Hardware and Networking
Most large hosting corporations sell at ultra low prices while offering “unlimited bandwidth” and similar promotions. They are able to achieve this by cramming thousands of websites onto a single server and divvying up the bandwidth and resources into tiny slices per site. The result is very slow network and file access speeds. This is typically called shared hosting.
October Hosting takes a completely different approach. We never overload our servers. The network access connection per server is 20 Mbps which is 2x the standard maximum network connection in shared hosting, and nearly 60x the experienced, sampled throughput of some leading competitors. Due to many factors beyond our control, each site hosted with us may not always perform at maximum theoretical capacity, but we never throttle site connections or speeds. We monitor all our systems and if any system is overloaded we bring more resources online to alleviate the load. Once a server or system is moderately full, we bring a new system online and new, additional sites are added to the new system. If an existing system has reached maximum hardware resources and is more than moderately full, we will offload existing websites to a new server.
Our approach results in faster access speeds for your customers and site visitors. Developers and technicians will be able to perform their work much more quickly. These increased speeds often result in a considerably more pleasant customer experience, which may result in increased sales. It may even give you a boost in SEO because search engines like Google know that customers appreciate snappy websites, so they are more likely to promote fast sites in their search index.
In addition, we use only the best, highest performing technology vendors to achieve maximum reliability and excellent performance. We never use cheap, discount hardware or network vendors, which in our 12+ years of experience usually suffer from performance and service failures.
Backups
For our hosting customers who purchase backups, we offer nightly full system backups which include all your files, logs, site data, configurations, and databases. We use a custom dual-database backup implementation to maximize data quality, recovery speed and reliability. We are not aware of any other hosting company that takes such extra care to maximize database backup quality in this manner.
We do not promise an exact length to our backup archives but we endeavor to keep them for many months, even years, if possible.
Compare this to typical corporate hosting companies who’s only backups are system wide “snapshots” taken once per week, with no separate database backups, and no ability to restore individual files or accounts (such snap shots are only for complete system restores in case of catastrophic failure and typically cannot be requested by the customer. They often result in loss of recent data, or data corruption). They often further prune large files or files beyond certain limits without warning, which means you will never be sure which of your files are backed up on their systems and which are not!
Monitoring
We take a special multi-layered approach to website and system monitoring.
First, our upstream technology vendors constantly monitor their services and in the event of a failure they will proactively respond to restore system connectivity. We do not buy services or technology from vendors who don’t monitor their systems.
Second, our systems have internal software monitoring, included “self-healing” safety net systems which will log the failures, alert us to the failures and automatically attempt to restart the systems and services that are down. Usually the system has automatically recovered within seconds, before the notification alerts have even finished transmitting!
Third, our personnel monitor reports from all our systems on a daily and weekly basis. This gives us a chance to spot and prevent trouble before it takes on a life of its own.
Forth, we work with our systems regularly, so we are familiar with them and can easily spot signs of unusual behavior as we go about our normal system interactions.
The fifth layer is our secret sauce: we use a completely independent third party company to monitor our systems from external vantage points throughout the world. This means that there is no chance of a server going down or being disconnected from the Internet without a wholly independent, geographically distributed system detecting the failure. The monitoring system we use is not owned, controlled or operated by us or our vendors, does not use the same hardware, networks or upstream vendors. This distance and separation between us and the monitoring systems ensures that there is nearly zero chance of the monitoring systems going down and being unable to reach us at the same time our systems are down.
Because each website has its own suite of elements and conditions that should be checked, such as domain and SSL concurrency, DNS records, server response on the domain name, http response on the domain name, http response, email system response, page content validation and so forth, we strongly encourage you to purchase our additional monitoring services for your site. We will always know when our servers and systems go down, but if there is an externally imposed interruption, or internal misconfiguration on your website, we may not be properly notified without the custom monitoring notifications tailored to your particular website.
Real Tech Support
We know what it’s like to be kept waiting for hours or even days by incompetent, ill-trained and barely understandable first-level help desk technicians who’s real purpose is to keep customers from using up the time of the more highly paid, experienced technicians. We know what that feels like: our personal all-time record for suffering through such treatment is two solid weeks of all-day phone calls as we were passed from one department to another just to get a latency problem addressed on our office T1 connection. We never treat our customers that way. When you contact us, you’ll be directly connected with the owners and trained support technicians who directly rely on you, the customer for ‘our daily bread’ that supports us and our families. We know that if we don’t take care of you, someone else will try to. And we have no large corporate infrastructure to continue providing us with a salary while performing badly on the job. It’s “our best for you, or nothing for us”!
We know this comes at an additional cost, but your time is valuable as well. We have chosen to eschew the cheap-but-worthless-service route in favor of taking better care of our customers. We hope that you’ll agree and experience that the benefits of a few minutes of well-paid tech support far outweigh the “benefit” of “free” tech support that hasn’t solved your issues, several days later. Simply put: 30 minutes of paid support that solves your issues in a meaningful way is better than 3 hours of free support that ties you up without producing any results!
Pricing
The one place our large competitors may have us beat is pricing. In the best interests of our customers, we have chosen the path less traveled: we provide good service in exchange for good payments! We have many satisfied customers who can attest to the pleasant results this route has achieved for them and we trust that you’ll find it a refreshing change from the cheap-goods-for-cheap-prices model.
That said, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that we are actually cheaper than many mega hosting companies not only in value but in direct pricing. Our retail prices on domains, SSL certificates and email services are less than many leading corporations.
High Business Standards and a Happy, Healthy Work Atmosphere
We play fair and do not use tricky promotional gimmicks with hidden costs, fees or restrictions.
We do not permit third party advertisements on our sites or systems at all. You will never see objectionable content in the course of using our services. Unlike some popular corporate hosting companies, we never use unethical or immoral promotional or marketing tactics, no matter how much it may cost us in terms of lost revenue opportunities. We’re a family owned and family friendly company. We never accept projects, sites or clients that we would hesitate to show to our children, parents, spouses, friends or associates.
When You Support Us . . .
You’re supporting real, down-to-earth families right here in the U.S.A. We directly and indirectly support a number of local church, non-profit and educational endeavors in our local communities all of which are dedicated towards building and promoting happy, healthy, wholesome lives and families, in the context of caring relationships and a clean, sustainable environment. When you support us, you directly contribute to our support of those endeavors, in our lives and the lives of others.