My Web Hosting Journey — an Interview with Clook Internet
Recently I wrote about 3 Steps to Finding the Perfect Web Host for your Business. With so many hosting companies out there, it’s difficult to know where to start. I recommend having a look at the article, which goes through the different options and what questions to ask.
I started writing basic websites when I was at University in 1995– when the world wide web was in its infancy. However, it wasn’t until 2000 that I bought my first domain names and looked at the world of building and hosting my own website. I opted for a small Scottish hosting company called XCalibre. I had a very good experience with them to begin with– they had good customer service and they went out their way to help novices such as myself. Initially I started with basic shared hosting, but after I founded my business, Select Performers Internet Solutions, with my dad, it wasn’t long before we upgraded to a reseller account and subsequently a dedicated server.
Unfortunately XCalibre sold it’s web hosting division to WebFusion to concentrate on its Cloud Services product, Flexiant. It was at this point that everything went down hill in a big way. I’ll spare you the sob story, but suffice to say the time when our dedicated server died as a result of a fire alarm going off in the Web Fusion data centre was the least of our worries!
We had invested so much in the set up we had with XCalibre, that moving to a different hosting provider was always going to be a difficult task. After a lot of time researching we came up with three possibilities and we contacted them all. We decided to take the plunge and move over to Clook Internet after a very helpful chat with the managing director. It was a long drawn out process for us, as it meant updating just about every page on all the websites we managed.
Thankfully we were in good hands– Clook were incredibly patient and helpful as we migrated all our sites across to our new server and they went over and above what I would have expected any hosting company to do. This included a one-to-one walk through of the control panel– cPanel where we could ask questions and learn how to use it.
Chris James (known to everyone as Jim!) was kind enough to let me interview him for this blog post. I thought it would be interesting to have a bit more insight into what it’s like running a hosting company. Clook are a smallish hosting company, but they offer a wide range of services including shared, reseller, virtual servers, dedicated servers, content delivery networks, SSL certificates and domain names. They’re not the cheapest– but what you do get is amazing customer service– and I mean amazing! They don’t always get things right, and there have been a few issues over the past few years– but you get that with any hosting company. I think the proof of a good hosting company is what they do when things go wrong. Do they admit the mistake and go out of their way to sort things out or do they fob you off and blame the customer?!
http://iag.me/tech/web-hosting-journey-interview-with-clook-internet/
