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1. Experience
With over a decade in business, we’ve experienced most of what this industry can dish out. Our staff have more than 20 years of combined IT experience, meaning we’ve got all the answers to your web questions alongside incredible support for our hosting solutions.
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2. Expert Advice
Over the years we’ve become the go-to company for hundreds of individuals and businesses. We provide advice on things like how to transfer a website, the best way to import a database, or repairing a hacked WordPress installation. Simply put, we know websites inside and out.
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3. Fast & Friendly Support
Websavers is known for its fast support and its friendly and knowledgeable staff. With impressive resources both in our knowledgebase and in our heads you know you will be getting the best support in the industry. Whether you have an issue with your website and email, server administration, or need seo help, we’ll be there for you when you need us.
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4. Proudly #local Canadian
Like most of our clients, we are a Canadian owned and operated company. Although we can offer you servers in datacentres around the world, our default will always be right here at home. We constantly strive to maintain our brand-leadership throughout the Canadian web hosting industry.
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5. Scalability
We're confident that your website and business will grow, so we've designed our services such that your hosting can scale with the growth of your website and business. From affordable shared hosting straight through to a powerful dedicated VPS.
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6. Security always wins
If you care about the privacy of your data, at all costs, then we’re the hosting company for you. We’ve fixed plenty of hosting horror stories left over from prior hosts. With our security systems and experience, you can be sure that if we haven’t already prevented your site from getting hacked, we have the expertise to help clean it up and prevent it from happening again.
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7. We’re Real People
We are not a faceless giant web-host (ahem, GoDaddy anyone? Not to name names…) that will treat you like a number or a dollar and always avoid your emails, Tweets or Facebook posts. We are real people. We care for our community, we enjoy sports, we love what we do, and we would love to meet you. Read about our team and send us a message just to say hi.
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8. We Don’t Advertise Shady Prices
When we advertise a price, we mean it exactly as shown. Many of our competitors show monthly prices that are only available in 24 and 36 month packages without any indication that it applies only to the longer term. To avoid this confusion, we always indicate the required term and avoid complicated contracts with ambiguous clauses (like you’ve probably had with your cell phone company). Instead you simply pay up-front for the term of your choice. After all, you’re not selling your soul… it’s just web hosting!
Other hosting companies...
The following is a list of things that we do not take part in, but which other hosting companies often do, negatively affecting the entire hosting industry.
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1. Overloading Servers
Most hosting companies will add so many websites on a single server that it's at 100% resource consumption at all times. This behaviour optimizes costs, but also leaves no resources free in the event your website needs a bit more to handle a traffic spike.
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2. Bait-and-Switch Pricing
This occurs when you pay a certain price at the outset, say for a year of hosting, then when that year is up your renewal is more expensive. We clearly indicate upon order exactly what your price is and what the recurring fees are.
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3. Forcing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
A content delivery network can help improve website speeds and security, but not in all cases. Web hosts often recommend using them to all of their clients because it's too much hassle for them to install or write software that provides better security and speed for your website built-in. We provide both for free without a CDN.
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4. Setting Unnecessary Resource Limits
While a web host may claim to have unlimited everything, as soon as your website gets a bit of traffic, or a web crawler gets a little over eager, your website could easily hit limits like inodes on the disk, Disk IO (IOPS) limits, CPU limits, or RAM. Instead of limiting things like CPU or Disk IO per website, we use hardware that has more than double what we need at any given time, so when your website needs it, the power is there.
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5. Not enough access
New wave hosting companies proudly proclaim they're providing you with a whole new hosting experience, which sounds great in theory, but in practice it often means that in order to simplify they dramatically limit your access. This frequently includes a lack of File System or FTP access, and a lack of access to manage your domain name.
With us, you have complete self-managed control over every detail of your hosting and domain via our powerful Client Centre paired with Plesk.
About Websavers
Websavers began in 2004 in Halifax, Nova Scotia as the answer to web hosting companies like GoDaddy and HostGator which provide poor technical support to all but the most basic of users. While their agents read from scripts and hope your problem matches, we provide insightful and data-driven answers to every question sent our way.
From the outset our goal was, and remains, to provide do-it-yourself web services that are easier to use than any of our competitors combined with more power at your fingertips. Balancing the power to do nearly anything web-related with a shared hosting account while simultaneously trying not to overwhelm our users is our ongoing control panel development struggle and joy.
Although we started laser-focused with shared web hosting and empowered support at an affordable price, we've since expanded into related markets that we found lacking such as, Virtual Private Server hosting, performance-focused WordPress development, and simplifying SEO advice and solutions.
We are the company that thousands of individuals and organizations trust every day to provide sound hosting advice and keep their websites, emails, and other data secure and consistently available.
We are proudly Canadian. Being based in Nova Scotia, we also bring our Maritime friendliness to work. We are an easy going and energetic team of hosting experts with over 25 years of combined experience working every day for you.
By building a workforce that operates from satellite offices (typically their home) and choosing our datacentre partners carefully we aim to be as environmentally friendly as possible for our industry (read more below).
Through our commitment to our community, and re-investment of capital in ever-improving software rather than excessive corporate salaries and bonuses, and our use of opt-in (or free) rather than opt-out sales process, we consider ourselves purveyors of 'beyond-compliance' corporate social responsibility. Because of this, you can trust that your subscription payments are always put towards great things like:
- Arts program sponsorships, like our recurring investment in classical theatre company: The Villain's Theatre.
- Training programs for minorities in software development
- Ensuring our employees live comfortably, yet not in excess, as is often the case with modern corporations
- Constant improvements to our Client Centre and hosting control panels to help make managing your account easier, such as the addition of incremental cloud backup solutions in Jan 2019.
- Enhancements to our hardware infrastructure. For example, much of 2018 was spent migrating the entirety of our systems to SSD-only storage to improve server response times (and website response times in turn) as well as reduce migration and restore times in the event disaster recovery is necessary. And because of improvements in technology we were able to do all of this without increases to our hosting plan prices.
We think you'd be hard pressed to find these same qualities from other hosting providers.
Our Values
A big part of the modern world comes down to what companies stand for.
Do they support social progress including rights for everyone, regardless of sex, race, and religion?
Do they stand up for corporate social responsibility and corporate transparency?
Do they care about the privacy of their customers?
Do they support the environment by actually using green energy (not just carbon offsets)?
We sure do.
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User Experience
We build our systems to make it easy to manage your online services. We've spent thousands of hours coding and integrating complex systems to provide you with quick and simple access to everything you need to maintain your services with us. We put more detail into our beautiful designs than nearly all other web service providers offering similar services. We do this because we believe that a control panel with an intuitive design and software solutions that are simple to understand make finding the things you're looking for faster and easier.
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Your Privacy
We are selling our storage, processing power, extensive wealth of knowledge and our outstanding customer service, not your personal property. We will never steal or sell your data. You own your content and domain name and we promise to continue helping you improve and maintain it for as long as you keep your account balanced.
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Quality of Service
Unlike social media services (Facebook, Google+) and free hosting and design providers (Weebly, Wix), we don't waste engineering time developing new ways to sell your personal data or inject shady advertisements into your website. Instead, we focus on building the most reliable, secure, and best valued service we can provide.
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Powerful Access Control
We believe it is not only your right, but also our responsibility to ensure you have access to self-manage every service and all data you have with us. Whether that is a website design, email account management, or domain ownership management, they’re yours to control as long as you continue service with us. Not ours! That means you can back-up, export, and delete any and all data at the time of your choosing.
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Social Responsibility
Websavers’ financial incentives are entirely tied to providing a secure and reliable service that you can depend on. We spend 100% of our time and your payments working to maintain and improve your service, not to pad our wallets with excessive executive bonuses.
Our Team
We are proudly Canadian. Being based in Nova Scotia we also bring our Maritime friendliness to work. We are an easy going and energetic team of web services experts.
Jordan Schelew
Jordan always knew his calling was in the intersection of business and technology and now he makes use of both skills full-time at Websavers Inc.
While not working on web projects or tinkering with servers, Jordan is often found walking the dog, playing tennis, or catching up on the latest news.
Allen Pooley
Allen has been working on websites and servers since 2001. Prior to Websavers Allen was building eLearning courses and websites for some of the largest professional services firms in the world.
An avid technology and food enthusiast, Allen is typically found nursing a coffee and playing with his latest and shiniest piece of technology, or cooking up some delicious culinary creation.
Krista Leger
Krista is self taught in everything she does from building sites with WordPress + BeaverBuilder to creating vector graphics with Affinity Pro.
She's the owner and head chef of a seasonal restaurant in Dartmouth, has a degree in photography, and spends her free time on nail art, reading, or scoping out her favourite vintage chairs.
Eric Ramallosa
Eric handles late night tech support including migrations, DNS, e-mail issues, HTML, PHP, CSS, SEO, page speed optimization, WordPress management and more.
To unwind, Eric loves a good book, chess, aikido, and skipping leg day at the gym (jk, we're pretty sure he does the legs too).
William Phomsavanh
Will's NSCC diploma, years of experience working for IT companies in Nova Scotia, and massive number of connections are put to the test every day here at Websavers.
When not working (which is pretty much never), Will can be found with a camera in his hand or atop his Ducati either on the road or on the track.
Moe Saidi
Moe has years of experience with software development and software security analysis, which have served him well throughout his first year of part-time development work at Websavers.
Moe has zero free time for crazy hobbies as he's got a cacophony of children, which he loves very much, awaiting him every time he returns home.
Who Shouldn't Pick Websavers?
Let's face it, you can't please everyone.
We don’t want just anybody around here, we want folks that plan to stick with us for years to come, so we want to be sure that our limitations won’t be a serious problem for you. In our experience, transparency is the best way to accomplish that and help ensure we create incredible relationships with every one of our customers.
While there’s plenty of reasons to host with us, there’s also a few reasons why you might not want to pick us as your go-to hosting provider:
Sorry, but we don't answer the phone.
(Which is why we don't advertise our phone number).
We have fast and effective customer support via our support ticket system that’s built into our Client Centre, we offer live chat on our website, and you can reach us via social media at any time.
If you're set on reaching out by voice, you can still leave a voicemail clearly indicating what we can help you with alongside your email address, and we’ll email you back within 24 hours.
If you are unable to communicate in writing or you demand telephone support, we’re not the host for you.
The only feasible way to operate a call centre for technical support is to have low-skill, low-wage technicians on the front-line of answering phones who then escalate up to senior technicians for everything but the most trivial of issues.
The last time I called a company for tech support I was on hold for over an hour and when I finally got through, the folks on the line didn't have the expertise to actually help me. Furthermore they kept requiring that I spell out *everything* over a crappy-quality line at which point there's a whole lot of "C as in Charlie, E as in Everest," while I'm pulling my hair out because I could have sent all this info in a 10 second email! You've surely been there before too, no?
Instead of putting our financial investment into telephone operators, and awkward tech support scenarios, we make use of a smaller number of developers and highly skilled technicians who are available via support tickets and live chat.
This way you know that, when you reach out to us with an issue, it will be an experienced and knowledgeable person who replies and works with you to resolve any issues. You'll also find that our knowledgebase and guides cover the vast majority of basic technical questions that come up.