Sure we’ve got the 8 reasons to choose Web Savers, sure we’ve got some of the best thought-out packages available in the hosting industry, and sure our servers remain up and running for months without problems. But we know as well as you that there are other companies that match at least some of those things. Heck, there are as many hosting companies as there are Chinese restaurants these days.

So we got to thinking, why would we choose us? What do we have that they don’t? Why did we bother starting this company way back in the Internet golden years May of ’04? Well, it’s not quite a clear-cut answer… so here we go.

The early days

Back in ’04 there were still quite a number of hosting companies. They had severs, they had hosting packages, they had pretty much the same stuff as all the hosting companies do today. What most of them didn’t have are these seemingly magical ‘unlimited’ hosting packages that we mention on our 8 Reasons page. They were sort-of up and comers at the time and we thought we should join them; offer unlimited everything at a ridiculously low price. And so we did – we launched with this extremely sexy plain mint green website and even sold computers on top of hosting!

It wasn’t long before we realized that we weren’t going to get thousands of customers fast to easily make up for the cheap prices with volume. At the time, though, that didn’t matter. We were all in university, trying to stay on top of a number of courses, working part-time and trying to run Web Savers; it was quite the juggling act. Summer was our refuge, and it was over the first couple summers that we finally were able start pulling even with our server costs. We were learning a lot (at running a web hosting company and maintaining servers, as well as at school) and we were pretty happy that we were getting new customers, even if it wasn’t as fast as we’d have liked.

Present Day

Fast forward a few years, past years of university, graduations, pricing changes, website redesigns, a variety of wonderful new customers (and of course a few less wonderful ones, as in any business) and on to the Web Savers of 2010. What is it that we have done and are doing to make us different? How do we separate ourselves from the pack? Here’s a few things we think we’re especially good at and that few (if any) other hosting companies are doing.

1. Pricing Structures

Nearly every hosting company advertises ridiculously low prices for their hosting plans. Normally this would be a great thing, however, as with everything like that, there’s always a catch! The prices are fake. Unlimited everything for $4.99 / month sounds great, but is only available on a 3 year contract. Want to pay monthly or annually? Nope sorry, you’ve got to pay $8.99 / month now. We think it’s wrong and we refuse to partake in this bate-and-switch advertising.

2. Customer Service

We can’t say every other hosting company has poor customers service, as we’ve heard a mixed bag of horror stories and love stories from people talking about other web hosting providers. We can say that the majority of big-name providers seem to give terrible customer support. From disabling accounts due to being just a few kilobytes over-used to the absolute worst communications ever seen, these guys clearly have yet to embrace the internet for what it is; a nearly perfect customer-to-business communications model. We do know this and we use it. Telephone, email, Twitter, Skype, you name it, we’re there to help. Admittedly our telephone support isn’t perfect, but we are doing everything we can to make our internet-based support system as simple and powerful as possible!

3. Telephone Support

Yeah, I know. I just mentioned that our telephone support isn’t our most effective support medium. Why? Because we refuse to hire a secretary or outsource our phones to India. We know people hate it when they can’t understand the person on the other end of the line. We know people hate it when the person answering their call cannot solve their problem. When you call Web Savers, we’re able to solve whatever issue you need resolved. If you get us by phone, we take care of you. If you leave a message, no problem; we take care of the problem and send an email to confirm. We think it’s a better way of doing business and we think our customers agree.

4. Clean and Simple

Over the past year one of our primary objectives has been to simplify our website. This means removing the junk. We dropped the ‘let’s throw everything we offer on the homepage’ system (GoDaddy, HostGator, DreamHost, among others) and instead we thought, “what are our customers looking for when they visit our site?” We dropped the stuff that requires knowledge of hosting a website and we replaced it with road signs – things to push people in the right direction. More recently we integrated our new client system into the site. In the process we dropped a number of options that our billing software developer thought was important for hosting clients, but truly isn’t. We pushed and pulled at every corner of the system until it was as simple as we could make it and we think we succeeded. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our brand new Client Centre. Don’t forget to let us know what you think; suggestions and constructive criticism are always welcome.

5. Dual Level Support

What does that even mean? If you’ve looked through the site any time in the last year you have likely noticed our Support packages. To some it may still be unclear what it’s for; if you haven’t used it, you probably simply don’t need it and thus don’t need to know about it. Well, Support is our way of offering two levels of support. Not 10, not 5, but simply two. We provide our basic packages that allow for as much do-it-yourself control as possible. With our ever-growing knowledgebase and choice of Plesk as a hosting control panel, we have designed our site, developed our software, and chosen the software packages that are the simplest available. This is done specifically for the do-it-yourself-ers: our first support level customers. The second level of support is needed by those who don’t have the time or the patience for even the easiest to use software. We don’t blame you; sometimes we want to let someone else take care of the back-end of business while we focus on the front-end. This is exactly what Support is for – to let us take care of your website configuration and updates so you can keep growing your business.

We no longer simply stand on the sidelines watching what the other hosting companies are doing and imitate. We’re here to do what those other companies don’t; make your life easier.