Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is pageBuzz® better than the other 10million website hosting systems?
A: It's not that pageBuzz® is better, but its unique and offers tools that are not available at any other company. That is because we built the entire system from scratch. So there is nothing like it in use anywhere. All the tools were designed around our users. Taking their input and suggestions to build streamline functions that are user friendly. You won't find anything even close at our price with what we offer. You won't find anything that is easier to use while still offering the flexibility, functionality, reliability and performance of pageBuzz.com®.

The simple fact is that we offer more, we have better equipment, better support and better programming. If you want the best possible solution for your business pageBuzz® is probably the best choice.

We are also up to date! Look at our major updates and compare the list to our competition. Ask them what they have added lately and see if they are actively developing new systems to keep up with new technology, smart phones and hand helds. Ask yourself, do I want old stale technology, or the newest, latest greaest tools available online.

Q: How do I know if pageBuzz® is right for my business?
A: Evey host is unique in some way. Try our demo, look at our features and call our support line, ask questions and see how our sitebuilder compares to other hosts. If you are starting or moving a website for your business then this is an extremely important decision, one that will impact your business greatly. Take your time, compare hosts, plans and features and make the best informed decision possible. If you call us and ask we will tell you if you are a good fit and if we don't think our system is right we will tell you that as well.

Q: Isn't $20 a month expensive for website hosting?
A: NO. $20 is very cheap when you consider what we actually offer. While most companies offer great unlimited plans at $2.99 a month, once you get in they start charging you more for everything. They will charge extra for a shopping cart, photo gallery, forms, extra pages, extra bandwidth usage, and so on. All of which are standard features on pageBuzz.com® for our price of $20.

Companies like yahoo advertise $7.46 a month which is cheaper than pageBuzz®, but they charge extra for ecommerce, extra for support, extra for bandwidth, extra for email and they even take 1.5% of your sales, charge a $50 set up fee and you have to pay 12 months in advance. By the time you get done with what we offer you are paying yahoo $299.00 a month. So the price they advertise on the home page, it's not realistic.

Other companies offer unlimited disk space plans, unlimited bandwidth and loads of installed programs, shopping carts and other features that look too good to be true. But the software is all open source (meaning free) and there is no support other than in online forums. When you call for help, they will tell you that they don't support it and you are on your own. So when your shopping cart stops working and people can't buy from your store you need to hire a programmer to fix it. Even worse, they will shut down you site if you have too many visitors or if you use more than 5% of the main CPU. In that case how much did really you save?

Q: How can you offer a similar system to Yahoo's at $299.00/month for Only $20/month?
A: It's all about efficiency. We work from home and keep overhead low. We own the business so we are not paying employees excessive overtime, health benefits or paid vacation. Our datacenter is private and costs only a few thousand dollars a month compared to the mega hosting companies spending hundreds of thousands. We maintain our own fiber optic routers, servers and network keeping bandwidth costs at a minimum. We have written and own our software and do not pay leasing fees or royalties. Its about bottom line and break even points. Ours is low and we can pass on that savings.

Of course we could never grow to the size of Yahoo, Godaddy or Quickbooks with that business plan. But then again we do not want to. We get to know our customers and work with them personally. That makes our work more rewarding and less like a job and more like fun. We don't have supervisors standing behind us telling us to cut the call short. We help people because it is our business and if it takes an hour then we have a satisfied customer that will refer a friend. (read more about us here)

Q: How much work do I have to do to start, do you have templates I can use for free?
A: When you sign up you will have a working website, shopping cart and all. We have over 1000 standard templates, boutique templates and webpage layouts you can use, customize and change at any time. Use one of the templates or even upload your own.

Q: Do I have to sign a contract or pay for one year in advance?
A: No, we only charge you for the current months services. If you cancel, you are not committed to any extra charges or locked into any contract. We rely on our services being useful to you. If we cannot provide what you need, we expect you to cancel and we will assist you in moving to an alternate hosting service. If our product is not suitable for your business, we do not expect you to continue paying for it. We never ask anyone for advance payments.

Q: How much space do I get?
A: We do not qualify space. Unlike other systems, pageBuzz® does not allow ftp access. The entire website is built online. So space is managed by the programs. You can upload thousands of pictures and build up to 1000 pages with an additional 2500 product pages. More space can be used by programs such as the blog, classified, availability calendar, used car dealer management gallery which all have generous allotments. We do provide10megs of space reserved for multimedia files such as MPEG or WAV's, PDF, MS Word and other types of non web files. Generally its more than anyone will ever fill if you are running an ecommerce website. We are not one of those unlimited hosts and because of that each website's performance is much faster than what you would typically expect under other companies mega space plans.

The amount of space you use is not as important as how many pages you can actually build. There should be ample space for almost any business other than a video upload or social networking site which we do not normally host.

Q: Why don't you allow FTP access?
A: FTP access would allow anyone to run programs on your web server. This is a huge security risk. If you run a site with ftp access, anyone on the server (generally 100 people or more) will be able to access your website as well as run programs that could render your site unreachable or slow it to a crawl. Although this feature does give site owners great capabilities, you are completely dependent on the other people on your server not to overload, overuse or upload malicious programs. It would be like allowing 100 people to install software on your computer. Anyone could crash the system resulting in loss of your website and data. All businesses that depend on their website run dedicated servers for security. But most small businesses cannot afford the expense and are forced to use shared servers completely unaware of the security risks until it is too late. We cater to people that want security as well as affordability. There are countless thousands of hosting companies with FTP, "Unlimited Space" and "Unlimited Everything Else", but we are unique and offer a very special product. One that feels reliability, support and performance are more important than a bunch of useless features most people don't even understand.

Q: Is the page building system easy to use?
A: That is a good question. We suggest trying our demo and seeing for yourself. pageBuzz® is not the easiest system online because customers have asked for so many features. But, you can call us 7 days a week, get help, explanations and have us walk you through step by step features you don't understand.

If you have never built a page, it may be very confusing at first as expected. But so is tying your shoe laces the first time you do it. If you have used e-bay or other online sites and are familiar with word processors such as Microsoft Word or Word Perfect then building pages will be a snap! Even if you are unfamiliar with computers, if you have some patience and are willing to learn, a few hours will go a long way toward building great pages.

Q: Can I sell my products online?
A: Yes. You can sell with any webpage at any host. However our system makes it very easy with programs dedicated to ecommerce. Using an existing merchant account or PayPal our shopping cart system generates invoices and stores them on a secure encrypted server. The programing is already installed in your website and you only need to upload your photos, add descriptions and prices and you are ready to sell. The system even makes thumbnails of your photos automatically and generates the pages to browse, search or and sell your inventory. This is a high end application found only at bumblebeeworks websites and developed and tested over many years and by millions of end users.

Q: What about bandwidth? How much do I get, what happens when I go over my limit?
A: If you have any time surfing, you have certainly seen the dreaded message "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded". That means the site is over the allowable data transfer for the month. For the site owner its a disaster. The search engines will remove the site from their index and the store is closed for business until next month.

We do not feel that this is an acceptable way to do business. All the time spent on the site is useless if you can get to it. For this reason we do not limit bandwidth. We do limit the types of sites we allow to avoid bandwidth hogs. (no porn or celebrity websites)

We manage bandwidth over thousands of users. We have had an occasional client in the past that has been featured on a TV or radio show and hit up to several megs of sustained bandwidth. If they were on a limited plan, the site would likely shut down after a few thousand pages leaving thousands of people with a not available message. If the bandwidth is left on, this could mean the site owner could be billed for an additional $2000.00 or more for bandwidth overages. One of our clients was able sustain have 500,000 visitors in a single day and incur no additional charges. Of course if the client continued to use large amounts of bandwidth we would need to make other arrangements. But most clients will not sustain intense traffic and should not be punished for success.

Its nice to know you can advertise your business and try to market your website without being shut down for actually getting traffic or billed for outrageous overage fees.

Q: How long has pageBuzz® been in business? What is the chance you will close up like the thousands of failed dot com's?
A: There is never any guarantee that a company wont go out of business. However, we have been online since 1997 and have been very successful by growing slowly and maintaining a competitive edge. Our overhead is low and profits are high. We continue to develop new features, network software while our hosting base grows every year. With our low overhead and high profits and a history of success we don't plan on failing anytime soon.

Q: Can I build a successful website in 15 minutes?
A: Absolutely NOT! Anyone that believes that should save the money and buy a bottle of whiskey, because you are either drunk or delusional. A good website takes hard work and time. Just entering items for sale takes time. If you have 500 items and need to upload pics, even at just 2 minutes an item you would have 17 to 20 hours in data entry alone. Anyone that tells you you can build a good site in 15 minutes is looking to take you for a ride. A 15 minute website is worth about 15 cents.

Q: Do you backup data in case of equipment failures?
A: Although it is not typical for a web host to backup your data or website, we are not a typical web hosting company. We do in fact run a proprietary system called ARTB which provides almost real time backups on a remote standby server. We are fully aware that servers do fail and we try to take every possible precaution to protect data and provide redundancy for failover protection. We understand the hard reality of equipment failure because we have run our network since 1997 and have had our fair share of headaches. Read more about our backup technology.

Q: Can I really make money with a website?
A: Yes. We have clients making well over $100,000.00 and up per month using our inexpensive hosting platform. Other successful businesses do not sell products but use the online tools to assist or advertise their products or services. The cost is low for the return of online advertising. If your business can not afford to have a website, you can not afford to run your business.

If you plan to start a business online with a website. Do more research. You won't make money unless you know what you are doing. However, if you use the website to help an existing business it will be a great asset and even increase the value of your business.

Q: Can I link to other websites?
A: Yes. A link is something you can do on any webpage and our editors have a simple to use tool to make linking to your own pages or outside websites simple.

Q: Can I have an About Us, Contact and a Services page?
A: Yes. You can build 1000 regular pages. You decide what the pages are named and you type the words in the pages. Your pages can be anything you want or need, it is all up to you. We do not have any set pages that you have to use or any pages that you cannot use.

Q: Can I have an email address like me@mydomain.com?
A: Yes. We provide 30 email addresses @yourdomainname that can be redirected to any standard email account. You can change and update those names from the management section at any time. Extra accounts can be provided at no additional charge if needed.

Q: Will I know how many people come to my website, can I see where they come from?
A: Yes. We have complete webstats with charts that show trends in traffic, search engine reports showing the keywords you are being found under and on which pages of each search engine. You will have complete lists of referring sites to manage advertising campaigns and affiliate programs. We have one of the most detailed stats programs of any hosting company online. Stats are viewable for the last 6 months of your website traffic.

Q: Can I move my store from another host without rebuilding everything?
A: Yes. The shopping cart has an import feature, so as long as you can export the data from your old host we can install up to 2500 items at one time in your store. The formats will not be the same, but should be transferable. You will still need to manually build the main pages which can usually be copied and pasted from the old website but you won't have to enter all the products manually.

Q: Is every one of your customers satisfied with your service?
A: No. It is not possible to make everyone happy all the time. Some of our customers scream and yell and threaten to sue us because we took 2 hours to return a phone call. Others blame us because they did not get any sales and they are not #1 in google. People have claimed we are a rip off because they did not get any sales the first day they opened their website.

We are careful to explain what we offer and make everyone aware of what they are getting. You are not getting an instant money maker business and the people that expect one will often leave with strong comments about how pagebuzz® sucks. With thousands of new customers signing up each year there is no doubt it will be easy to find people that don't believe in our system. So we are never surprised to see negative comments in forums and people unhappy with pageBuzz®.

We have even had customers cancel and report us the the better business bureau only to sign up again later for another website. If we were so bad, why do they keep coming back?

But overall most people are very satisfied with everything we offer and refer their friends and family with strong praise.

Q: What if my business gets too big for pageBuzz® and I need to move?
A: That could happen. We can offer you dedicated servers and clustered servers if you have too much traffic for shared plans so we can accommodate millions of daily visitors, but our system still has limits such as the 2500 products in the shopping cart. If you have grown past that and we sincerely hope you do, you may need to move to another website host.

We provide export tools complete with image urls, data, options and so on. That data can be imported into most commercial shopping carts so you won't have to rebuild from the ground up.

For the vast majority of e-commerce businesses pageBuzz® will never fall short. Other businesses just see pageBuzz® as a starting point because of the low price and will move to larger shopping carts as their business grows and money is no longer an issue. Whichever the case, pageBuzz® is a wonderful place to start.

Q: There is a notice "website hosted at pageBuzz.com®" at the bottom of every page, can I remove it?
A: No. You are hosted on our network, using our software, our servers which we have spent millions of dollars and years building and we have the most to lose if you do something illegal or unethical. We have had problems in the past with copyright infringement, spam and fraud which has resulted in downtime for other clients on the same servers because the upstream bandwidth providers could not contact the website owner. pageBuzz® and all of our other hosting clients cannot afford downtime due to any other business website's mistakes or activities. We require the copyright notice on every page for your websites safety, security and reliability.

Remaining completely anonymous is just not possible when thousands of other people using the same network are at risk should you do anything illegal. If you need to hide, do anything illegal or wish to remain completely anonymous please use another host. We work with real businesses and will do everything we can to protect ourselves and our clients from any downtime or damage from any bad apples on the servers.