Our Awesome Hosting

We think our hosting is awesome.

We started our own dedicated hosting service as an offshoot of our parent company the Business Marketing Agency because, simply, clients so often had bad hosting.

The typical problems that we found our clients had with other Web Hosts:

– Expensive ‘raw’ hosting (no updates or backups provided)
– Support was supposedly 24/7, but often was not available
– Sites maxed out on bandwidth or disk space
– Slow to load
– Windows Hosting did not allow ‘SEO friendly URLS’ (technical issue which our hosting fixes completely, being LAMP servers)
– Clients had other sites on the same hosting account (undesirable)
– Emails were not allowed as part of the hosting package, or were a separate charge
– No human was checking the client’s site manually on a regular basis
– Client’s sites got hacked
– Client’s hosting did not support our backup software or other web based software
– Clients did not understand what hosting is, and isn’t
– Most clients need more than raw hosting – they need someone to keep their website software (plugins, wordpress, Joomla, other apps) to latest versions
– Clients often need 10-20 minutes of support per month to troubleshoot issues, like ‘how do I…’ on their website, or help setting up emails on Outlook, Mac Mail, Webmail, iPad, or iPhones.

We are resellers for Hostgator, which, after trying (or having had clients try) almost every hosting company on the market – Netregistry, MelbourneIT, Justhost, Xhost, Bluehost, WpEngine, and others – we believe is the best in the market, with servers in three locations in the world, ensuring your site loads fast no matter what country your visitors are browsing from.

The difference between having our hosting rather than going to Hostgator directly is twofold.

Firstly, the way we manage our servers is different. We don’t offer ‘unlimited’ bandwidth and disk space. This sounds good on paper, but actually means that a bunch of websites collectively ‘share’ the server’s bandwidth and disk space. Most hosting companies ‘oversell’, which means they sell you unlimited, but only a small percentage of sites use a lot of bandwidth or disk space. This means that they crowd the server, and everyone gets worse service and speed.

What we do (differently!) is allocate you a fixed disk space and bandwidth allowance, which we manually adjust as soon as you need more. The amount we initially allocate you is often double or quadruple what you need, to allow for spikes in traffic or extra space for backups. (Backups take up as much room on your web hosting account as your website does.) This means we don’t ‘oversell’ the server, meaning that if one site does spike in traffic or disk space, we adjust that site individually, and it doesn’t affect any of the the other sites we host, as it does on oversold hosting.

The other thing we do differently is actually human manage your hosting. This means, as already stated, that we constantly monitor your account. When you reach 80% of your bandwidth or disk space, we automatically increase it for you (at no extra charge.) We also install backup software and schedule it to make backups of your website on a regular basis (usually fortnightly or monthly, with database backups made weekly or fortnightly. The frequency of backups depends on how regularly you (or us) are updating your website.

Another thing we do is actually update all your plugins and WordPress itself, and in most cases also your Theme, to the latest version. This ensures that your site continues to function and display correctly in all the new browsers and devices that people are using to view sites on the web. This is invaluable! Many sites that just sit on ‘raw’ hosting will eventually get ‘buggy’ and not display properly. Your site, hosted with us, won’t do this – because we maintain it for you. It’s like weeding a garden, but a bit more technical. We also make a backup before we do any changes, thus protecting your site forwards and backwards in time!

Not only do we regularly back up your site and store copies on the server, but we can restore sites for you as needed to an older version. PLUS – we even send a copy of your backup offsite to a second independent backup server, hosted on Amazon S3. Amazon is a market leader for cloud storage and our software sends your backups to our Amazon server seamlessly and automatically – all done by us, and human-set up for you.

If your website is your livelihood, and for most of our clients it is, then you cannot overlook the excellent value of our hosting, when you consider that it includes all of the following:

Hosting Benefits:

–       99.9% Uptime Guarantee – Best in the market

Maintenance Benefits:

–       Personal Management of your site – we treat it as our own

–       We check your site once a month and update all plugins and WordPress

–       20 minutes of additional website maintenance per month (for those tweaks you need)

–       Scheduled backups using Backup Buddy – plus we store a copy offsite!

–       Security! Sucuri and Tim Thumb Vulnerability scanner – PLUS backups mean you are protected in case of hacking

–       Avoid breaking your site by DIY trying to update yourself

We currently maintain and host a portfolio of over 80 websites, and specialise in WordPress hosting, maintenance and upgrades.

Because all websites are different, in terms of having different themes, different sets of plugins, we not only offer ‘raw’ hosting (storing your files) but the human element – we manage and fully support your website on our hosting (or yours).

We manually update each site. If we host your site, it is on your own allocated server space, which means we don’t ‘over-sell’ (oversubscibe or overcrowd) our server. This means it is not ‘shared hosting’ as such, because you have your own dedicated space and bandwidth allocations.

But most of all, we look after your website as if it were our own.

What makes this hosting package different?

Our awesome maintenance package with or without hosting (you choose) includes all of the following, though if you would prefer to leave your site hosted where it is, this is fine and we will still do the maintenance which is the true value of this package.

This is what you get:

Full service ‘human performed’ Website Maintenance With Hosting

Free migration to our hosting (one time)

If your website is currently hosted elsewhere (such as Godaddy, Netregistry, MelbourneIT, Bluehost, etc) we will migrate it to our server for free, as long as the website files do not exceed 900 MB (sites exceeding 900MB are rare, unless the sites are eCommerce or include other older backups.).

1 Cpanel per domain/hosting account

2000MB storage – but as your site grows, we will increase the space as required

Most blog sites use around 30-100MB of disk space.

Generous Bandwidth Allocation           

When there is a need to upgrade the bandwidth allocation because your website is getting more traffic, we will upgrade it. However, we cannot host websites that stream more than one or two audio or videos from our server.

If you have a high need for audio or video hosting, we highly recommend these for externally hosted media:

Video: Youtube (free) or  Wistia (premium)

Audio: Amazon S3 (can also be used for private video hosting, such as for membership on staff only content)

We host WordPress

We specialize in WordPress websites, and can work with sites we have built as well or sites built by other developers.

Access to Email Support           

If have any questions at all, you can always send us an email and we will reply and action promptly.

Once a month update schedule           

We run a maintenance check on your website every month.

Verify that site is up and running

If we find that your website is not loading, we will investigate the cause and let you know. If this is a hosting issue and we are your webhost, then we will fix it, though we have a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee on our servers. If we are not your webhost, we will let you know what to tell your webhost to get it up and running again.Most of the time it is a quick fix (well, with us helping you, it is!) so there is no need to panic!

Regular Backup Creation

We will create regular backups, two different types, and send it to your Dropbox account if you have one, have space, and give us the login/password details. We will always keep as many backups as we can fit into your 2000MB storage space. If we run out of space, we will delete older backups – but we do keep significant copies offline (we send them to our cloud storage) as long as you are a client with us indefinitely ‘just in case’.

Plugin and WordPress updates

We will update them both for you, and make sure that the site still looks and functions properly. We will notify you if there are any plugins that need to be removed, and if there are any that are no longer compatible with the latest WordPress update.  If we can find a replacement that works, we will let you know and install it with your permission.

Security check

We will scan your site for vulnerable files with the Tim Thumb scanner.  For malware issues, we will scan it with Sucuri.  We have a security specialist for malware issues, and we will do everything we can to get your website clean again.

20 minutes Web development time   per month

This development time can be used to do anything on your website, such as fixing a broken website after someone (not us) made some changes to it, installing scripts, posting new articles, editing the header/footer, – whatever it is you need.  The turn-around-time for development requests is 1-3 business days. Note monthly time allowance does not accumulate, but if you need more time, you can just purchase more hours for anything you need done – as we also offer full service website maintenance.

Prompt support

The best thing about our hosting is prompt support and attendance to your requests. We do this for a living and we have a fantastic team who can fix, code, move, restore, tweak or change almost anything – fast.

Billing Options/b>

Initially we will just invoice you monthly, and it is your responsibility to pay your account before the due date by bank transfer or Paypal. Feel free to set up a monthly direct debit with your bank.

We also offer Paypal recurring billing (just ask us.) This means we send you a link where you pay with Paypal just the once, and future bills are automatically deducted from your Paypal account monthly. You can cancel at any time, but this is done within Paypal.

Finally, you can provide your credit card details and we will process your card monthly using the Commonwealth Bank secure BPoint service. You will get an email from us once a month when your card has been processed.

Prepay Only

Like other hosting, service is strictly in advance. If you default on your payment before the due date, we won’t suspend your account instantly like other hosting accounts – at least, not the first time. We will send you a reminder as we realise that things can happen. However, if you default more than once, we do reserve the right to suspend your account, plus charge penalties depending on how late your payment is. This is because we have to continue to host your account at our expense (even if it is suspended, we are still hosting it) until you decide whether to fix up your bill or let it lapse. If you let your account lapse too long, we will of course eventually delete your files, and after that, they are non-recoverable, apart from backups that we have stored on Amazon.

Basically, if you keep your account current and pay your bill on time, you will never have to worry. You can read our full terms and conditions here.