WHB: A new host for a new year

In November 2011 I made a decision that, in early 2012, I’d move this blog and some other web properties to a new hosting service. From today, that service is WebHostingBuzz and I’d like to introduce you to them.

Founded a decade ago, WebHostingBuzz (WHB for short) offers a wide range of hosting services – web hosting, business web hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers – as well as specialized services such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal hosting plus e-commerce hosting. The company says it has over 30,000 customers worldwide, hosting more than 250,000 websites at datacentres in the US and in The Netherlands.

Sounds pretty standard stuff, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of setup you’d expect from any competent hosting company. I think WHB undoubtedly meets that minimum bar; it’s some other things about them that I think takes them beyond the minimum.

The arrangement I have with WHB is more than simply customer and hosting service. When I was initially approached about getting together with WHB – the timing couldn’t have been better, given my November decision – I had a number of conversations and email exchanges with their UK-based CEO Matt Russell. It quickly became clear to me that here is a business that acts differently and which is interested in forming relationships with people and businesses that aren’t just about obvious commercial interests. They see themselves as forward-thinkers and look for similar others in the relationships they want to build, and want to use the evolving social web as a platform to tell their story.

I also like their stance against the US government’s proposed SOPA legislation that aims to combat online intellectual property theft among other things. The intent of this proposed law may be good but the proposed measures and methods to fight such crime currently in front of the House Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives are alarming in areas such as the power it confers on government (and if you think that only matters in the US, think again).

So we agreed a sponsorship deal that brings benefits to both of us – in essence, they’ll host my web presence at no financial cost to me and I’ll talk about them from time to time, here and elsewhere, and give them a platform to occasionally tell their own story. We’re addressing our arrangement openly and transparently: there’s a little badge on this site that declares ‘hosted by WebHostingBuzz,’ for instance, as well as a similar phrase in the footer of each page; and there’s this post to start with that is posted primarily to its own topic category: webhbostingbuzz.

Today, we threw the metaphorical switch and this site is now ‘hosted by WebHostingBuzz.’

What does it mean for you, the reader? Well, in a practical sense, the first thing is that you should get content served to you a lot quicker and more reliably as this site is now hosted on a dedicated server. It also has WHB’s VIP Management service behind it where people who know what they’re doing will look after the physical infrastructure that enables the content to appear on your screen.

If you’re thinking about a new web hosting service, you might want to check WHB out and look at some of their special January offers for dedicated servers as well as the coupon discount from their UK home page. (Note: I get no commission or anything for mentioning or linking to any of their deals.) Connect with them on Twitter and on Facebook. I wonder if I can persuade them to open up on Google+ as well.

And finally, I’m impressed with their 24×7 tech support in the past week and during this weekend – it really is 24×7 – as they did all the heavy lifting to successfully migrate my WordPress content including databases, DNS changes, etc, to their service.

A good move.