Why choose a local web hosting company?

A local web hosting service can be an excellent alternative to the “big box” web hosts available around every corner. Although the larger hosting companies boast of unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, etc. Do you need massive amount of disk space or do you need customer support and help optimizing your site? Having that massive space isn’t going to help when your company doesn’t show up in the search engines week after week. What would help your web hosting issues? Having a person on the other end of e-mail or a phone call, to guide you through what your next steps are and what to watch out for. When you e-mail a customer support question do you get a form letter back that has no specifics to your problem? If you value your web space, form letter responses won’t work. Here’s where a smaller web company can help you. A smaller web hosting company generally has the same amount of bandwidth available for your traffic. The limiting factor for them is usually disk space. With enough disk space available overall a larger company can over-sell the resource – much like an airline oversells seats on the next flight. You’re not the only person on that web server – in a larger company they over-sell those too – that next person is going to be taking up disk space and traffic as well. What happens when they take too much? You and your website suffer. Will the larger company notice or will they wait until you say something? Maybe you should pay more money and get their monitoring package? Where’s your money savings now? A smaller hosting company has it’s advantages here – they’re more invested in an individual customer. Big customer or small web customer, there’s an actual support team looking for problems at the customer level – not just reacting to system wide outages. Not overselling means when you purchase your package, you’re purchasing an agreement for a certain amount of resources. If you only need 10 gigabytes of space you only pay for that amount – and no other customer will be putting it in danger. Personal web support comes from a smaller web hosting company as well. Larger web hosting companies rely on web-support systems that take your incoming e-mail and look for keywords – when it finds enough keywords it will reply with a link to a support document or with a canned response. We’ve all gotten these before – do they really work for us? If we’re having a simple problem, sure – but that’s not likely to happen very often. Generally, problems come up and they’re a simple problem with a twist. My website works – except for my comments page, or maybe your blog area is posting, but not responding when you try and view it. These are the most common types of web support issues – ones that are best helped with human interaction. Smaller web hosts don’t have the keywords you were told to look for “unlimited everything”. They do have what you need though – unlimited customer service.