Webhosting For Business

pageBuzz is primarily webhosting for business because that is the business model we chose getting started. Our thoughts were that having businesses rather than home pages, blogs and more personal websites would give us a more stable customers base. So we raised the price a little bit and created programs and tools that businesses need and are less useful to the other types of websites that need hosting.

So over the last decade or more we have concentrated on ecommerce hosting and small businesses rather than following the trends and the bloggers as they transitioned from blogs to Facebook and over to phone based social apps as well as video sites like youtube and Vine. We kept our noses to the grindstone and continued to develop programs for businesses so they had what they needed to run their websites.

For us, having 99% of our customer base with actual real businesses is better for our bottom line. That being the case, we can afford to spend more time with each customer and provide the support they need as a business. We can afford to develop more technology and provide online tools that no other company has.

Other companies with discount and unlimited hosting plans just can't afford to do what we can for the individual customers.

Lets compare pageBuzz with other webhosting plans that don't specialize in business.

pageBuzz Website Hosting

• Develop fully proprietary software

• Runs redundant servers and failover for high availability hosting

• Runs dedicated secure servers for processing create cards and managing sales

• Helps customer build pages and typical website updates

• Provides all the tools to update and manage pages right online

Other Website Hosts offering webhosting for Business

• Use open source, unsupported, undeveloped and FREE software

• Use cheap servers with thousands of websites each due to unlimited plans

• Require you to buy an SSL cert and install the software

• You are on your own when it comes to building a website

• No site builder at all

Hosting Software & Programs for Business

At pageBuzz.com we build and develop our own software. This allows us to control everything and manage resources.

For example when we realized there were crawlers hitting websites at 2000 pages a minute we addressed the problem by creating filters in the software to automatically block the abusive traffic.

Other hosts can't because they don't have access to customers programming, so there solution is to close accounts when the websites have too much traffic so other sites are not affected.

Now I know this because we set up accounts on many other hosts to monitor how their networks operated and I had many websites closed.

Now as a business, that is no way to run your website. You can't control who visits your website and if you do get some bad robots reading pages you get shut down.

But other hosting companies don't have many options because they cannot control traffic at the programming level. They have to address it at a network or system administrator level at that is how they manage traffic, by closing sites that have it.

That is just one of the key elements in developing proprietary systems for customers. Another is the fact that we can duplicate data over multiple servers for high availability and have backups in the event of a server failure.

Again, I leaned the hard way after losing hundreds of websites on another host before I did all the hosting myself. When a drive fails, you are out of business unless you have backups. Unfortunately, you can't do real time backups when data changes every minute, so any sales or new website data is lost back to the last backup you did.

Imagine if when you are having a sale and you lose the data for 100 or more sales. It is gone and you have no way to recover it.

Now, the high school teenager running a blog does not need to pay extra for that kind of service. They can have a wordpress blog and be happy with it and maybe even create backups and download them regularly.

But we realized businesses would be willing to pay a few dollars more for a service that provides those things rather than losing their website or having it turned off.

Of course there are a lot more examples like those, but the point is, other companies business models don't allow them to deal with those issues at all.

But by developing our own proprietary system, we can deal with it.

Additionally they offer shopping carts and programs that are open source, meaning free to use an modify. That is exciting to a developer because they have access to the programming code and can make changes. But to the ordinary business owner this means only one thing, when they have a problem, there is no help and they have to hire a programmer for their time.

With open source programs website hosting companies can package amazing deals. They say, have unlimited everything, we provide 5 different shopping carts and on and on.... what they don't tell you is that when you call for help and ask a question about that program, they don't help you.

One, because they just don't know anything about the programs and two, they are opensource, so even if they did, once you make changes you need even the original developers would not be willing to help you.

So while opensource programs drive a big part of the Internet, they are not appropriate for small business websites.

Now that we have the software out of the way, lets get to the servers being used.

Networking and Hardware for Business Website Hosting

Most companies just use the cheapest computers available, sometimes not even in cases just mother boards on shelves. I am not saying that to put down every other website host, but it is a fact.

To make money, you don't spend $20,000 on a server when a $200 server will do the same job.

In any business the less you spend on overhead the more you make. And most importantly in the website hosting businesss, customers will never see the servers so no need to impress anyone with fancy rack mount equipment.

I remember when I first started in business back in 1996 I went to the local ISP to get at that time a dial up account. I noticed a bunch of old computers on the top shelf. A hodge podge of cases that looked like they came from the local dump.

So I asked what they were and they told me, they were all the websites that the company was hosting.

Now, I didn't really know anything at that point and I thought that was pretty cool.

But now I know how not cool it was and that servers need to be in a secure environment where cords don't get unplugged, where you have backup power, power distribution and filtering, and the temperature and humidity are controlled and monitored. The can't be up on a top shelf of an office or on the floor of a closet.

But if you have your website hosted with them, you would never know, until it is too late.

The fact is, when we spend $20,000 on a server and they spend $200 or use an old desktop that they were going to throw away the customer never knows. Until a drive fails, a fan fails, a power supply fails or they get more than a few visitors on the website at one time.

"So companies save money by buying hundreds of cheap servers and selling the space cheap."

But our business model is different, we have limited space because we use higher end equipment that costs much more. But our customers need realizability, performance and certainty that their website will work 7 days a week 24 hours a day.

The teen bloggers don't mind if a website is down for a few hours a month or a day or two at a time, the world is not going to end. But having the server down for 2 days when you just spent $10,000 advertising a sale, that is devastating to a business.

So business have stricter demands, more requirements and expect more from a host. But most host just can't provide what they need despite their claims that they will.

But don't take my word for it, just look at the millions of posts online complaining about web hosts that were offline, closed websites and lost data costing businesses money. If you are paying pennies for an unlimited plan, you might be one of the people complaining soon enough.

Secure Servers and SSL

Most businesses do need to process sales, so you need a secure server to encrypt transactions and collect credit cards. That means you need to set up the software, generate a cert and have it signed and installed. That is complicated and can be expensive.

But that is not the real problem. The real problem is that you are taking credit card data on a shared hosting server. That means even though the data is encrypted during the process the data on the server is not. So anyone else on your hosted web server can get access to the data once written to the hard drive.

Now there are better models like VPS which are more secure than shared hosting but nothing is as secure as completely separating the data from everything else like we do at pageBuzz.com.

We take care of all of the security and processing. You don't have to worry about hiring programmers or trying to secure data on the server.You don't have to write programming to interface with your credit card company or worry about updating your SSL each year.

This is just another issue that online business need to deal with and most don't even know about it. Making one mistake can cost you your merchant account and your business. If you can't collect credit cards you can't get paid and that is death for a business.

SiteBuilder & Page Building Support

At pageBuzz we offer 7 day a week support when people are building pages, adding slideshows or just about anything else they need to do.

But other hosts don't offer that type of support at all. In fact, they only support calls about FTP access, email or password resets.

Since they don't have any type of content management system or sitebuilder they don't help with those issues. If you need to edit a web page, you have to call the webmaster that built it for you and pay them for support.

We know that businesses need help. They don't build pages all day everyday, so when they do try to update a page it is confusing. Without someone to depend on for help it is often impossible for business owners to manage websites.

So the typical FTP hosting model does not work and can never work for small businesses.

The support person can't help you because they don't even know how the pages were built. You could have used any number of thousands of website building programs and have elements only an experienced webmaster could understand.

Do you think the phone support people have a page in the manual for what you did with your website? It cannot happen. Every website is different and the only way they could support you is if they understand the code that you have on your page. No host will hire those people to support $5 a month customers and you know that.

But at pageBuzz, we do the support, we wrote the programs you use and we use the same software all the time. So when a customer calls and asks for help, we know how, when an what they did to build a page. We can direct them how to make updates and fix problems that they may have created. And most of the time, we just login and do it for them.

pageBuzz is just better for hosting small business websites

The fact is, pageBuzz is just better for hosting business websites. Our business model and philosophy are different than most hosts and business need what we provide.

"The typical 1998 website hosting model with FTP access and no support does not work in 2014. People need help, they want tools and APPS that do things for them."

If someone could create a shopping cart from scratch, they could host their own website. But business want more than a folder on a web server, they want solutions. Complete, supported and usable solutions for websites.

There will always be a market for cheap hosting and those discounts hosts will always have a business. But businesses don't need a parking spot online, they need a website and websites today mean applications and programs, sitebuilders and tools and more reliable servers than the old top shelf model.

That is why more and more small businesses are choosing pageBuzz for their webhosting needs. When it comes to webhosting for businesses, we just do it better than anyone else.