If you’re looking for high quality, reliable web hosting, then I’d like to put forward a personal recommendation for the company that has managed the web hosting for our companies network of websites for the past 5 years…
That company is called Liquid Web and I couldn’t be happier with them. As a web hosting company they stand miles apart from the rest.
We’ve had several managed dedicated servers with Liquid Web over the past 5 years, and we have not once had one issue with website downtime (other than a few minor issues caused by my programmer or when I’ve requested minor upgrades to hardware). However never has downtime occurred due to the web hosting company itself – it is in fact amazingly reliable and unmatched in comparison to the previous 4 companies we’ve tried in the last 9 years conducting business online).
That’s over 1,825 days of continuous uptime (I’ve just impressed myself again when crunching those numbers and realizing how long it’s been).
Pretty impressive stuff.
Uptime, that is keeping your website/s online, is fundamentally critical to the success of the online aspect of your business. It’s even more essential if your business is conducted exclusively online.
If your website goes down then not only will you be loosing traffic, leads, and sales, but it can negatively impact your search engine rankings for a long time to come.
So uptime is absolutely critical and when Liquid Web says that have a 100% network uptime – surprisingly – they do in fact mean it.
Now I know every web hosting company states they have a 100% network uptime guarantee, but the proof is in the pudding, and Liquid Web has been the only company that has proven this to me without a shadow of a doubt.
Almost as crucial as website uptime when selecting the right web hosting company is the customer support.
Crappy customer support is abound when it comes to website hosting companies.
Many web hosts outsource to third world countries to cut costs – there’s nothing wrong with that but often there are communication issues.
Many simply have copy and paste replies to common problems, and no matter how specific and clear your initial support ticket is to them, you’ll still end up with the canned replies and have to resubmit the ticket. Something along the lines of “I already know that… what I need to know is what I explained in the first ticket I submitted”. If that sounds familiar you really need to evaluate who you’re hosting with.
I’ve got to say that Liquid Webs customer support is quite simply outstanding. They offer…
A 30 minute response time guarantee on all support tickets submitted.
If you’ve not had a response within that time you’ll be credited with 10 times the amount of elapsed time in free web hosting credit. If it takes 1 hour, you’re credited with 10 hours free web hosting on your account. Having said that, I’ve never taken advantage of this – why? – because I’ve never had to.
Their support team is available around the clock AND MORE IMPORTANTLY on site – they call it their “24×7 Heroic Support”.
They also provide server monitoring to constantly ensure our server’s optimal performance through early detection of problems. This is impressive. Often our servers can become bogged down due to high volumes of visitors and before we know it we’ve received an email from the support team saying they’ve just made this or that tweak to fix it.
Now that’s real service.
I could go on and on about their support but it’s something that you’ll have to experience for yourself.
Lastly we come to pricing. Liquid Webs pricing is highly competitive for the kind of dedicated server you can set yourself up with (I would even have to say cheap – however I use that word reluctantly because the price of their servers should not detract from their quality which I’ve already explained above).
You can get a “Webmaster Series” managed dedicated server from as little as $149 per month. This is more than suitable for pretty much any decent website (or group of websites) that you wish to host.
You can get a “Professional Series” managed dedicated server from as little as $234 per month. This will give you a bit more space and bandwidth than the standard webmaster series so is more suited to high traffic websites (or group of websites) that have more data they need to keep on the server.
You can get an entry level “Enterprise Series” managed dedicated server from as little as $279. Again, this will provide you with more space, more bandwidth for increased traffic, and faster processing. It’s ideal for high performance websites that also run many different programs and scripting on the backend that require that extra boost of speed and power to run effectively.
That pricing really is excellent value for “fully managed” dedicated servers.
You can find out more about their standard packages (and build your own to suit) here.
As a web hosting company, Liquid Web definitely gets the thumbs up from me and my highest personal recommendation. Try them out – I’m so confident that you wont be disappointed I’m putting my name to it.
Best…
Duncan Carver