best web hosting blog
2/13/09
It still works.
Every now and then, it's nice to be reminded that something we coded a long time ago still works.
Back in 1999, when we started providing our own web hosting in-house, we needed a formmail script to replace the then-ubiquitous Matt's script formmail. At that time, Matt's script formmail was
pretty much the de-facto standard for formmailers.
So I wrote a little formmail script that accepted the same input parameters as the Matt's script and then generated the email with CDO. All of our web hosting clients have been using this script ever since.
Today, we were moving a new web hosting client's site to one of our web servers. Lo and behold, their web site had approximately 75 Matt's script forms. We did a site-wide search-and-replace on the <form> tag, uploaded the site and presto - it worked like a charm.
Really, this is not a big deal - given all the current hoopla about AJAX, Ruby-on-Rails and Google Chrome, this is almost not even worth mentioning. It's just a little happy; about a some code I wrote almost a decade ago.
2/06/09
Buying web hosting companies
Ok, today's blog will not apply to most you, but my business coach told me to tell everyone about this, so here it is.
We are buying web hosting companies. Fortunately for us, after 12 years in the business we are in a solid position to weather the current economic storm. During the last tech bust in 2002, we purchased the hosting division of an IT firm. It was a good deal for both of us - they got rid of non-performing business unit (revenues did not cover expenses) and we added about 20% more hosting to our existing web hosting clientele.
Our best web hosting company is looking to buy web hosting companies or divisions with about 20 to 40 web hosting clients. We are open to both smaller and larger companies as well.
Realistically, if you are not making enough money from your web hosting to justify your time then you should consider this.
We own all of our hosting equipment and we have a national infrastructure. Our primary datacenter is 1,500 miles from our secondary datacenter. We replicate all of our web data (email, web sites, web databases) every 24 hours from the primary datacenter to the secondary datacenter. We have a total of 4 DNS name servers located in the four corners of the continent. We can switch active web hosting from one datacenter to the other in about 15 minutes (database-driven web sites take up to 1 hour).
If you want to get out of the web hosting business, you will be compensated fairly for your clients, and your clients will be well cared for.
