About Websavers Inc. Content Marketing company in Dartmouth, Canada
With over a decade in business weve experienced most of what this industry can dish out. Our staff have more than 20 years of combined IT experience meaning weve got all the answers to your web questions alongside incredible support for our hosting solutions.
Over the years weve 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.
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 well be there for you when you need us.
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.
We#39;re confident that your website and business will grow so we#39;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.
If you care about the privacy of your data at all costs then were the hosting company for you. Weve fixed plenty of hosting horror stories left over from prior hosts. With our security systems and experience you can be sure that if we havent already prevented your site from getting hacked we have the expertise to help clean it up and prevent it from happening again.
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.
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 youve probably had with your cell phone company). Instead you simply pay up-front for the term of your choice. After all youre not selling your soul… its just web hosting!
Most hosting companies will add so many websites on a single server that it#39;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.
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.
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#39;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.
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.
New wave hosting companies proudly proclaim they#39;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.
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#39;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 #39;beyond-compliance#39; corporate social responsibility. Because of this you can trust that your subscription payments are always put towards great things like:
We think you#39;d be hard pressed to find these same qualities from other hosting providers.
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.
We build our systems to make it easy to manage your online services. We#39;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#39;re looking for faster and easier.
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.
Unlike social media services (Facebook Google+) and free hosting and design providers (Weebly Wix) we don#39;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.
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 theyre 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.
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.
Datacentre
While our managing partners are based in Halifax our physical servers reside just outside of Montreal Canada. Although we have access to datacentres spanning the globe for those looking for a particular locale we suggest all of our clients try our Canadian-based servers before investigating an alternative location.
To date not one client has required an alternative datacentre. We attribute this to our datacentre#39;s private network that connects Canada to both Europe and the US with exclusive high-speed fibre bundles. Most datacentres require shared third party lines to make the same connections thusly limiting their bandwidth during peak hours.
Bandwidth amp; Power
Our primary datacentre partner is 98% free from air conditioning thanks to highly efficient open chassis design and water cooling which enables 70% of heat emission dispersal. The power used for fans comes from a nearby hydroelectric dam making it 100% green energy. Their networks span the globe with over 7Tbps of total bandwidth.
Server Tech
Our Shared Servers and Virtual Private Servers operate on an OpenVZ virtualization layer atop bare metal with specs ranging from 4-16 cores 32GB – 128GB RAM 2-6TB storage and unlimited 500Mbit – 1Gbit bandwidth.
Backup amp; Recovery
Our disaster recovery backup solution is two-fold starting with near-instant hard drive failure recovery using parity RAID on most servers and mirrored RAID on all others. Our secondary recovery layer is covered by off-server TLS encrypted rsynced data to massive bit-parity protected dedicated storage servers.
As clocked by StatusCake our average page load time across all servers is just 0.5s and our average uptime is 99.99%.
Custom Built (and Managed) Infrastructure
We do not use centralized cloud services like Amazon S3 Google cloud or Microsoft Azure for two reasons:
1. There#39;s no guarantee that the data remains within Canada which is very important to us for privacy law consideration.
2. Although people tend to think cloud services are infallible that#39;s anything but true. These massive cloud services regularly encounter outages as you can see. It#39;s probably way more common than you realize. By not using their services when they have an outage we#39;re still online.
Sure we don#39;t have a perfect 100% uptime record but at least we can step into action to repair our virtualization host nodes when needed rather than being stuck sitting on our butts only relaying updates to our customers during our few outages.
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.
Let#39;s face it you can#39;t please everyone.
We dont 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 wont 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 theres plenty of reasons to host with us theres also a few reasons why you might not want to pick us as your go-to hosting provider:
We dont always answer the phone because we do not operate a call centre.
We have incredibly fast and effective customer support via our support ticket system thats built into our Client Centre but if you call us and were busy updating websites or servers or meeting with other clients at the time Im afraid you wont get an answer.
We ask that you leave a voicemail clearly indicating what we can help you with alongside your email address and well email you back just as soon as we can! If you are unable to communicate in writing were probably 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.
Case in point: the last time I called a company for tech support I was on hold for 45 minutes and when I finally got through the folks on the line didn#39;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#39;s a whole lot of C as in Charlie E as in everest while I#39;m pulling my hair out because I could have sent all this info in a 10 second email! You must have been in this kind of situation before too no?
Instead of putting our financial investment into telephone operators and awkward tech support scenarios as described above we make use of a smaller number of developers and highly skilled technicians who are available via support tickets during our support hours.
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#39;ll also find that our knowledgebase and guides cover the vast majority of basic technical questions that come up.
There are 2 ways to get help when you need it:
Option 1: Do-it-yourself. With our barebones plans we provide the tools and resources necessary to both administer and self-repair your hosting and other services. When you encounter a problem that is with our software we fix it (for free of course) so you can continue to make use of our software trouble free.
Option 2: Leave it to us. Our Platinum add-on is available to both shared hosting and VPS hosting clients that want someone to take care of most of the management for them. Our Platinum support can be purchased when you place your initial hosting order or through our Client Centre simply by choosing ’Add-Ons’ for your hosting plan.
If you disagree with this support methodology perhaps were not the right fit for you.
We take security seriously. No really.
This is a major bonus for those that are likeminded and always keep their software updated but those of you who are scared to run software updates might have a bit of trouble. This is because we dont wait 2-4 weeks after a security patch is released that fixes a serious vulnerability: we patch immediately.
For some this is problematic as it doesnt always supply enough time to update their software for full compatibility resulting in a plugin not functioning or a page not loading properly. Unfortunately thats just too bad. To help illustrate why heres a couple scenarios:
Scenario #1: Leave a vulnerability unpatched and it could result in stolen data entire websites defaced/offline rooted servers and hours if not days of costly cleanup.
Scenario #2: Patch the vulnerability. You might find one or two incompatible plugins or custom code that could break just a small portion of your site. Apply an update or change a few lines of code and youre all fixed up. Compare that to the entire website being offline or leaked customer data and surely youll agree that this scenario is preferred.
Were proactive about security regardless of the consequences because keeping your data and websites secure is more important to us than anything else.
We cant always fix everything immediately.
Sometimes we require that you run some tests on your end to help us resolve a problem. We believe every problem encountered is a learning opportunity for all those involved including you. This means that were very likely to involve you in the repair process.
If youre the type of person that likes to throw all your troubles at IT and expect them to resolve it without your help then we might not be the best solution for you.
