I’m sure you’ve noticed there are a lot of web hosting companies out there, some making outrageous claims, and some appearing to be very cheap. What should you be looking for in a webhosting company? Why is White Dog Green Frog different?

One of the key areas, I guess, is that I (Brian) come from a background of being a (Unix) system administrator for many years. Having worked for Fortune 100 companies, and training staff doing system admin at those companies, I understand how they think and I’ve been able to bring some of that thinking to the practice and value that we bring as a company.

Reliability

Our hosting is very, very stable – in general with only minutes down per year, with only a very few exceptions. Over the 7 years we’ve been in operation, we’ve had only one major incident, where we had a server down for a bit more than a day over Easter 2 years ago. Even including that incident, our uptime is over 99.97%. Only a few hosting companies can honestly claim this.

The reason for our stability is our expertise in running our servers, configured to use the latest “LAMP” style technology (LAMP = Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) – a combination that adds up to a fast and secure platform for webhosting.   We have nearly 30 years of experience in running Unix (aka Linux) servers on our team, something most smaller hosts simply can’t match.

One of our current customers was with Webcentral for years, and his email and web hosting is critical. Despite upping his spend with them several times, the server was regularly down or unavailable, having a huge impact on his business. About a year ago he moved to us, and I spoke to him the other day – unprompted, he mentioned that he didn’t think his server had been down at all during the year (I said we had, for 5 minutes at midnight, a month ago, but he said he hadn’t noticed!).

Security

Secure hosting – we take a lot of precautions to keep your websites secure and keep hackers out. Having said that, at the end of the day it’s your responsibility to keep your scripts updated. We run a predictive firewall which detects attempts to hack and locks hackers out after a few tries, across a number of different areas. We also proactively produce blocks for new attack types as we become aware of them.

An example of this saving one of our resellers time is that once he set up two Joomla accounts, having been forced by one of his clients to use hosting other than ours. Within two weeks the non-White Dog Joomla account was hacked and the site defaced, obviously an embarrassing incident for the customer.

Backups

Shockingly, a lot of hosts do few if any backups at all. We do our backups pretty carefully, and one some of our servers this means we keep up to 14 copies of your data over time – daily, weekly and monthly backups, several disaster recovery backups, and redundant disk technology.

This is of course something you need rarely, but when it’s not there you could lose your site data, or the server could be down for days instead of minutes. And of course, few server companies will admit to bad practice in this area.  Many times the difference is in the areas you can’t see – the invisible stuff that makes all the difference to keeping you up and running from day to day so you’re free to do your business without interruption.

Performance

We don’t oversell our servers – we keep user loads low on our servers by administering them carefully and not putting thousands of accounts on each server. Some companies sell too many accounts for too little, and then don’t have the time to administer the servers, leading to slow servers.

When a new customer signs up with a cheap web hosting company, they will normally be put on an empty server. Performance will naturally be great to start with, until the server fills up and you start getting problems 6 or 12 months later, and things stop working, or worse, your website is slow and unwieldy and so in the end you lose business and may have to go through a lot of work chasing an uncooperative hosting company for service or to move to a new host.

Anti-Hacking

One of the most common problems folks have is with getting their websites hacked, often in extremely embarrassing ways.

We know enough to run our servers such that user accounts are kept separate from each other. This lack of separation is something that most hosts know nothing about – and is widely known about and exploited in the hacker community. Again, this is an “invisible” point, something you don’t notice until you fall victim to it. We worked at one stage with a group that was regularly hacked every time they came into public view – once they moved to our hosting all the hacks stopped. Most hosts will deny this is an issue, simply because they don’t know about it.

We also know enough to prevent the “invisible” exploits some of the cheaper companies have suffered over the years, where the server itself has been invisibly hacked and website owners have found, to their extreme embarrassment, that their websites have been used to infect their customers with viruses. Our servers have been secure from the start, having been security hardened by one of the top security professionals in the world.

I know this may sound like a marketing sell, but I hope it doesn’t; I firmly beleive our hosting to rival or exceed the quality of most of the top providers in industry today.

Disk space

Most of our client websites actually occupy under 10mb of disk space. While it’s true that we offer lower amounts of space, some of our users have used us to provide the basis for their webhosting, storing their large files elsewhere, thus both saving money and getting the world-class advantage our hosting provides. If you have a particular need in the area of storage, talk to our folks and see what we can do for you.

Beware of companies that offer large amounts of disk space or bandwidth, seemingly for free. A lot of these companies look great on paper but will actually disconnect you due to “terms” violations if you start to use the disk space or bandwidth. This is actually pretty common. The other issue can be that the company is underpricing themselves – over 90% of hosting companies don’t last more than a few years, and many disappear suddenly, taking your email, domains and web sites with them. Some very large hosting companies can offer large amounts of space by assuming that only a very small percentage will use the space – if all their clients used any serious part of their space allocation, they simply couldn’t sustain it! At the end of the day, many of these groups are selling a cheap service which will ultimately cause their customers grief as time goes on, and it’s something we’ve seen so many times in the hosting industry that we’ve lost count. Interestingly you’ll probably notice that most of the older, stable and well established hosting companies offer fairly conservative amounts of disk space – something that says volumes about what works over the longer term. I guess that over time we’ve all realized that it costs something to provide a quality product.

Finally, we should say that the difference in pricing between the US and Australia for both disk storage and network bandwidth is huge. While we absorb some of the difference, we can’t absorb it all! The differences in pricing are due to the network costs being much lower in the US, and market forces being much stronger. To make matters worse for us, we only use quality servers in top quality datacentres, something which of course costs more and, of course, is almost completely invisible to you as a customer – except that we have problems less than most other web hosting companies.

Nevertheless, we’ve noticed disk space and prices are starting to come down more recently, and we hope to be able to pass this on to our customers in terms of larger disk space provision over time. We do offer less disk space than some other companies and it’s something we’ll be looking to grow in the future.

Summary

A lot could be said on this issue – but at the end of the day, it’s worth saying that our intention is to be in business with you all in 10 years time, and we aim to provide a platform that will make that possible for you as well as for us.

Please feel free to comment, either on or off list – we’d love to discuss this further.

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