of mistakes because we
didn't know any better We paid too much money for no service and no
support. Plus had to sit on hold to get that. Well it sucks plain and
simple. I know they say buyer beware, but frankly 90% of the net
population doesn't know what to beware of. They gravitate to the
larger hosting companies of the world who have long hold times not
alot of support and charge high prices for a Swiss cheese hosting
plans. You get space you don't get email. You get email you don't get
a shopping cart. They give web hosting companies in general a bad
name. If I now the answer to a question I'll answer it. We aren't
going to tell you to call Microsoft. Oh and incase you were wondering
it is now $35 per phone call. Yup you pay $90 for the product and hope
you don't need to call for help. Although my customers know if we know
the answer we'll tell you. You know I think if I had to guess, 60% of
the questions we get are really third party questions. Microsoft,
Adobe, AOL, CGI scripts. ISP questions.
You may wonder why we get this, well I have one customer who calls us
every time her DSL line stops. One day I asked her why she did this
being we have no control over Southwestern Bell. I think her answer
sums up what we are about. I don't have to sit on hold when I call
you, she said to me. And you answer me, she added. That's what it
comes down to. We listen we answer and we try to provide the best
total hosting product available.
As I look back over
the years, remember how I said we still had customers #1 and #2...well
here's another fact. We sign up several hundred people per month. And
when I look at who's cancelled, we have less that 1% cancellation rate
and usually its accompanied with a letter that says you guys have been
great but for some reason or another they were closing their site
down. I don't know how many other hosting companies get complementary
letters from people who are closing their accounts. Judging by the new
sales calls around here of my hosting company is out of business, I
can't get though on the phone, they won't help me, my site is always
down there can't be too many.
Okay so now that you
know our whole story and why we are not like other hosting companies
out there. Why don't you take a look at
what our customers have
to say about us .
Some have real
horror stories about their old hosting company and some just wanted to
say keep up the good work.
You know recently we took a survey of our customers and we got a huge
response. However one thing that we noticed was that the people that
had hosting with other companies before us just raved about how much
better we were. Out of 20% of our customers who responded only 3
actual people had something negative to say about us. That tells me
that we are doing the best job that we can and with a 99.9% customer
satisfaction rate we must be doing it right
