Web Hosting

As we began designing sites for clients, we quickly came face to face with a simple truth: the sites we designed needed somewhere to live. Sure, some of our clients had their own hosting arrangements already, particularly if we were just giving a facelift to a pre-existing site. But many didn’t.

Now, at first, we did what a lot of people foolishly do, and looked to our local dial-up ISPs. But we soon found out that wasn’t the best way to do things. For one thing, they tended to be exorbitantly expensive — anywhere from $75 to $200 a month at the time that we were looking. Considering how many of our clients were small businesses or non-profits, this was often right out of their reach. Also, if we had a problem or question and had to call their tech support, it was really hard to find someone who knew anything about domain names and web hosting. Which is only logical, really, considering that 98% of their tech support calls probably had nothing to do with these things.

So we thought, there must be a better way. We began sifting through trade publications and searching the net, and discovered that there were in fact hundreds of companies out there that were specifically devoted to web hosting, and most of them charged much less and offered much more than the dial-up ISPs. The only downside was that — well, there were hundreds of them. Where to start? How do we know who’s best?

We visited dozens of hosting companies’ sites, ruling out the ones whose sites looked like disaster areas, and those who were either unable to answer simple technical questions we sent them, or simply didn't bother to respond at all. We talked to everyone we knew who had a domain name site hosted anywhere, and listened to their experiences. We compared features, price, support, service, and gradually, the list got smaller.

Eventually, we narrowed it down to one that seemed to offer just the right combination of affordability and quality (well, actually, we initially narrowed it down to two, but got really badly burned by one — but that’s another story). With a flexible hosting setup, fast net connection, friendly and knowledgeable tech support people, and a quirky sense of humour, Dreamhost was the obvious choice.

So we signed on to become Dreamhost resellers, meaning that we can offer domain name hosting starting from as little as $15 (Canadian — that’s about $10 US) per month. Each domain includes unlimited e-mail aliases, autoforwarders, and announcement mailing lists, as outlined on Dreamhost’s site. And because we can add multiple domains onto an existing plan, the costs of higher level plans like Code Warrior or Strictly Business can be shared among clients who are interested in those features, thus saving you money.

We’re not going to spend too much time on the details of hosting here, because you can read plenty about it on Dreamhost’s site. We just mention it here so that you know that when planning to have us create a site for you, or to create your own, you don't have to go slogging through dozens of web host sites, pestering all your friends for their recommendations, or getting shafted by the host from hell — we’ve suffered through all that for you, and will happily share our hard-won wisdom.