Effective February 2019 we are no longer offering web hosting services, and have begun transitioning our clients’ sites to other providers:
- We are transferring most of our clients to a DigitalOcean droplet with ServerPilot management services. This combination is highly scalable, and in our opinion provides the best performance, security, and service for an affordable price point. Cost per month starts at $10.50/month ($5 for DO and $5.50 for SP). Our tests have shown this configuration to be quite adequate for most small businesses or organizations. An example of a larger configuration is a client who is paying $23.50/month to host five small business WordPress sites, three of which are fairly busy.
- For budget-minded clients who have very lightweight sites for which top performance isn’t critical, we recommend shared hosting with Stablehost.
- For clients who need better performance and security than shared hosting can provide, but prefer a more turnkey solution than the DO/SP combination, we suggest SiteGround’s GoGeek account or a small Cloudways server. (Cloudways’ $10/month account is a good value but if you want a larger droplet you’ll probably save money with DO/SP.)
Note: some of the above links are affiliate links. Clicking on our DigitalOcean and ServerPilot links to sign up will give you credit toward your first months of hosting. There are many other reliable hosting companies. To find frank discussions of pros and cons between providers, we highly recommend WebHostingTalk.com.
Why the Change?
It’s been a long-standing practice for many web designers and developers to bulk purchase domain registration and hosting services, and then resell them to their clients. Ten to twenty years ago that made sense, as signing up and managing the services was arcane. Some clients didn’t have email, and some who weren’t in the habit of checking email regularly let their domain names or hosting expire. So we provided those services.
These days anyone who has a website is probably accustomed to paying online for goods and services. We transferred our domain registration clients to Namecheap over the last ten years because we decided that website owners should control their own domain names, and in the past year we concluded that they should also control their own hosting accounts, rather than paying a web developer for hosting.
If you have any questions about our hosting decision, please contact us.