Why Choose ACTWD:
Info for picking a hosting company even if it isn't us.
We realize that there
are many choices available when deciding where to host your web site.
And we know that you are hopping all over the net trying
to figure out who's real and who's working out of their
garage. It can be overwhelming. And then you found us:
Okay so
what makes us different. Most of all we've been right
where you are, sitting in front of a monitor, with
a AOL connection; trying to pick a hosting company out
the 1.7 million choices you get when you put in web
hosting. For us that was a lot of years ago. Gone are
the dial-up accounts the Pentium 100s and even quite a
few of those 1.7 million listings we got while we were
trying to pick. We did this enough times it qualifies us
as experts of what not to do. Our hosting services were
born out of these experiences. What it comes down to is
this. We didn't like the service and products we got
else where so we decided to do it ourselves picking all
the things we wanted and liked about other hosting
company and basically couldn't find without a compromise
of some sort. No support, no email, no FrontPage, long
hold times, on and on the list goes.
So if you can take a few minutes, I can save you a bunch
of time trying to figure this all out. I want explain
how we got here and why your search is over. And maybe
even answer the why are we so cheap, what's the
catch...I know I hear it every day. Honestly there is no
catch. We just got sick of getting taken by other
hosting companies.
In 1997, we decided to start a web design company. Well
we signed up with a company called Simplenet who a bunch
of our friends were using and put up our very first
website: our own. We paid them $24 per month at first,
which escalated to $39 by the time we left. At the time,
Simplenet offered unlimited web space, but not much
more. No email, no cgi, no stats. Nothing. But we had a
lot of space. Oh we had to use their domain
acreativetouch.simplenet.com. In those days we were just
starting out and didn't have the $70 Network Solutions
wanted to charge to register actwd.com plus the extra
$100 Simplenet wanted to charge us just to set it up.
But with a few clicks of a mouse we were open for
business. On a side note that site was shut down in
January 2001 Why, well frankly because Yahoo wanted us
to pay them more money and get out own domain. I'm still
a little sore about that because we had some good search
engine rankings on that site and is why we kept it all
these years later...but that's getting a little ahead of
my story.
One day Howard asked me how many hits our site was
getting. After all we had been open for just under a
month, we were sure thousands of people were looking for
what we had to offer. So I went and looked around on
Simplenet's site. I couldn't find statistics anywhere.
So I called. Well I sat on hold for about 10 minutes
only to find out they didn't give you anything more than
a head count. No info of where these people had found us
or if our advertising was working. Nothing but a paltry
head count of 50. I think at the time we were so excited
that 50 live people had found our site we didn't even
notice that we weren't getting any type of useful
information.
Well we
got our first couple of customers (who I may add are
still here with us), and they wanted stats. So I started
hunting around the internet to find that it could be
done with a cgi script. I didn't know much about what
they were but hey I'm a quick study. Well after about 22
hours of trying to make this thing work I called
Simplenet did the sit on hold now for 30 minutes only to
find out that they didn't let you run cgi scripts. So I
hit the web to find another hosting company for
actwd.com, which we finally had registered. Infact
pretty much any time I called Simplenet I was put on
hold only to find out that they didn't offer what I was
looking for or that they didn't offer useful support
other than what was our username and password. I called
way early on about FrontPage. Silly me of course they
don't support that. I had to call Microsoft.
Well there was millions of hosting companies, big ones
small ones and after days of searching and reading about
each one, we decided on a company called communitech.net.
What drew us to them was their control panel. The web
space was a decent size, 350 megs, plus we got lots and
lots of extras, stats, shopping carts, auto responders
PHP, MYSQL, 100 email boxes. All for $17.95 per
month...we thought it was Christmas. Sigh, if we only
knew. We moved ACTWD.com first to see how it was before
we moved our 7 others with us. Well we were there for
about 2 weeks and bam, our site disappeared. Poof!
Gone!. I remember that Saturday so clearly. I sat on
hold for 4 hours only to have someone hang up the phone.
Then sat on hold for 2 hours for someone to tell me that
they tried a new kind of server and it didn't work out
so well and they didn't know how long it was going to be
until they restored service. Well a week later,
ACTWD.com made its reemergence.
It
really didn't get any better around there. You couldn't
call them for support. If you called them without a
trouble ticket number they can't answer you. If you make
a trouble ticket, don't expect for anyone to answer back
in under a week. They seem to have alot of customers
now. But our customer number is 1309 and they had the
same issues when they were tiny. In case you haven't
guessed I hate being put on hold and I hate voice mail
and automated switchboards, thus why as president, I can
say with conviction we won't every have them. But we
liked their control panel and all the extras we got and
even the price. But there was no support and no
reliability.
Anyway,
incase you were wondering we didn't move our other
customers there. We choose AWC. We got everyone settled
into their new homes without incident. I don't really
have anything bad to say about AWC except they sold out.
Yup the IPO wave came the owners of AWC sold out to Sage
Networks. Thankfully some one told us long before the
management change and we got out of dodge before it got
bad. And from what I heard it got really bad. We had a
man last June call us and tell us his site was down
since February. After the initial question of why did
you wait so long to change? We had is site back up for
him in less than day Thankfully we got out of there. And
ironically we have gotten quite a few old AWCers over
the years. In some way its like a family reunion of
sorts.
Back to my story we looked around and looked
around and even tried to go back to Simplenet, only to
find out that they too had sold to Yahoo and thus why
hey cancelled my website after having it for 3+years.
Plus things around there were way different than when we
left. We had 40 customers when we left AWC and were off
to get our own servers. We found out that Yahoo closed
off the pipes on the machines so connections were slow
and wanted a small fortune for bandwidth. Oh and did I
mention that I had to sit on hold for an hour only to
leave a message for some guy that didn't call me back
for three weeks.
I think
it was right then and there that we decided that we
could offer a superior hosting product to anyone on the
market, with all the features that I needed for our
design customers and offer it at a reasonable price.
We've must have succeeded because we don't take any new
design customers any more. I had a $19 price in my
head for what we needed for each customer so I wasn't
going to charge $39. I wanted email, a control panel,
auto responders, FrontPage extensions cgi access and
most of all a Stat program that told me how you all were
finding us. Mostly all the neat gagets we had at
Communitech with a better pricing scheme and most of all
no hassle technical support. Plus we have
added things along the way webmail, web-based design
tools, shopping carts, search engines, a discount on
domain registration based on the fact that we register
so many, NT services, cold fusion. We added as you ask
for it basically.
But most of all we wanted to offer support especially to
those who didn't know any better. We had our fair share
of mistakes because we didn't know any better We
paid too much money for no service and no support. Plus
had to sit on hold to get that. Well it sucks plain and
simple. I know they say buyer beware, but frankly 90% of
the net population doesn't know what to beware of. They
gravitate to the larger hosting companies of the world
who have long hold times not alot of support and charge
high prices for a swiss cheese hosting plans. You get
space you don't get email. You get email you don't get a
shopping cart. They give web hosting companies in
general a bad name. If I now the answer to a question
I'll answer it. We aren't going to tell you to call
Microsoft. Oh and incase you were wondering it is now
$35 per phone call. Yup you pay $90 for the product and
hope you don't need to call for help. Although my
customers know if we know the answer we'll tell you. You
know I think if I had to guess, 60% of the questions we
get are really third party questions. Microsoft, Adobe,
AOL, CGI scripts. ISP questions.
You may wonder why we get this, well I have one customer
who calls us every time her DSL line stops. One day I
asked her why she did this being we have no control over
Southwestern Bell. I think her answer sums up what we
are about. I don't have to sit on hold when I call you,
she said to me. And you answer me, she added. That's
what it comes down to. We listen we answer and we try to
provide the best total hosting product available.
As I
look back over the years, remember how I said we still
had customers #1 and #2...well here's another fact. We
sign up several hundred people per month. And when I
look at who's cancelled, we have less that 1%
cancellation rate and usually its accompanied with a
letter that says you guys have been great but for some
reason or another they were closing their site down. I
don't know how many other hosting companies get
complementary letters from people who are closing their
accounts. Judging by the new sales calls around here of
my hosting company is out of business, I can't get
though on the phone, they won't help me, my site is
always down there can't be too many.
Okay so
now that you know our whole story and why we are not
like other hosting companies out there. Why don't you
take a look at what
our customers have to say about us .
Some have
real horror stories about their old hosting company and
some just wanted to say keep up the good work.
You know recently we took a survey of our customers and
we got a huge response. However one thing that we
noticed was that the people that had hosting with other
companies before us just raved about how much better we
were. Out of 20% of our customers who responded only 3
actual people had something negative to say about us.
That tells me that we are doing the best job that we can
and with a 99.9% customer satisfaction rate we must be
doing it right.
Beth Guide
President
ACTWD
