Web Hosting

Website Hosting is a critical part of your overall online marketing plan, and TMA provides Value Web Hosting as part of our suite of services.

There is no shortage of cheap inexpensive hosting services available today.  In fact you can find hosting for as low as $3.00 a month.  BUT, don't be tempted by low cost budget host providers that can do more harm than good for your web site.

The old adage is true, "you get what you pay for".  Cheap hosting is just that, and after years of poor service, limitations and problems created for our clients, TMA gave up on cheap commodity grade hosting services.  We provide dedicated servers and hosting exclusively for our clients.

Why Host With Us?

TMA provides hosting only for the sites we develop. This means we know the sites are developed with the latest technology with multiple levels of additional security at the site level.  We host a only small number of clients at any one time on a given server.

TMA updates the core Content Management Systems as security releases become available.  This is important to ensuring that your site runs smoothly and that the whole server environment runs as healthy as possible.

TMA performs nightly database backups of your site and files. Servers are mechanical devices and mechanical things can break.  While our servers are healthy and maintained we feel you can never be too prepared so we make off-site copies of your site in the event we need disaster recovery.

TMA monitors your specific site uptime every few minutes.  The commodity services monitor server up time, but it's your site up-time that matters. If there is a problem with your site we are immediately notified of it.

Beware of Budget Hosting Companies:

With budget hosting companies your site is located on a computer with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of web sites all sharing the same IP address.  This means that you are subject and exposed to the bad behavior of the other sites located on the server. 

From an Internet search ranking standpoint you can be thrown into the "bad neighborhood" category, simply through guilt by association.  And, you have increased exposure of being hacked or sensitive information being extracted.  While these commodity hosting services have a small IT team maintaining the servers, there are several risks:

1. To make their job easier, they restrict access to server resources and services that can - and do - impair your site from working properly.  Their incentive is to keep the whole server up and running, not your specific site.  Remember your are just 1 of thousands of sites hosted on that one box.  Additionally, they may never tell you when they disable a particular resource thus putting your site at risk of becoming unreachable.

2. While commodity hosts work hard to make their life easier, their servers are still exposed to the steady flow of creative hacking attempts.  Such attempts can come from the outside and even from the very sites hosted with their service!

3. When your site gets hacked theses hosts often are not available to help.  Your site is your problem which means you need to find a smart IT person to either restore or recover it, requiring a current clean backup of your site.  If you get hacked again, guess what? It's still not their problem and you may be stuck.

These hosting providers are great at promoting their services and boast 100% server up times.  Server up time is different than your web site up time.

While the savings are attractive, you need to ask: "How long can you survive a hacked, or downed site"?  "What if my hacked site is suddenly displaying objectionable content?"

You also need to look at the marketing and functionality of your site and make sure you're not doing anything too fancy with SEO or business intelligence as they can (and do) shut down those things without notice.

If you are serious about your brand, your business and online presence then host with us, otherwise take your chances of getting what you pay for.