I figured I would address a question I get asked quite often - “Do I provide web hosting”, or “Who would I recommend for hosting”. First, I don’t offer this service myself. I don’t have the resources, facilities, expertise or time to manage site hosting properly. However, over the last decade I have had the opportunity to put several web hosting companies to the test. These hosts include everything from shared hosting to managed dedicated servers, and I have found one provider that has far exceeded the others.

So, if you’re wanting to know who I would recommend for hosting (for most applications), it would be SiteGround shared hosting, without reservation.

I’m sure you’d like to know why, and I don’t blame you. One reason is that they are affordable, but that’s just a minor consideration. There are a lot of inexpensive hosting options, so this criteria certainly can’t stand on it’s own. So lets take it one step further and say it’s because they are an incredible value - they offer a lot of features and have great specs (bandwidth, diskspace, hardware), especially for the price. Still that’s not enough. What I would say starts to really separate them from the slew of other web hosts I’ve dealt with is their customer service.

There are 4 great aspects of SiteGround’s customer service they I feel have made them such a great selection; they are responsive, flexible, proactive and knowledgeable.

• Responsive:
  To date, I have never had a support request take more than 15 minutes to be addressed. Most are actually answered within 5 minutes. That doesn’t necessarily mean the request is resolved in that amount of time - but most are. And if they aren’t resolved immediately, they are diligent and consistent in following up with the progress and requesting clarification.

• Flexibility:
  Also, I have not yet a request that they denied (and several of them I expected to be refused, especially in a shared hosting environmet). SiteGround has been willing to tailor the configuration of my accounts to my specific needs. With almost all of the other hosts I have dealt with, including the provider of the managed dedicated hosting I used for a time, would often respond with “we don’t do that”, “that can’t be done”, or “we could possibly do that for an additonal fee”.

• Proactive:
  One thing that really amazes me is that fairly regularly I will get a message from SiteGround that says something along the lines, “We have determined that the server your site is hosted on is no longer sufficient, and we will be moving your site to a new server on a certain date. You should not experience any downtime.” With many of the other hosts I have experience with, I would notice that my site was down, I would contact them, and they would let me know that they didn’t notice anything because they were still able to ping the server. Some have then replied that there was in fact a hardware failure, but it would take a few days to procure the parts they need to fix the situation.

• Knowledgeable:
  I think this goes hand it hand with the prior 3 aspects of SiteGround’s fantastic customer service. In order to be able to provide the timely responses, custom configurations and to eliminate problems before they occur, you have to have a lot of knowledge about what you are doing. Not much more really needs to be said about that.

Now there are obviously circumstances where a shared hosting account would not be adequate, but for most, SiteGround’s hosting will be much more than sufficient. And while I haven’t had the need, they do offer Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and Dedicated Hosting for those that require it. If I ever have the need for these services, I will definitely look to SiteGround first.

I have no doubt that with the number of web hosts out there, many will be comparable to SiteGround, but since I have had a good long history with SiteGround, I won’t hesitate to recommend them.

To get the full specs on their phenominal hosting, visit www.SiteGround.com

UPDATE:
Speed PPC has just launched version 3 of this powerful tool with even more search engine support (including Yahoo), keyword libraries, ad copying, advanced bidding, cleaning features…. You can find out more and get your copy of SpeedPPC.

Through April 15th, 2008 they are offering $100 Off Speed PPC and 12 months free access to their Clickbank Mining Tool.

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Well, it’s 2am and I just launched a new commercial site. The site, Subscriptionville.com, is a magazine store operated in affiliation with a 3rd party fullfillment center. This is phase 1 of the project, and I hope to eventually build this into a large magazine comparison shopping service, but that will have to wait until more time is available. One of the great things about this project is that the fullfillment company provides a datafeed of all the titles, which means I have about 1000 different items to promote and generate revenue from. One of the big disadvantages is that there are about 1000 different items to promote and keep track of. Since my primary form of advertising (at least in the early stages) will be through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, that leaves a lot keywords and ad text to manage.Because of the volume of information to be managed, I decided it might be a good idea to invest in a tool to automate a lot of the tasks required to set up a large PPC campaign. The best tool I was able to locate is a software package and membership site called SpeedPPC. This is definitely a tool for somewhat experienced PPC advertisers, but if your comfortable with this type of advertising, then SpeedPPC can be a lifesaver for large volume, tightly focused PPC ad campaigns. That said, there were a couple of areas where it fell a little short - at least for what I needed in this case, but I expect I will get a lot of good use out of it on future projects. I plan to write a more detailed review of SpeedPPC in the near future, and will hopefully be able to offer some documentation to explain some of the shortcomings (there’s not many, but you need to be aware of them) and provide tools and information to help overcome them.Anyway, I am writing this as I have just finished building a Google Adwords campaign to advertise nearly 1000 magazine titles - 1600 ad groups, 3000 text ads and 50,000 keywords. All this in hopes that magazines might be a profitable business for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Now that it’s 3am, I think I should head to bed…Such is the life of an web developer and affiliate marketer.