Gyress, thanks for the input. It's really great to find a hosting company you feel good about and brings something to the table.

After Apthost had an employee that put malicious code on its servers, whom they sacked and despite assurances their systems were now clean, problems persisted. I moved over to a small hosting company called Magmahost. They use lite speed servers rather than Apache, which are blisteringly quick. Their customer support has been beyond reproach too.

Will, thanks for the info. Not to sound corny, but I guess many are called to be in this type of biz, but few are chosen. Some of these experiences are not good, but even if someone doesn't go us, may help others when searching a web hosting solution. Thanks!

Of course website uptime and speed is a concern. Price and support also. I have never waited more than a couple of minutes to talk to support and get results with my hosting company. I deleted my stuff once and had them restore from a backup withing half an hour. That was nice.

But the #1 concern I have is security. I had a friend who had their site hacked several times. It was a root level issue. The hosting company kept blaming the PHP scripts being poorly written. I had my friend switch hosting company and it stopped immediately. I also did some work for an IT company who gave me the FTP UN and PW for a client. I logged in and was able to go up a level out of her acount and into the root directory, enabling me access to every website on that server. Very uncool! Yeah, I know there are logs but malicious people don't care.

Tom thanks, security is paramount, and I think it goes hand in hand with making backups. I feel we are going to have something to bring to the table in those areas as well. We had a 2 hour meeting last night and did some risk assessments, and are developing this area. On any level it's a concern. A really big mistake with some peers is a 'set it and forget it' attitude on the back end. We also have a couple of folks in our gang that's specialist in this area(major bank). The VPS/private hosting will be a nightmare without doing some strong security.

The number one concern is making sure emails/forum get answered asap if anyone is having problems.

On the shared host end, we are looking to offer the service at a competitive cost so then we have to have some real numbers for clients to support that price. The only way to do this is to have really good service. I look at examples of people like Scott who is always driven to have client contact and great cs.

Our company also has a bundle of products including social media, security consultation, and some other stuff, but each area fits together.

My background includes management, marketing, and corporate training. My primary job after we get started is front end marketing.

I don't know if I already mentioned this, but we are going to have an affiliate program.

As hosting provider here are the number one concerns of my clients.

1. Saftey and Security
2. Speed (uptime)
3. Backups
4. Price (Isn't that interesting)
5. Support

For what it's worth.

I read a lot about problems with big hosting companies, especially hidden costs and poor support - so I used a local hosting company hoping for a personal touch (and I do like to support local business whenever feasible).

A few years ago I redesigned my site with hardly an original file remaining intact.
After deleting old files I set about uploading the new ones, but after 3 or 4 files were loaded successfully the server refused to accept any more and I was left with a useless site.
I emailed the hosting company who said they were flummoxed by the problem (they couldn't get into my site either) but luckily they soon discovered the problem, apparently the server regarded my attempted large-scale changes as a cyber-attack and locked out further attempts to access my site.
I called into their office (Darwin N.T. Australia isn't a big place) with my site on a CD and they loaded directly into the server while I stood at the counter and watched.
If they were a big company, would it have gone as smoothly as that?
A lot of people appreciate the "personal touch", which is probably one of the reasons why CoffeCup is successful.

A control panel with an FTP configured to run inside a browser which can help save space on a computer. That way you will not have to download your own FTP which most of them require Java. Hostmoster has got that feature in their CPanel


Momiji Dolls

Yes, this is true any good hosting company, would and should have some sort of FTP built into their control panel.

My hosting control panel has FTP in the file manger, but you know,, there is always FireFTP for Firefox that runs inside the browser.