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.
It has been brought to our attention that a company with a similar name has been charging individuals illegitimately by debiting their bank accounts.
After speaking with a number of the company’s victims we have discovered that the charges are typically $29.98, although in some rare cases this amount has varied. We are not responsible for these charges. We do not have any packages that cost the above amount, nor do we ever debit bank accounts as a method of payment.
This page exists to help those experiencing this problem and to allow for an open discussion to help get to the bottom of it.
Some of the victims were able to confirm they found the correct company and relayed this information back to us:
Websavers LTD
72 High St.
Haslemere, Surrey
United Kingdom
GU27 2LA
www.websaversclub.com
We ask that if you are experiencing these charges that you please check the bottom of the direct debit slip from your bank (or call your bank if necessary) to verify the above company and website is correct. Comments are enabled on this page so as to invite discussion and feedback. Please help us get to the bottom of this problem!
Update [June 17, 2010]: A consumer reports site (consumeraffairs.com) shows dozens of complaints about this “Web Savers Club” company, which helps to confirm that the above information is correct.
Update [July 16, 2010]: We have heard from a few people who mentioned that all they had to do was call the phone number on the website, www.websaversclub.com, give them their phone number, and they were happy to refund the charges.
Thank you.
Web Savers Staff.
We experienced an extended mail server outage on one of our shared hosting servers (Basil) on Monday, February 22, 2009.
The issue started early Monday morning and was caused by substantial denial of service type attack by an extremely large volume of mail being sent to a specific mailbox.
To make sure this does not occur we have implemented new emergency response processes with our upstream providers, meaning they will have the authority to act immediately without our contact in similar situations. This will ensure that outages like this do not occur in the future.
In addition to the new processes, we are also hiring and training a new in-house technician to make sure you get the quickest responses and communication in the future.
Many of our attempts to respond to incoming tickets failed due to email addresses being hosted on the server where the problems were occurring. Please ensure that you are using an email address that is not hosted with us when creating tickets during outages – particularly those involving mail problems. It is also important to note that telephone support is only included in our Support enabled packages. For those without Support, we are more than happy to respond to a telephone request via email as long as you leave an accessible email address in your voicemail.
We understand the importance of email and we apologize for any inconveniences this has caused. We believe these changes will not only prevent a similar situation, but will allow us to continue to offer you with the best service in the industry.
For best updates and information you can follow us on twitter.
We are asked this question quite regularly and although we have a knowledgebase article outlining how to fix the problem within Plesk, I felt it would be beneficial for many of you to know why it occurs.
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So you have a website and are a bit concerned about its security. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business site or a personal blog, this article will tackle some of the basics you can implement today to avoid the big headaches down the road.
How and why do websites get defaced, hacked, or corrupted?
Most sites are compromised by known vulnerabilities in outdated web-based scripts and applications. Simply put, this means if you run outdated versions of popular software such as message boards, blogging software, or content management systems, your website could be at risk. Other ways a website is commonly compromised is due to insecure or stolen passwords and incorrect file permissions.
Why would anyone want to hack my website? I don’t store any personal or financial information on my site so I shouldn’t worry about this right? Many people feel that because they think no one wants to compromise their website they don’t need to worry about its security. Stop it.
Although they may not want any of the information on your site, most of the time your site will be used to spread viruses, spyware, or deceive your visitors into going to sites with them. Most compromised sites we see have malicious code injected into the files in order to do just this.
Here are a few things you can do today to make sure your website is better protected.
Start locally
Make sure your personal computer is secure. If you use an FTP program to upload content to your website, chances are that you have the username and password saved within it. Depending on how that program stores this data it is possible to have that info stolen if your computer has spyware or a virus.
We recommend installing a virus scanner and regularly scanning for spyware along with being more cautious of where you are surfing online.
Update and patch your third-party applications
Most website security issues can be avoided by being proactive with updates and security fixes issued by the authors of your applications.
Many popular applications now have a one-click update that takes less than 30 seconds to perform. It is recommend that you backup your data before upgrading which can usually be done through your Control Panel.
If you stop using an application make sure you remove it. If you’ve switched from WordPress to Joomla for your content management, make sure you remove the WordPress installation as it can be forgotten about and left outdated. Even though you may not be using it, it can still be accessed.
Remember that updates, patches, and new releases are released for a reason. Staying on top of these updates may seem like an inconvenience at the time, but it will save you from a lot of headaches and issues in the long run.
Checking file permissions
Allowing everyone to read, write, and execute files on your website is a huge security issue. In a web-based environment you typically will want a “755″ permission setting, or full access to the file owner, and only read/execute access for everyone else.
Some applications will ask you to set a permission to “777″ or full access to everyone. Make sure you are running the most up-to-date version of this application before installing. Also, you may want to try it with a 755 as some hosting environments will for this.
Secure your login areas
It is best to access the administration area of any application over SSL (https://). This can be done by making sure it is placed in a ssl-based directory.
In addition to this, it is possible to limit the admin directory to only specific IP addresses. This can be done by placing the following information into a .htaccess file:
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName AdminAreaAuth
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
# allow home IP address
allow from 99.x.x.x
# allow work IP address
allow from 142.x.x.x
# allow vacation home IP address
allow from 24.x.x.x
For example, if you wanted to secure the admin area of your WordPress installation, you would place this .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory. It will deny all connections that are not made from one of those predefined IP addresses.
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Hope this helps. Interested in hearing more on a specific topic? Let us know!
The Canadian Government announced this week that it is planning on only buying Energy Star qualified servers. Canada, along with many other Governments including the EU, Switzerland, Australia and Japan have adopted the US EPA’s energy efficiency certifications for appliances.
The datacentre and hosting industries have seen a huge green push over the last several years and it is interesting to see a client with the purchasing power of the Canadian Government make an announcement like this.
With space being such an issue in data centers, it is easy to sacrifice energy efficiency with space efficiency. Although much attention has been put on making data center infrastructure and design more energy efficient, it’s nice to see a push to get the servers in those data centers more efficient as well.
Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada said “Soon, any server purchased by our government will be Energy Star (certified).” She also noted that “If all data centers were using state of the art energy efficiency technologies, by 2011 we would go back to our electricity consumption levels of the year 2000,”
This guide shows how to configure your mail account in Outlook Express on Windows XP. It assumes you already have a mail account setup in our Plesk Control panel and know your mail password.
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This guide covers the steps necessary to broadcast to a SHOUTcast server. These are the steps that need to be completed on the client side, not the server-side. This guide assumes that you have already received an IP address, port, and password from Web Savers’ staff.
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We would like to welcome Chris MacLellan to the Web Savers team. Chris is joining us as our new Account Manager and will be introducing himself to many of you over the next few months. Thank you in helping us welcome Chris as part of the team.
This guide shows how to configure your mail account in Outlook Express on Windows XP. It assumes you already have a mail account setup in our Plesk Control panel and know your mail password.
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