So I’ve been involved with website design and web hosting for the better part of 10 years. I’ve used every provider you can imagine and they all do this one thing. The one thing that drives everyone up a WALL. It drives me absolutely mad.
They all raise the price of the hosting plan after your first pre-paid annual term. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. So this is how they trap you. They give you a hosting package with tons of space (that’ll you’ll never use) and claims of unlimited bandwidth (you’ll never use enough to need unlimited) and tons of other “stuff”. They offer this to you for $3-$5 a month for a year. That sounds like a great deal right? DON’T FALL FOR IT!
When the end of your pre-paid term rolls around, the price all of a sudden is now $20-$25 a month! WHAT! You contact support only to be told “that previous monthly rate is for new customers only” – they give you the option to create a new account (some don’t actually and will suspend you for doing this) but you don’t want to take the time to transfer all your content to a new account.
This is what the industry calls “H&C or Hook & Capture”. They hook you with the great price and then capture you and hold you hostage under the guise of you not knowing what you’re doing. Another thing the large hosting providers will do is over sell their resources. This creates and attracts “badly behaving” accounts and customers.
A customer will have a shared hosting account sharing resources on the same server that you are on and then all of a sudden your performance drops to nothing. This is called the “noisy neighbor effect”. They do naughty things such as host horrible in-optimized websites, host large videos and music files for downloads or have a huge site hosted with an even larger database. This leaves you with your hands in your pockets unable to do anything and typically the provider won’t do a thing for you either.
I’ve had enough!
I decided to get my own servers and launch of my own web hosting service, called 1 Geek Hosting or GoGeek1. I wanted to build my own service around these 3 pillars: reliable, afford, and fast.
1 Geek Hosting has a Price Assurance Guarantee. This means that you can lock in a special price for the entire life of your hosting account. Let’s say we are running a special that is $5 a month for the hosting you want. Even if the normal price of that plan is $10 a month, you get to keep it for $5 a month for the entire time that you maintain the hosting plan AND if during the last 30 days of your pre-paid hosting plan there is a better price available for that hosting plan, you can get that price applied to your hosting account. All you need to do is ask for it. THIS is what makes the biggest difference in US vs THEM. We also offer a 60 day money back guarantee on all hosting plans.
I host our servers on a fiber-optic backbone network connected to some of the fastest ISP’s in the United States in a huge data center. The facility where I host our hardware is one with triple redundant failover protection for data and power. If one server has an issue, the next one will pick up the traffic and continue delivering your website. (this is called “cloud hosting”) If the power fails, there are banks of back up batteries and diesel generators that kick on to keep everything online.
What 1 Geek Hosting offers that the other guys don’t.
This is a lot of technical information below but you may learn a thing or 2.
We offer a free website builder with all of our hosting plans. You can build your business or personal website with an easy to use, point and click interface. You can create a website with our demo and then purchase the plan so you can keep the work you started. All of our customers enjoy that feature.
We offer free website migrations within the first 30 days of your plan (Static & WordPress sites) so moving your data doesn’t need to be a daunting task.
Our servers back up your data in our own local environment and we double that back up in to the cloud. I also maintain an additional backup of your data on offline storage. This is called Disaster Recovery or “Data Continuity”. Your data is safe even in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure.
Our servers also feature an OS modification called CloudLinux. This lets us limit the resources of each hosting account so they can’t eat up all the resources of an entire server and then shut down and crash other hosting accounts. This prevents the “noisy neighbors” that may use our service from disrupting your service.
In addition we offer tons of freebies the other larger hosts charge for. We provide you with a free SSL Certificate to secure your site (even for e-commerce). Our servers run on LiteSpeed web servers, which are 8 times faster than traditional Apache based web servers. Combining that with that the LiteSpeed Cache we offer for free, your website will have blazing fast load times. Better load times means better Google Ranking which translates to better business for my customers.
Our service is built on the industry leading cPanel which gives you complete control over your domain, web hosting, and email systems. There is essentially no gatekeeper or support required. Most other providers give you a slimmed down version of this but ours is full fledged with no restrictions. Our cPanel hosting also supports Multi-PHP so if you have a specific application to use on your account you can be it will be supported.
Our MYSQL Database has been swapped with MariaDB, which is the newest fork of MYSQL. It is highly optimized and super fast. Gone are the days where your MYSQL database is the downfall of your hosting plan.
For our larger WordPress & WooCommerce hosting plans, we offer Redis. Redis a caching plugin that takes your website visitors information and session details such as their cart & history and stores it in the servers virtual memory. This greatly increases your e-commerce website performance.
We live and die by the support ticket. Meaning that if you submit a ticket to us for assistance or jump on our live chat (it’s almost ready to go live!) that you’ll be able to get help with the issue you are having, FAST. Great support is the name of the game in web hosting.
The bottom line.
1 Geek Hosting aka GoGeek1 honestly cares that you get the service you pay for without the headache and wallet breaking insanity that comes with dealing with a traditional host. I am an open book and can answer any questions that you have.
-Gabe Fletcher, Founder @ 1GeekHosting.com
Affordable, Reliable & Fast web hosting.
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