Web hosting Offered Here too!
What good is a web designer if they can’t host the new website for you too? That’s like buying a house without any land to place it on.
I am happy to say that I offer web & email hosting (not just web design) for you and your business.
Features... all included!
No need to worry about picking the right plan, the right plan is the only plan I offer to my clients! My Web Hosting package includes all the essentials plus the add-ons that competitors often charge extra for. Who wants to pay extra just to have a backup of your website in case of catastrophe? Exactly – I don’t think anyone should, so I don’t charge you for it either.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Virtually unlimited resources
- TLS/SSL certificate (signed by Let's Encrypt)
- Frequent backups
- 10 email mailboxes
- Calendars & Contacts Sync
- Unlimited databases
- Domain management
Lightning Fast Servers
Many visitors will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So naturally speed is a very important factor especially if you are running an e-commerce site. Thankfully, speed is one of the primary factors I use when choosing my tech stack.
TLS / SSL Certificates
Every knowledgeable user looks for a trusted certificate in the web browser before placing an order, or adding in any personal data. In order for any website to offer this peace of mind, it requires a TLS (or SSL) certificate signed by a trusted certificate authority.
Frequent Backups
Your site is important to your business, and it's important to mine too. I take frequent backups and keep these for a week "just in case". No need to worry about any data casualties. Your data is always recoverable from any "worst case" scenario.
Email from Anywhere
If a website has a domain name and their email addresses don't use the same domain name... this scares customers off. This is why it's important to use email from the same domain as your website is hosted at. This makes you appeal more to cautious customers.
Hosting in Canada
For various reasons, I proudly conduct my business while hosting and maintaining data on Canadian soil. Three of these reasons include…
- Supporting other Canadian businesses
- Data stored in Canada is subject only to Canadian law
- Compliance with various privacy regulations in Canada such as the following:
Responsible Policies
Most data centre providers in Canada also offer ethical use of our resources, such as programs for using mostly or even running entirely on renewable energy (or generating renewable energy itself and possibly even selling some back to the power authority in the location to help residents and businesses on that power grid), planting trees to offset any carbon emissions, as just two examples.
While there are not a lot of Canadian data centre providers around, most of them are thinking of the environment and have policies in place to make them an attractive choice if you care about the environment – and these are the options I choose as well – making a conscious choice to caring for our environment.
F.A.Q. on Hosting in Canada
As of the time of this writing, my servers are located in a data centre in Toronto.
The above is subject to change. I aim to keep this FAQ updated when/if that happens.
While the exact datacentre location may change from time to time, I remain committed to always operating my servers in Canada.
There are unfortunately very few companies that have data centres in the Vancouver area, and of those companies they cater to larger corporate businesses, so the rates are astronomical. It just isn’t financially feasible, nor is it currently justifiable as there is no real performance gain (time saved might be maybe 40 milliseconds on page load, nothing noticeable). When it becomes financially feasible though, it will certainly be in the cards.
If you have a larger project that requires your data to reside inside the province of British Columbia, please reach out to me and I will provide you with the accommodations.
More Details
The Important Stuff
SSL/TLS Certificates
SSL certificates are essentially a requirement for any online activities, especially if you are running a site that collects personal data or handles payment transactions such as on an e-commerce site.
All of the websites I design (and email servers I host) are secured using strong SSL/TLS certificates signed by Let’s Encrypt. Their mission is to “give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites”, and they do this “because [they] want to create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.” And I am in full support of their mission and support them how I can, one such way is by using them as the certificate authority for securing websites.
One of the largest providers in the last years is a company called Let’s Encrypt, who’s mission it is to allow any website to have the protection it needs. Let’s Encrypt is trusted all over the world, issuing certificates for very large companies, and is invested in by many of the world’s most respected companies such as Shopify, GitHub, Mozilla, the EFF, VMware, Red Hat, and many more. So as you can see, Let’s Encrypt has a lot of credibility and the backing of many large companies.
All certificates provided achieve an A+ rating on the SSL Server Test by Qualys.
Spam Control
Have you ever had a contact form on your website, and did you get a lot of spam from it? Spammers and scammers use robots to hunt through websites just as a search engine crawler works, but the robots of spammers will specifically hunt down contact forms, and will send spam to you through it. To combat this, I use additional tools such as “honeypots”, Google reCaptcha, and more.
Other Security
- SSH keys are used for authentication to any servers, making it nearly impossible for anyone to access the servers who don’t have possession of the private key
- Everything is hosted over HTTPS wth TLS protocol version 1.2 and strong cipher suites
- All apps and servers run sandboxed, so they cannot interfere with the others
- Strong authentication policies in place
- Frequent OS updates for the latest security patches
- Rate limits are in place to avoid any DDoS attacks and prevent brute force login attempts
- Users are required to use strong passwords (a mix of symbols, letters, and numbers)
- Firewall rules are in place to further secure the network inbound and outbound traffic
- Mail connections are all secured using STARTLS and TLS
- …and more…
It is well known in the industry that visitors to any website will tend to abandon it if the pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. And of course – time is money.
Fully understanding the above, I have a laser-like focus on performance of the servers I manage, from the top to the bottom. This means that websites load quickly (less than 2 seconds, often much quicker) which provides for a better visitor/user experience. This translates to happier customers for your business, which in-turn can lead to additional revenue.
Updates & Testing
Frequent Backups
Disaster Recovery Plan
The Additional Features
Want to keep your calendars, reminders, and contacts private as well, hosted in Canada? I am happy to offer you the ability to host your own contacts and calendars/reminders, while syncing them across all of your devices. This feature is included in your Web Hosting & Email-Only plans – no extra fees!
This is possible using the open standard protocols CardDAV and CalDAV. These protocols are fully supported in macOS and iOS, and through third-party apps will work on Android and Windows devices as well.
What good is a website without analytics to review? You need these analytics to make effective choices and decisions and have needed insight into your visitors browsing your site. I email reports monthly (first of every month) which compile a list of the most used data types for your website.
It’s customizable so if you wish to have less or more information on it, I can definitely do that for you.
You will have insight into important data such as the following:
- “Hits” / visitor counts, and related totals:
- Total hits for the website
- Total hits per web page
- Hits per day, and by day of the week
- Visitor data (amalgamated):
- City
- Region (i.e. Province or State)
- Country
- Time spent on website, can be broken down by page too
- Referrals to your site – this includes how many came:
- Directly
- via other Websites
- via Search Engines
- via Social Networks
- Devices used, including:
- Screen size
- Web browser
- Plugins
Other Hosting Providers
Why choose me?
If you’ve been shopping around for hosting providers, you’ve surely come across some that practically start as low as just $2/month and then some that go upwards of hundreds of dollars a month. There is an extreme variation in pricing between hosting providers. And while most of them market to the same audience and claim to have the same features, there is a big difference between them and someone like myself.
For starters, I’m open and honest. If you have a need that I don’t believe I can meet then I will tell you this up front, for example. In line with standing behind my services and being open & honest, I even publish posts with a sort of “inside look” at my processes. You can see this here on my post tag I’ve aptly named Transparency.
Secondly, I’m fair. I’ll even take a loss just to make things right for you. I never overcharge, in fact if anything I undercharge as I often won’t even bother invoicing for really small tasks or short meetings we have, for example.
I’m also very personable. You will receive meaningful service and support from me – you can think of me as one of your employees with my goal to be to help your business, whatever those needs might be.
In my opinion, you won’t get any of the above from the big players like GoDaddy, HostGator, and many others. My clients will tell you this too! I am proud of the service level I’ve been able to offer my clients.
Quick Hosting Comparison
| Dustin (d19) | GoDaddy | HostGator | WHC | |
| Plan Name | – | “Launch” | “Business” | “Beast” |
| Monthly Price | $30.00 | $39.99 | $27.95 | $24.98 |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| Storage (GB) | Unlimited* | 60 GB | Unlimited* | 50 GB |
| Domain Included | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| SSL Certificate | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Security / Prevention | Yes | (not listed) | Extra $1.99/month | Yes |
| Automatic Backups | Yes | (not listed) | Extra $2.00/month | Yes |
| Frequent SEO Optimizations | Yes | No | No | No |
| SFTP Access | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Web Analytic Reports | Yes | No | No | No |
* Virtually unlimited, but must follow the terms and conditions for fair use to prevent abuse.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you choose not to renew the Hosting services offered, I can help package the website for migration to a new web hosting package elsewhere. Installing that website elsewhere will be your responsibility, I will simply package all the data for you to import on the other end.
Please note that as various plugins used in the website as part of the web hosting package is subscription-only, they will be revoked once Hosting service is cancelled. You’ll then either need to purchase your own license for the software to stay current with updates or else will need to find a replacement plugin. I can assist you with purchasing the licenses from the appropriate software developers as needed to make that transition as smooth as possible.