Dallas Website Design - Website Hosting

Web hosting is the process of storing your website on a server which is connected to the Internet. Some companies charge as much as $150 per month for hosting. Many web design firms make more money hosting a website than they made building the website. Some web design companies make it difficult or impossible to move your website away from their server.

Many hosting companies offer cut-rate hosting plans offering large amounts of storage space and bandwidth. The absolute truth is that they bank on their clients never using even 1/10 of that space or bandwidth, and for any that do they simply terminate those accounts. If a company offers 5, 10 or more Gigabytes of storage space and/or 100 or more Gigabytes of bandwidth for $5.00 or $10.00 per month, you can bet that for any clients starting to approach anywhere near their limits, the hosting company would terminate the account. They simply cannot afford to offer those type of plans and make money!

Most hosting companies place anywhere from 100 to 400 websites on each or their shared hosting servers and provide shared I.P. addresses. Hosting companies are generally not at all selective of the accounts they take. How does that affect you, you ask? If your website is sitting on a server with 400 other websites and any of  those sites start getting a lot of traffic, it could cause your webpages to load extremely slow, or worse yet, cause visitors to your website to get "Page Cannot Be Displayed" errors.  Another potential problem with most hosting companies is that if your website is on a server that is also hosting pornographic websites and/or websites engaged in mass e-mail marketing campaigns, your website could be penalized and/or blacklisted by search engines.

Another consideration is that hackers are usually far more interested in breaking into servers that have many websites hosted, as the more websites on a server, the more damage they can do. Servers that are hosting a lot of websites are also far more vulnerable to Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.

Did you ever wonder what happens if your web designer gets hit by a car or goes out of business - if his company owns your domain name and hosts your site, you just lost your website and probably will not be able to get it back. We feel a client who pays for a website should own their domain and have their own hosting account, in their own name.

Professional web hosting means having emergency generators to provide electricity for up to a week during power outages, a T3 connection to the Internet, and separate (not shared) IP addresses available for each website. Professional hosting means having a secure server available for clients that need to accept credit cards or transfer information securely over the web, with 128-bit encryption.

Professional web hosting also means having a company that actually answers their telephones and are willing to help when you need them. We at Dallas Website Design are always available when you need us. That means that if it's Sunday evening and you can't get an important e-mail to send out, we are a phone call away. The Instant Callback button on the website and our toll free number are tied into a 24 hour locator service, and will track a representative down and connect you to them even on weekends and after business hours.

Dallas Website Design offers professional hosting accounts to our web design clients. Our hosting packages are tailored to our client's specific needs, and include unlimited e-mail accounts, autoresponders, spam filters, web based e-mail access, website monitoring, traffic and statistics tools. We host a maximum of 25 websites per server and utilize servers with Pentium 4 processors and at least 1 Gigabyte of RAM, for the fastest response times and page processing. Our servers are located at The Planet Datacenter in Dallas Texas. 

Our prices for hosting services range from $25.00 per month for most standard type accounts, to $50.00 per month for large database driven websites, e-commerce sites, or websites requiring secure encryption.

Your website is an integral part of your business and a store front to the world.  The difference between a $5.00 or $10.00 a month cut rate hosting account and hosting with Dallas Website Design could mean a prospective customer finding your website and making a buying decision, or getting a "Page Cannot Be Displayed" message and going to your competitor.