What is Hosting?

And why do you need it?

Websites need to be housed onto the internet

We can build you a fantastic website, but we simply don’t have the tools and resources to put your website into the nebula of the internet so that it can be accessed by other people.

To accomplish this, we bring on the services of reputable “hosting providers”.

They have the millions-of-dollars of hardware, the 24/7 cybersecurity teams, and everything you need to ensure a safe and efficient environment for your website.

How we choose hosting providers for you

Overall, we considered 5 main criteria when selecting the best host for our clients.
In order of importance:

  • Security
  • Performance
  • Price Point
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support

Our current winner: SiteGround

1. Because PHI is such an important asset to protect, we simply valued security above all else. 

2. Performance came in as a close second to security. Performance is so incredibly important to any marketing a dental practice does. It can lower the costs of advertising because Google and Facebook favor websites that perform well and offer them cheaper advertising. Even offline, imagine if you spend thousands on a snail-mail campaign just for your website to be down when potential patients are looking to learn more. It also significantly helps your website get onto page one of Google and other search engines.

3. Getting our customers great value at every possible angle is a priority for us. That’s why we don’t take a monthly cut by “offering” hosting. However, we recommend that our clients have something robust and reliable for their practice, instead of saving a few dollars a month in the short-term. This can save lots of headache and prevent having to spend even more in the future. At this time, SiteGround is approximately $15/mo while cheaper options are at about $9/mo.

4. Ease of use for clients was definitely important. But, since we would be handling most of the tough-stuff, our current strategy is to provide simple tutorials and explanations that would make anything simple for our clients. So ease of use, in terms of the host, dropped a few points. 

5. Customer support from hosts came in last. Our mission is to provide lasting solutions that the client doesn’t need to worry about. If there are any issues, we will deal with the customer support issues so that you can focus on what’s important to you. If our clients are dealing with a hosting provider’s customer support, we aren’t doing our jobs very well.

Why do you have to buy it, instead of us?

First, it’s important to note that almost all web design/web development company use third-party hosts, just like we do.

However, many of them offer website hosting as a service. What’s really going on is that they are using another company and will charge their clients the difference, plus a little more. Typically, there is little-to-nothing that needs to be “managed” with the host after the website has been set up.

Another thing many companies do is take ownership of their clients’ websites.  Then if a client wanted to have someone else do their websites, the company could outright refuse to give them access to the host.

We wanted to get rid of those trends in the dental ecosystem.

Instead, we wanted to give you full ownership of your website and everything along with it, without charging you extra.

Rest assured, this doesn’t mean any more work for you, besides doing the simple sign-up.

Keep in mind, hosting management is sometimes necessary with VERY popular and VERY resource intensive websites. So we’re not against host management. It’s just extremely unlikely that a local dentist’s website will need such a service. In that case, we can refer you to specialists.