Choosing the right Hosting Company
Since being a freelancer over the past 2 years its been a bit of a challenge to arrive at the right hosting company. In the beginning I wanted to offer reseller services to my clients. Being a reseller involves me arranging the hosting directly though the company itself and offering space to my clients. Initially when as I was searching around my goal was to find a quality “Canadian” hosting company. I turned to Google to see what it would turn up and a quick search for “Canadian Hosting” turned up a handful of possible suspects. One that caught my eye was Webserve, overall their Google paid ad wasn’t too over the top. After a quick viewing of their site I checked out their About Us page. I was drawn right away to the title “B.C.’s Fastest Growing Company”.
“WebServe Canada is proud to announce being awarded as the 2006 top B.C.’s Fastest Growing Company (5th place ranking).
Award winning weekly newspaper Business in Vancouver has recognized WebServe Canada as one of the top 50 fastest growing companies (5th place ranking) in British Columbia.”
WOW, I was hooked (so I thought), here was a progressive company, located in Vancouver, award winning and blah blah blah. I signed up a reseller which allowed me 5 domains for $24 a month.
The #1 mistake of my freelance career to date was offering hosting to clients under the assumption that this great “Canadian” company was going to get us off the ground running. With claims like “you benefit from a comprehensive set of intuitive graphical user interfaces”, “Live Chat 24/7!” and “Top-quality support”. Long story short Architexture and my clients suffered from many outages some of which were up to a week long. Support was next to impossible to deal with as it was mostly outsourced to India. The “Live Chat 24/7!” was weak at best with it working maybe a small percent of the time and when it was I was usually provided with a support ticket where someone was going to get back to me “right away”.
I’ve finally cut all ties with Webserve after much painful back and forth with their accounts department. All my clients have now been migrated away from their services and all but a couple domain names are still registered with them (for now).
Charles Haigh, my old employer at Number 41 Media in Victoria always said “pick one thing and do it really well”. Well Charles was right and now I shy away from offering any sort of branded hosting solutions for my clients. I would prefer to sign them up individually with a reliable hosting company.
In all my years of working on the web I’ve finally found a reputable host that puts as much effort into their support as their server technology and administration panel. Media Temple came to my rescue at a time when I was seriously desperate for help. My clients were at their wits end with no email and their sites being down frequently with Webserve. Media Temple posts system incidents and status reports if they are having a problem. When Webserve was having issues I would try time and time again to contact someone to find out what was up to no avail.
For years I saw designers gloating the Media Temple logo on their site and I brushed it off as some sort of trend, but now after I needed to see the light I too boast a Media Temple logo on Architexture. My suggestion to you is the cheapest host isn’t always the best solution. Look for a host who prides themselves on what they do and not just running the same equipment as every other hosting company out there. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter to me that Media Temple isn’t from Canada because I know what to expect from them. Their support isn’t outsourced to India, they tend to respond fairly quickly and they actually answer the phone.
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Comments
Hey Bill, Yeah I feel for you. I know the stress that I went through to ensure that my clients were not disappointed and it was all getting very out of control fast. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for far too long and was so happy to leave them, which is what I would recommend to you.
Best of luck!
I plan to leave them. Am a bit sick at the moment so will sort that problem out at the soonest opportunity. I checked their Better Business Bureau rating too — in the toilet.
Thanks for your info and support.
I’ve been with webserve canada for about 6 months. Right now we are in the midst of the second major service outage. My story is pretty much like yours. They really are lousy at what they do.