Managed Web Hosting 101

I was out of the office for a little while this afternoon and during that time I received a text message from a friend that I haven’t spoken to in several years.  He has a website that he setup himself using the Website tonight product offered by GoDaddy and it has been online for about a year or so. 

As we talked he revealed to me that his website traffic was sort of at a standstill and that he was looking to upgrade the site by adding some functionality to it.  In doing so, he had managed to bring the entire website down. 

In his efforts to restore the website to it’s previous state he was unable to repair a few cosmetic issues related to his design.  Basically the phone call was a cry out for help.  I pulled his website up and was surprised to find that his hosting provider because he only had standard web hosting and didn’t pay for the optional site backup.  He then proceeded to ask if I would mind taking a look at his broken stylesheet and see if I could fix the problem.

My answer was no.  There was a short pause on the phone and then he asked me why.  I went on to tell him that first and foremost, for me, troubleshooting a stylesheet is one of my least favorite things in the world, it’s right there behind walking on a bed of hot coals.  Secondly, he wasn’t one of my clients and that he should probably give GoDaddy a phone call and see what they could do for him. 

The line got quiet again, and then he asked if he could pay me to take a look at it, I told him no again, and let him know that it wasn’t a practice of mine to troubleshoot projects that I didn’t build and that were not accounts.  I then asked him what he was paying for his monthly web hosting, his answer was $8.99.

I let him know up-front that our managed hosting packages start out at $24.95 monthly and go up from there depending on a couple of variables related to the website.  I also informed him that our servers are backed up constantly and that if he was one of my accounts that he would have already been back up and running because he could have just restored a backup from the previous day and been off to the races. 

I also learned in our conversation that his website was loading very slowly a few weeks ago and even went offline sporadically a few weeks ago.  I offered to transfer the website for him to our servers and offered our services in helping him reassemble his site, but he said that he would have to think about it and get back to me.  I did my best to get off the phone call at this point, but this just goes to show that in the hosting industry, you get what you pay for.

There is no comparison between the server or datacenter that is housing his website and the infrastructure that my partners and I have have put together over the years, no comparison.  There is also no comparison between what he is getting from his hosting plan and what we provide with our most basic hosting plan.

Since the first of the year, we have seen a huge spike in the number of established websites that are approaching us to take over their managed hosting needs.  I can think of two new accounts right now that have utilized our services to migrate their websites to Pleth.

If you are currently using a bargain basement hosting provider and have a legitimate business, you should check out our managed hosting solutions.  If you are interested in talking with us, don’t hesitate to drop us a note.

Pleth | Managed Web Hosting Solutions