Hosting

An essential step to launching your website is getting a hosting plan. Website hosting provides you with disk space and databases for storing your site files and data, as well as bandwidth for serving those files and data to viewers. In short, your web host enables you to serve your website to your visitors when they request to see it.

The inner-workings of the control panel.

Many small business website owners go with one of the large, reliable providers, such as HostGator or Bluehost. Because they deal in large volume and many of the sites on their servers are among the millions of sites on the Internet that get very little traffic, taking up little resources, they are able to charge pretty modest fees (typically around $6-$20 per month for their basic plans) compared to the smaller providers that specialize in serving sites that are more resource intensive, charging much more. The volume of the big providers at least makes hosting rather affordable for small businesses and even individuals.

But still, figuring out how it all works can be a little daunting. Once you have paid for a plan you are given space on a server and get access to the Control Panel (or cPanel, seen at right), the remote control of sorts for your server space. While it’s not terribly difficult to do the basics (adding a URL, installing the WordPress software) once you get the hang of it, there is a lot going on that takes time to orient yourself around.

For most small businesses and individuals, that time is likely better spent working on your own projects. We recognize that, but also recognize the importance of you having complete control over your website’s underbelly. As a result, we offer to all our clients an integrated approach to hosting whereby you can have your own independent cPanel in our management server at Bluehost.

You’ll have complete independent login credentials to the cPanel, meaning that you’re always in direct control of your website and your business. On our end, having your site hosted on our management server allows us to streamline the set-up process of your site, while making it easier to answer questions for you should you have them down the line. When we bring your site live we take care of things on the server such as initializing your databases, setting up your FTP accounts, and routing your MX records for your @your-domain.com email hosting. All the while, you have complete control over your cPanel login credentials, and thus complete control over your website, should you ever need to access the cPanel yourself, even with a company or tech friend independent of us.

We have tried to make our design process as smooth as possible, and integrating hosting into our services helps us get your site up and running as quickly as possible.