 hosting for designers
Looking for an Internet Partner to Build a Website?
Some time back, we at Webpro realised that the South African based hosting facilities were woefully inadequate. Our own infrastructure providers (a polite name for Telkom) and the oligopolistic ISP arrangements have left us with slow and extremely expensive connectivity. There is also a dearth of good Windows platform support and, where available, hosting providers charge for every inch given. In short, functionality is limited, what's available is expensive, support for what concerns designers and developers is poor, and response times for overseas visitors is unacceptable. So, where to.......... ?
We went through the standard route of hooking up with European and British based services which came bundled with a long and painful learning curve. Difficult registrars, overseas domicile addresses, poor application level support, and then to crown it all, we had a hosting service "disappear". A domain registrar was "sold" shortly after that and with it went twenty of our domains and it took three expensive months to get domain control back. So we thought we'd check the US market out..........
Just Google the terms "hosting service windows" and you'll get a good feel for the word "minefield". It's a veritable one. Two more bad experiences later and we decided to resort to asking for advice in that trustry old standby, the Webmaster Mail Lists. And, to get some validation, we went to several ASP groups on UseNet. Should have done that a long time ago.! The short story is that we finally located an excellent host and moved up our more critical and bandwidth hungry sites. The results were so good that we eventually migrated almost all our sites. Access times from South Africa are near instantaneous and out perform any local hosting we have experienced. Overseas clients report real time video streaming from MPeg and AVI clips. The facilities offered are extensive, and the bandwidth is enormous - almost to the point where usage limits can be disregarded.
Of course nothing in life is all positives, and we did have to figure out a lot of it ourselves. We found that you can offer Access-2000 database support on Windows 2003 servers, and that MySQL, PHP and SQL Server are all supported. And with over 150 websites to relocate and configure we came across lots of problems which we worked through. Eventually all problems were solved, our clients were extremely happy, and we had loads of excess capacity on our hosting plan. And a new area of competency.....
Then we were approached by a designer looking for help in placing websites who had been referred through to us. And then another. And so on..... Basically we realised that we can add value by helping other designers who concentrate on specifying, designing and building and who need help with placing and controlling hosting - but don't want to relinquish control over the sites and plan to stay in the revenue loop through the hosting cycle. And that's probably how new products are born - we've added "hosting facilitators" to the confusing computer technobabble dictionary.!
We offer developers a locally supported US based hosting facility.
Competent support is available for ASP scripting applications, database backending and standard Windows server platform functions.
| Costs are as follows: |
| 1st up to 5th sites | | R 150 + vat each per month |
| 6th to 10th sites | | R 120 + vat each per month |
| 11th site on | | R 80 + vat each per month |
We encourage you to contact us for further information. We can then give you access to a test account where you can experiment with the features and get a feel for the control panel functions.
Features and Supported Functions
- Windows 2003 Server
- Daily backups
- Your own IP address
- POP3 Mail accounts
- Autoresponder and Mailing Lists
- Mail Aliasing, Forwarding and Catch-Alls
- Server Side Includes
- Private Secure SSL
- PHP v4.3.2
- Perl v5.6.1
- ASP Scripting and .NET Functionality
- SQL Server 2000 Databases
- MySQL Databases
- Private CGI-Bin
- Web Based File Manager
- FTP Accounts
- FrontPage 2000/2002 Extensions
- Webalizer Statistics and Raw IIS Logs
What next?
Why not Contact Us for Access to a Test Account as that's the best way to see what's really available. Or just ask your questions and we should be able to give you Good, No Obligation Advice.
E-mail Us: webpro@webpro.co.za
Phone Us: +27 (31) 563-8344
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