Frequent Questions

Yes. Our web hosting plans give you a lot more than the typical website hosting service. We manage your site with periodic programming improvements, monitor your site for hacking attempts, and block the IP addresses of bad actors who are recurring sources of contact form spam. Your website will also be backed up on a regular basis.

Yes. We do host several websites that we did not create, including several WordPress websites.

No. Absolutely not. You can move your site at any time.

Regardless of which template, content management system, or programming your website is built with, publicly available page content and images are easy to copy and save using just a web browser. It doesn’t matter what the underlying programming or content management system is.

We’ll even help you by preparing a convenient copy of your website in a format that is easily transferable to the new web hosting server. But understand that when you change website hosting companies, contact forms and database driven applications like product catalogs, event calendars, and price estimating may not work on the new server. This can be true even if the content management system (e.g., WordPress) is the same on both servers.

We have business class web servers located at our hosting partner’s secure facilities in California and Virginia. These facilities have compartmented security zones with 24/7 armed security and require biometric clearance for access. All facility cooling systems, power, network access links and data storage are fully redundant.

Yes. A couple of the websites we host get hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. And over a million pageviews each month. One site we host sells tickets for an international series of events. It can experience over 1,500 simultaneous connections during the traffic spike immediately following an announcement that tickets are on sale for an upcoming event.

Naturally, a number like 1,500 doesn’t tell you much without some context. Here’s some context: GoDaddy’s business class website hosting as a practical matter limits sites to 200 simultaneous connections.¹

So yes, unless you are Amazon, Google, Facebook or, well, you get the idea …

We can handle your website’s traffic.

Yes. If you don’t have a domain name, we will research and recommend one for you, based upon available domain name options and our analysis of your market, products, services and direct competitors. The cost of most .com domain name registrations is less than $20 per year, so we just include it in our regular service fees. Of course, the initial purchase price for high-traffic, premium domain name could be a lot more.

Here are some basic rules we try to stick to when choosing a domain name:

• Shorter is better.
• Domain names without dashes are better.
• A shortened version of your company or organization legal name is better (acmewidgets.com is better than acmewidgetsgroup.com and acmewidgetsinc.com).
• Avoid confusing spellings and repeated vowels where two words join, like aerieevents.com.
• For domain names that combine two words, a second word that starts with a hard consonant is more memorable.
• Clever phrases and cute plays on words can cause confusion.
• Be careful with homophones, words that sound like another word but have different spellings, like main and mane, or sun and son.
• Don’t use numbers in a domain name unless you can also buy the same domain name and extension with the number spelled out, like 10rules.com and tenrules.com.

We always recommend that .com be the preferred top level domain (TLD) for a business. If your business has acquired any sort of brand recognition in a competitive market, we recommend that you also acquire the major secondary TLDs (.net, .info, .co, .us). We can configure the domain name versions with secondary TLDs so they automatically forward to your primary domain name.

If you already have a domain name in a registration account that you own and control, we will point it to our servers when your new website is ready to launch. If you do not control your domain name, we can help you recover control.

If you’re just starting out, Wix or Squarespace might be the most economical solution for you to get an attractive website up and running. On the other hand, we advise you to stay away from Web.com. Web.com heavily promotes “free” starter websites that are very basic. Once you have a basic site, Web.com telemarketers will try to upsell you into more expensive plans that we don’t believe provide value for what you pay.

Here is how our services differ from Wix and Squarespace:

• Editorial content. Wix and Squarespace are just design templates. Providing the content is up to you. We create compelling, original content for you that is optimized for search engines. We also create, find and edit relevant professional imagery for your website.
• SEO. You’ll have robust search engine optimization for your website, including research, analysis and adjustments that you just don’t get with SEO plugin tools like Yoast.
• Lead generation. You must have a mechanism to capture leads through your website from prospects who aren’t quite ready to have a conversation. So we create a free giveaway PDF with valuable content to serve as an incentive for website visitors to sign up for your mailing list.

No. We have a very robust system for monitoring and managing client websites that requires hosting on our servers. We could not provide the level of service we offer for the same price if we had to keep tabs on servers at several different hosting companies.

Yes. We host several WordPress sites.

WordPress is a great solution for website companies founded by graphic designers, and for do-it-yourself website owners willing to invest the time it takes to learn how to use and adapt it. WordPress allows them to produce attractive websites without understanding programming code. Incidentally, the same is true for hosted template design companies like Wix and Squarespace.

But the convenience and ease of use come at a cost.

The biggest cost is page loading speed. Every extra second it takes your website to load costs you business. Open source content management systems like WordPress often take an unacceptably long time to load because they require more calls to the server and to external links. A technique called caching — preassembling pages on the server so they load faster — does not completely solve this problem on a WordPress website because many of the plugins that add functionality, reporting and features also require separate calls to the server or to external links, even for cached pages.

A secondary problem is code bloat. The WordPress a la carte plugin system can dramatically increase the ratio of programming code to editorial content on a page. Google has said that the ratio of code to content may impact search engine rankings.

Yes. We host an entertainment news WordPress site that gets over a million pageviews a month and often ranks first in Google searches related to its editorial content.

But it’s important to understand that for a popular high traffic site, user behavior factors like click-through and bounce back rates will probably overwhelm page loading speed as variables in Google’s search results algorithm. Whether this would be true for a local business is less well understood.