What is hosting?
Just in case the phrase ‘hosting’ is jargon to you, I’ll first explain what it is and why it’s important. If you have a solid grasp on how and where stuff lives on the Internet, skip the next paragraph.
A ‘Host’ is a computer that your website lives on. It’s not all that different to when you save a document on your C: drive, except that a Host computer is accessible to everyone in the world. So it has to be switched on all day & all night forever, be powerful enough to bend time and space like a pretzel, and have security features stunningly clever enough to defeat Marvin in an impromptu chess friendly. In short, a ‘Host’ is a computer that delivers your website to everyone, everywhere.
There are a LOT of hosting services in the world. You can spend a lot of time researching what’s what. We use Dreamhost for our own website. Yep, you’re inside a Dreamhost machine with me right now. We highly recommend the experience, and 100% of our clients have churned to Dreamhost from their previous hosting solution. Let us give you some reasons why.
Reason 1. Dreamy Customer Service
When you self manage your website, having access to quality customer care and technical support is pretty important. One might go so far as to say ‘vital’. Because although we all hope things won’t go wrong, even the sturdiest of plans and good intentions cannot utterly prevent things going awry. Bad stuff even happens to the TSM team (occasionally) and when we’ve needed DreamHost support, we have experienced a level of service second to none. Live Chat technical staff are available 24/7/365 to assist in real time with web chat, which has been a life-saver for us (read: sanity-saver) on many occasions. Most importantly, we have found the support staff unfailingly professional & patient throughout our 10 years of service. We are always happy to talk about how wonderful they are because they are wonderful. When you provide exceptional service people talk about it, and the Dreamhost service genuinely sets the bar.
Reason 2. Dreamy Affordability
It’s seriously cheap, and this is somewhere you can save money with your website. If you are currently hosting elsewhere, grab your most recent bill and really look at it. If you just ‘pay a guy’ to look after your small business site, ask them to itemise your bills so you can see what you’re paying for. You can compare that to Dreamhost pricing here. If you think ‘hosting’ is a highly technical service that you need to pay someone else to manage, you’re wrong. You can easily take control of this yourself. Most of it is quite simple and the rest is comprehensively explained in the Dreamhost wiki. And if things do get a bit challenging, see reason 1.
Some people don’t want to be responsible for this stuff. Their time is better spent doing the things they do to make the world a more wonderful place. If that sounds like you, then we can look after this hosting stuff for you. That’s part of the service we offer. The beauty of it is, you now know exactly what your hosting is worth and what you’re paying for, so our fee is utterly transparent and has to be lean as heck. And that’s how it should be; it’s not something that should cost you the earth.
Reason 3. Important technical stuff
Dreamhost offers shared hosting suitable for small business, and a range of other hosting packages allowing for traffic growth as your site traffic and complexity grows. We can only speak for ourselves, but during 10 years with Dreamhost, downtime has been negligible. Regardless, they offer a 100% uptime guarantee – your account is credited a full day for every hour of interrupted service. We think it’s more comforting to know that you’ll probably never need it. If you are hosting sensitive data, you can be sure security standards will meet the demands of your industry. We have clients hosting some pretty valuable data, and we had to do some serious research & planning to ensure their regulators would be happy. Dreamhost ticked all the boxes.
Hey – where’s the 6 free months?
If you hadn’t already gathered, we believe Dreamhost is the pinnacle of hosting services. It is the smartest solution available if you want to get in control of your content. So, we’ve created a special code offering your first 6 month’s shared hosting FREE. Sign up for DreamHost shared hosting here (« link!) and use Promo code TENSPADES6 – it’s as simple as that. If you’r enot completely happy with the service Dreamhost provides, they even offer a 97 day money back guarantee.
