About Hosting
What is hosting? Hosting is an important part of any and every website. Without hosting, you don't have a website. A "web host" is a company that essentially publishes your site on the internet so that everyone can reach it. There are many companies that offer web hosting as a service. These "mainstream" companies offer competitive hosting packages at very affordable rates! With their rates being affordable and the companies being highly recognizable, why wouldn't you, a business owner, go with them?
Hosting is Hard!
If web hosting were easy, everyone would do it! In fact, there are many web development companies that do not offer hosting as an option because it's not an easy business! If you decide to pay a company like GoDaddy to do your hosting, they provide you all the tools you need in order host a website, but you still have to have a decent amount of knowledge to know what you're doing. At the end of the day, a web hosting company is managing servers, databases, DNS records, port security, failovers, resiliency plans, backups, and many other items that you, as the business owner, would probably prefer to be abstracted from!
Hosting is NOT Support
Ok, so you decided to go with one of the large hosting companies to host your website. After you have...
- Started your account
- Set up the DNS records to point to the correct endpoints
- Created your database
- Created your WordPress installation
- Logged in to your new website for the first time
Let's assume for a second that you've already paid someone (like pearGate!) to design and develop your website and it's running on GoDaddy now. But...something isn't working! Your "Contact Us" page isn't sending emails anymore! (It's very common for future issues to popup after your site has been live for a while).
It's so weird because it was working just a few days ago! Or...was it weeks ago? Gosh...you can't seem to remember when the last time you were contacted through your "Contact Us "page on your website. Now you're wondering how many people have tried to submit something to you, but it never went through! How much money have you lost?!
Guess who you can't call! Your hosting provider!
Your hosting provider will usually only provide just that - hosting. They don't do support, they don't do troubleshooting. Their concern is NOT that your website is doing what it's supposed to - their concern is that your website is up and available for the world to see. They're hosting your site - not supporting your site. These are two different types of services!
The pearGate Hosting Solution
In order to give each customer the ability to focus on their business and not the technology running their business, we have created a few different hosting packages that we feel fit most companies quite well. Take a look at the table below to understand how we mix hosting & support to give you the best of both worlds!
Seedling
- Daily backups (Most recent 30 days)
- Security updates and patches
- 99% uptime
- $175 / hour consulting rate
Sapling
- Daily backups (Most recent 30 days)
- Security updates and patches
- 99% uptime
- $160 / hour consulting rate
- One month free for annual plans!
- 1 hour of consulting time per month*
Tree
- Daily backups (Most recent 30 days)
- Security updates and patches
- 99% uptime
- $150 / hour consulting rate
- One month free for annual plans!
- 3 hours of consulting time per month*
*hours do not rollover from month-to-month