Where Does my Website Live?
October 23rd, 2009
Recently I was asked by a client why they’d want to host a site with us when there are web hosts that offer hosting for 4 bucks a month. The short reasoning I gave them was support, reliability, and time.
We work with Rackspace to provide clients the best possible hosting experience. Rackspace offers their fanatical support via chat, twitter, phone, email, and now a new ticketing system. Basically if you have a problem and need to reach out they’ve got you covered. This is a huge difference from a host that lists an 800 number that goes directly to a messaging system. I typically interface with them via chat and am greeted with a server engineer that I have yet to stump. If you choose to call you won’t get long automated menus, but you will get a server specialist that works with you to solve your issue. No scripts, no pdf manual, a real person working through your issue.
As far as reliability goes Rackspace offers a 100% uptime guarantee. Thats right, no 99.999999% garbage. Fully committed and backed 100% site uptime. I’ve yet to have to use this feature of getting a refund because of downtime and I’m glad. They are following through on their commitment to their clients. MediaTemple used to be our web-host of choice, but because of their repeated downtime failures we looked for better for our clients.
Rackspace really works hard at creating a UI for their site management that makes sense to users. It has been refined over the last 6 months and allows new users to create sites in minutes. This saves us time as we setup accounts for our clients and makes the overall management process extremely intuitive. Their control panel allows us to perform hosting operations on behalf of our clients as well as giving clients their own login and control. This 2-tiered administration setup gives our clients independence yet provides the security of us being able to save-the-day when necessary.
In addition to all this, file backups are run on a twice daily schedule and have saved our clients in multiple situations. Working with them is like having another whole department in our company that takes care of our client’s servers. Thats how dedicated they are.
Are you going to pay 4 bucks a month for this? No. But think about what you are getting for your investment. Not having to worry about the availability of your number one marketing tool is priceless.
