Is Your Hosting Company Up To Snuff?
Some of our new customers ask us: why can’t we host our site with Company X? It’s only $6.95 per month, much cheaper than your services. The answer is simple: Peace of Mind, and here is why:
Somebody recently called because a website hosted with Company X had been hacked and it had proven impossible for him to regain control over it. That is one of the scenarios where the difference is obvious. When a website is compromised (and any one can be) there are many operations that have to take place, and practically all require the highest level of access to the server and logs. This is called “root access”, the person doing the diagnostic must have constant communication with the systems administrator and work hand in hand. When you call Company X, a level 1 tech picks up the phone, he/she has a collection of scripts that are designed to make the call as short as possible and -if at all acting on the issue- send it to a level 2 tech. It frequently takes them up to 72 hours to do something on the trouble ticket. Meanwhile your site is down or worse: being used as a phishing platform or redirecting to another website in East Europe.
Who is looking after the server?
When you call for support at AMPHION you will talk with someone who will take responsibility for resolving your issue.
Weeks after the incident I’m not sure our caller has regained control on his site. At AMPHION we most definitely would have it solved in hours.
Security is not the only difference, our servers are monitored from 5 different locations around the world, so we know about any glitch before our customers do, and take corrective action. That is why our uptime has been better than 99.95% right up there with Google.
Servers are under attack everyday all over the world. If your website is important for your organization, who has your back will make a big difference. Can you wait days for it to be restored? If at all?
Do you want to know who is your neighbor?
Today I received a request from a customer to make a change on their email. They moved their main website to another provider and are hosting in one of our HUGE competitors where your website is in a cluster server with maybe 10,000 others. I researched what company they were using so they could contact them directly and just by curiosity took a look at what other websites are been hosted on the same IP address (analogous to a physical street address on the Internet). At the very top was www.racial-humiliation.com. The site is plagued with anti-semitic, anti-islamic and aryan racist verbiage that turned my stomach. It claimed to be “entertainment” but it exposed a big chunk of what I consider wrong with our society. By far their favorite is the “n” word.
In all fairness the nature of your server neighbors may not affect you greatly. Google used to penalize websites that shared the same IP address on their searches, but they changed their formula years ago. The most relevant implication that sharing that IP address (or block) has to do with email. If one of your neighbors is actively spamming or has been hacked from the same server where your website resides, the whole server will quickly get blacklisted and suddenly you may stop receiving email inquiries from your contact form, your clients will not get their confirmation email when they place an order on your eCommerce store and your newsletter will bounce back from major email providers like Comcast, Hotmail Gmail etc.
That is the big advantage that we, “Boutique Web Hosters” have over the hosting farms. Not only do we take pride in our technical support and getting things solved fast, but some of us are very picky on who do we accept as clients. In our case we have 3 redundant monitoring solutions to discover hacking, spamming and other breaches of our terms and conditions. plus a very aggressive set of tools installed on our servers to prevent them in the first place.
In the end is a matter of choice as a client: Do you want to have your office or store in a building with guards, CCTV, intrusion prevention and security doors or do you want to have it in a building where the KKK meets, a fly by night scammer lures people in and drug dealing is done on plain sight. Do you think that the difference in price of 4 cappuccinos versus 1 capuccino of rent per month is worth it?
I’m very eager to hear your opinion, please share.
AMPHION communications develops solutions for the small and medium sized businesses. We are expert implementing Google Apps for Business. AMPHION has been in the Web and Email hosting business since 1996 and our goal is to develop solutions that allows us to render better service and have happier clients.
Give us a call at 888-AMPHION (888-267-4466) for a free 10 minute consultation and see if what we are doing for our clients can help you.
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