June 25th, 2008Canadian Web Hosting Done Right
With all the competition in the web hosting market, you’d think that companies would be working tirelessly to maintain a 99.9% uptime and offering superior services for rock bottom prices. However, for reasons I can’t understand, most hosting companies lean more towards offering sub-par services for premium prices. Luckily, there are some companies that recognize the importance of the service-to-price ratio. Canadian Webhosting is just one example of this.
Before going too far, I should tell you that Canadian Webhosting has asked me to review their site and, after a quick glance at their offerings, I’m quite happy to promote a Canadian business. Although I am Canadian, my web server is located in Chicago. Why? Because Canadian hosting companies are notorious for overcharging their customers. If I were to host my sites on a server within my home country, it would be 60-150% more expensive than the American competition. However, it seems that Canadian Webhosting is not like the home-grown competition … they can actually compete with the world.
Verifiable Uptime
Uptime can make or break a website, which means that this alone should be the top consideration. Price is pointless if your site has fallen off the internet, as are other benefits such as storage space, data transfer, databases and subdomains. Customers need to pay close attention to uptime guarantees and verify any sales pitch that sounds too good to be true. Some hosting companies will promise a 99.9% uptime, but fail to tell us that uptime is defined as “a server is running.” If the server is functional, but it can’t access the internet, the site is down. Period. Canadian Webhosting understands this.
I’ve checked around for reports of downtime with this company, but there isn’t one negative word about them. You’d think there’d be one complaint after ten years of business, yet there isn’t a peep. This alone sounds too good to be true but, when a company has great people, machines rarely have major problems.
Service-to-Price Ratios
As with any business, the cost of a service and value-add options can make or break you. Most of the better quality providers online are currently offering decent starter packages in the $8/month range, and Canadian Webhosting is no different. What is different, though, is the package detail.
For $8.95 CDN a month (when prepaying for 2+ years), site owners can host an unlimited number of websites, MySQL databases, and subdomains. Email packages come equipped with spam filtering at no extra charge, and can be accessed via your preferred POP3/IMAP client, or online through a web client of your choice. To sweeten the deal, you receive a $25 Google credit, and access to 50+ preinstalled scripts. This makes setting up new sites a snap for anyone that might not have extensive knowledge setting up a PHP/MySQL site “the hard way.”
Of course, cheaper plans are available but, for the sake of a few dollars a month, customers have a Terabyte of transfer every month, and 125 Gigs of storage available. If you opt for a bigger package, you get 3.5 Terabytes of transfer, 300 Gig of storage, a dedicated IP and support for Ruby on Rails.
Want something a little more Microsoft? They have Windows Server-based solutions available as well. I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the different offerings. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.
Home Field Advantage
The .ca extension isn’t too popular for obvious reasons, but it seems to be incredibly difficult to obtain when working with a foreign web host. I have several .ca sites, and I can say with absolute certainty that most ordinary people will not go through the hassle of buying one and setting it up unless it’s part of a package deal. Luckily, the great people at Canadian Webhosting can do this for us.
To be completely honest, I’m really impressed with Canadian Webhosting. This is a Canadian company that is actually able to compete with web hosts in other nations. Considering the number of sites I have with .ca extensions, and how many more I’ll likely have by the end of this year, I’d be daft to ignore this company. They do offer free site transferring, which would be a great time saver if it means I don’t have to transfer MX records and upload 18 gigabytes of data across 12 websites and 19 subdomains.
If you’re looking for a great webhost, want something hosted in Canada, or some combination of the two, be sure to give Canadian Webhosting a go.
Question. How come they asked you to review their site and did they pay you or offer you free service to review their site?
Not a big deal to me but you probably should mention that even if they aren’t paying you in any way.
I thought I had my new webhost picked out for the variety of sites that I am contemplating starting, but maybe I should reconsider. Although my current site sites on a server at my residence, for my future sites, I am going to host elsewhere and this might be just what I was looking for. No mention if they offer SSH access though and I know this is one of the things you look for in a host (you said so in a previous post)
Nothing wrong with a little paid advertising. I will say that I use dedicated servers, but the few sites I haven’t moved over yet seem to be real cheap with limited customer service, and when things break, they break for a long time.
It’s just too easy these days to buy a dedicated server, slap up a website and some adwords and sell to people.
Dedicated server cost? $49/month, sell a standard webhosting package for 5.95 and you’re not far from having profit.