Hosting

We don't do hosting ourselves. We know way too much about hosting to delude ourselves that we know enough about hosting to take responsibility for it.

We believe that all things having to do with hosting belong in the capable hands of real hosting experts.

Finding A Good Web Host

We are constantly monitoring and evaluating hosting companies, and it's a rare hosting outfit that stands up to our scrutiny.

But a few do, and we'll be glad to let you know who they are.

That said, there are two things we won't do:

  • We won't be held responsible if you have a bad experience with a hosting company we recommend. Instead, we'll hold you responsible for letting us know they no longer deserve our recommendation!
  • We won't accept any financial "incentives" from a hosting company. They have to win our recommendation through merit alone. That's why your feedback is so important.

Very simply, we want what you want: a good, reliable hosting company to put our faith in.

If you want to learn more about what we look for in a hosting company, read on.

The Hidden Costs of Cheap Hosting

To a great degree, "you get what you pay for" holds true with hosting. However, an important point to consider is that you may not actually require very much at all!

The very worst hosting companies are the ones that offer a lot of bandwidth for a very low price. The unsuspecting customer naturally assumes that the lower the cost per megabyte of space or traffic the better the deal. Wrong! When space and traffic are sold too cheap, the only way for the hosting company to make money is to pack customer accounts into their servers like sardines. This results in an overloaded server.

The problem with an overloaded server is that it's slow. Your website may take so long to load when someone comes to visit that your potential client will decide it's not worth the wait and move on to your competitor's site.

The other problem you may encounter with hosting that is too cheap is lack of adequate customer support. If your website goes down and you can't reach anyone to get the problem resolved, the potential loss of new business will cost a lot more than what you appear to be saving with cheap hosting.

Value With Inexpensive Hosting

Just because we recognize the problems with "cheap hosting" does not mean we think you have to pay a lot for hosting. It just depends on what you need.

Most therapists do not need gargantuan amounts of space or traffic or email addresses. The needs of most therapists are easily met with the minimum account at 123ehost.com which costs only $4.17/month (paid annually)!

If you have bigger needs than that then we can recommend other top-notch hosting people who can provide what you require.

Hosting Security

First off, understand that there is no way to be absolutely certain that what you place on any server is 100% secure. The planet could be destroyed by a meteor! The town where the server is located could be leveled by a hurricane or earthquake. Bad guys could break into the building and take a sledge hammer to the server your website is hosted on. However, it's probably not worth thousands of dollars a month to you to protect your website from those kinds of threats, so you accept a certain level of risk as coming with the territory.

The main security risk you actually face is hackers, and the biggest risk factor there is, in fact, your neighbors who are on the same server with you. And of those neighbors, the primary risk is "script kiddies," typically teenagers or younger, whose hobby is exploiting common server vulnerabilities just for the fun of defacing others' websites. It's the Internet equivalent of defacing public property with graffiti.

Your best defense against the most typical forms of hacking is to be on an account that runs php as a wrapped cgi.

OK we know that last sentence was Greek to you, so just take our word for it.

123ehost.com runs their servers that way and that's one of the many reasons we recommend them.

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