Hosting

Most of the web development companies who cater to therapists make most of their money from high ongoing hosting fees. To ensure that they can keep receiving those fees they prevent you from moving your website anywhere else. This means that the cost of lowering your monthly costs is that you lose everything!

We think that's just wrong.

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. However, 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!

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

What We Look For in a Hosting Company

  • Good customer support! The hosting company needs to be easy to reach, and the tech support people need to be knowledgeable.
  • If you are on a shared server (and of course you will be), we want them to be running PHP as a CGI. More on that in the "Security" section below.
  • We don't want a hosting company that overloads their servers. This makes your website run slowly. Many cheap hosting companies overload their servers, but not all. The ones who don't usually limit the number of concurrent visitors you can have. The allowance should be plenty for any therapist website. If it's not, then you need a private server.
  • We want a company that's big enough that you can count on them staying in business for the entire life of your website.

Value With Inexpensive Hosting

The hosting company we are currently recommending scores high on all of our requirements: Hostgator.com

Unless you are doing something really unusual and traffic-intensive such as hosting very heavily attended online chats or extremely popular videos, their cheapest account, the "Hatchling" will be all you need.

The cost is only $4.95 a month.

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.

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

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