This post was written by me through an activation with HireInfluence on behalf of Liquid Web. Although I received compensation for participating in the campaign, all thoughts and opinions are my own.
Being a professional web designer and developer, I know how important web hosting is. If you have ever built anything (or tried to build anything) online then chances are you do too. You can’t do *anything* online without some kind of server hosting platform, and once you realize that you start to realize that some of the options out there on the internet aren’t really options at all.
You can find $3 per month (or free even) hosting all over the web these days but nine times out of ten this is either too good to be true, or you get exactly what you pay for and the hosting doesn’t cut it for your project needs.
I’ve built THOUSANDS of websites at this point in my professional freelance career, and I’ve worked with hundreds of hosts from managed wordpress hosting to cloud hosting – I know what it takes to be a good web host.
Which is why I was happy to participate in Liquid Web’s latest campaign – #BuildSomethingBrilliant. I only work with brands and companies that I can believe in and stand behind and create the highest quality products and services. I know that Liquid Web is a top quality web host.
How do I know this?
I’ve worked with them in the past, I was more than pleased with their services, and most importantly my clients were too. Just in case though, before starting a new project for a client that needs hosting – I poll web designers and developers in my network just to get their opinion on the latest and greatest hosting company to ensure I didn’t miss anything – and the first name out of their mouths is always “Liquid Web”. That isn’t just a coincidence – that means something. Liquid Web has touched these people and made quite an impression.
Who Is Liquid Web?
If you are new to the world of web design and development, or maybe even a veteran, it’s possible that you haven’t heard of Liquid Web so here is a little bit about them. They are a passionate and technical group of regular people that have set out on a very ambitious goal of becoming The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting. I’d say they are doing a smashing job so far. Providing remarkable customer experiences is in their DNA, which has only made stronger by uncovering every possible way they can be helpful and provide value to their customers. Thanks to their amazing work ethic and eagerness to provide unstoppable customer support, Liquid Web has the highest satisfaction ranking in the hosting industry.
Who Uses Liquid Web
Businesses and Individuals big and small enjoy Liquid Web’s services but their biggest fans are Web designers, developers and digital agencies who are out in the trenches everyday creating mission-critical sites or storing business-critical data for small- and medium-sized businesses. In all honesty this group of people know and appreciate hosting the most, so if they are choosing Liquid Web and you are on the fence about what company is going to handle your website or web application needs the best – it makes that choice pretty easy to arrive at.
They Grow With You
As I’ve mentioned I have created thousands of sites for my clients over the years, and I’ve even created a few of my own that have grown through various levels of success (such as this site and infinigeek.com) and one of the most important factors by far for me when choosing a host was their ability to grow with my sites. I started at nothing, like most people – 0 visits per month. No traffic.
Shared hosting can handle that – no problem!
The problem comes in when you start getting high traffic in the 20,000 – 50,000 visits per month range, like I did. Shared hosting won’t cut that. Some of these web hosts out there ONLY provide shared hosting – what do you do then?
Liquid Web offers Dedicated Server Hosting, VPS, Cloud Hosting, PAAS or Managed WordPress, there’s a little something there for everybody – big or small no matter where you fall on the traffic spectrum. The support they provide comes in a lot of different flavors as well, if you aren’t particularly techy you might go for a Fully Managed setup, If you are a command line ninja and want to have full control over your server environment you can Do it yourself or if you fall somewhere in between you can even get a hybrid of the two. Enterprises trust Liquid Web enough to go for a custom build. Basically what we are saying is that they have the very real potential to be the last hosting provider you will ever need.
They stand with you where it counts
When you have a server with a company, it is mission critical to be able to know what is going on in that environment at a moments notice. With Liquid Web they provide these hosting essentials to you with their dedicated servers. You get the best fully managed network infrastructure and hardware in the business, complete with Level 3 technicians on site (which is super important to have if there is an outage or an emergency in your environment). You also get system level health monitoring and graphing with monitoring alerts and notifications – crucial if you want to prevent a catastrophic event from happening in the first place. They ensure you have a secure server by applying updates and patches with security enhancements. Most hosts won’t go through so much trouble to keep your server secure and safe, they really care about your business because at the end of the day your success is their success too!
Security and Reliability
Other than the ability to grow with your business – the hands down most important things about your server host is their ability to provide you with Security and Reliability. These days cyber attacks and data theft are the new threats we face as online entrepreneurs and Liquid Web’s Server Secure™ tech is here to save the day (and your business). ServerSecure™ is an exclusive Liquid Web service designed to save you both time and resources. Available for both Windows and Linux, it provides many additional services and modifications to your default operating system and control panel installation – greatly enhancing the security, reliability, and compatibility of your server and software. The folks at Liquid Web constantly innovate to save you hours of installation work, or the hiring of an outside systems administrator.
Reliability becomes super important when your website or application is receiving tons of traffic, and most of that traffic is coming in the form of a paying customer. Any second you are down is a potential loss of a sale, or could trigger worse things – such as refunds! Liquid Web really has created a great one, two combo to knock out any chance of server outages with their Sonar Monitoring™ being the first line of defense.
The Sonar Monitoring™ team is a dedicated division of Liquid Web™, solely focused on providing service reliability and immediate incident resolution. The guys on this team utilize many proprietary system level health and service monitoring tools to constantly check your server’s performance through an early detection system. When they find an issue, they respond immediately, squashing downtime before it starts and repairing any issues fast – in other words no news is good news as Liquid Web has you covered before you even knew you needed it. That’s piece of mind.
The second line of defense is the simple fact that Liquid Web actually owns and controls their data centers and that really does makes all the difference. For example, my previous host (and actually 90% of the hosts on the web) didn’t own their data centers, they had no control over them either – so when an issue would happen, my sites would sometimes go down for hours because they were still “trying to get a hold of someone” at some data center that I’ve never even heard of – the scariest part was my entire business rested in the files inside that server in some far away unknown place (it could have been on the moon for all I knew). You don’t have that issue with Liquid Web – when a problem happens with your site or server – if a reboot is needed, or any type of physical maintenance – they can actually send a real person to the physical box to get it serviced – cutting down potential hours of downtime to minutes and seconds. No passing the buck here. Their data centers also feature numerous zones for added redundancy, with teams in the US-West region to provide true Geographic Redundancy in multiple disaster-neutral US locations.
And just in case your site ever did go down…
Liquid Web™ Has The Industry’s BEST Guarantee
No kidding.
They have the incredible guarantee of 100% Network and Power promise so if you DO experience downtime, they will credit you 10X the amount of time you were down. That’s 1000% compensation.. Simply incredible – I wish I had THAT guarantee over the years, i’d have been a really happy camper with that deal.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, if you are a creative, freelancer, or entrepreneur – you don’t want to spend your days fiddling and tweaking with your server (unless that is the business you are in!), you want to put all of your passion and energy into your business – doing what you love! Liquid Web I feel truly has enabled thousands of businesses and business owners to focus on their passions and building brilliant things. It makes their customers happy, so happy that I’m sitting here writing this because I have seen the happiness and the satisfaction of those customers – it cannot be denied! When people are happy they do great things – it helps everyone, it makes the world a better place. So if you are a creative entrepreneur with big goals, aspirations, and great ideas – make sure your host is up to the challenge of enabling you to crush those dreams and #BuildSomethingBrilliant. Because you deserve a host that works just as hard as you. Even while you sleep.