What separates the 1,000's of web hosts from each other?  Most of the time nothing.  You can buy webhosting for pennies a day.  Then again you can buy a car for $100 or $100,000 and anyone could see the difference.  The challenge with technology is weeding through the lingo and to trust people to tell you the truth about the technology.  At ITP we want to empower you the client to understand our platform and ask questions.  We want you to know the level of service your getting and the great price you are getting that service for.  We can utilize publicly available online tools which we will describe in the article below to show you objectively that what we are saying is true and the fact of the matter is your web site and your corporate email and reputation is most likely at risk right now.

Lets talk technology for a second.  You can host a web site on your computer at home if you wanted.  You probably don't have the bandwidth for it and your ISP would probably block it but you could do it.  You can Google web hosting (you will probably find us there too because we know how to market) and find fun web hosting company names like "Vortech" "Hostgator".  We feel firmly that our technology speaks for itself as clearly the best.  Not the easiest or the cheapest but the best.  Here is why:

99% of web hosting companies today still operate in a traditional IT environment.  Hosting companies will have hordes of servers that they purchase and lease for say 100/mo in turn they sell the space on that server over 2,000 times.  You can see why now they can charge only $5 a month.  Think of it as rent on a home.  If it is just you in the house the rent is high but it is quiet.  Think of having 2,000 other people in your home, not so quiet and everyone would be fighting for resources.  Want to check how many other sites are on the same server as you?  Goto: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ and enter your URL.

Surprised to see who you are sharing space with?

If the site happened to find any adult content or sites, which have been compromised, your search engine rankings may well be suffering from their mistakes.

The next problem with traditional web hosts is that these servers have to sit in a datacenter somewhere in the United States (hopefully). Most web hosting companies will select a datacenter which is good for them, meaning price. Do they have an SLA? (Service Level Agreement) which guarantees them certain uptime? If you host with the company who actually rents the space from the datacenter you might be ok. Problem is most people are not they are getting their hosting space from a reseller of a reseller of that space. Now try to get support when there is a problem. Go back to the home analogy, the power goes out, 2,000 people start screaming who is going to get helped first?

With ITP you always know you can contact our office 24 x 7 and if there is a critical server issue someone you know can take care of your issue.

Brace yourself we are going to get really technical now. Most web hosts are running your website and DNS on a Windows Unix or Free BSD server. Those operating systems are running cpanel or plesk or hspshere the 3 largest hosting platform providers. All that software is running on a server which if it has a failure is going to bring down all the websites connected with it. Do you use email or a database? Now you are exposed to possibly 3 servers (hosts like to divide tasks to save money) which If any have a hardware failure your site is immediately down until someone calls someone who knows the guy who can actually replace the part.

At ITP we use the latest in cloud computing technology. Your website has dedicated resources available to it and is hosted on a virtualized layer that is independent of the hardware it resides on. Meaning one or more hardware failures can occur and your website, DNS, email does not go down because the virtualization layer will shift to the non-failed hardware in the cloud. This means less maintenance downtime and little to no unexpected downtime.

Contact ITP today and we will help evaluate your current platform and explain why you may be at risk. Your web site is your connection with your current and future customers. It is a reflection of your brand and just as getting a busy signal on a phone dos not instill confidence a down web site hurts the appearance of your organization. In addition, your web host often also controls what is called DNS (Domain Name Service) this service is what tells the rest of the world that “@yourcompany.com” email should go to your servers in house or elsewhere. That means whether you are hosting your email with your website hosting company or not your corporate email platform which you have taken great strides to maintain could be taken off line because of your web host. With everything that is riding on your web site hosting company don’t trust it to a noname company with a cute mascot. Trust it to the people you know at ITP.