I consider myself a full time Internet person. I am connected almost 24-7, either through my desktop computer or on one of my multiple mobile devices. In addition my companies all have full service websites that are back end driven with complex administrative controls. The websites are a BIG PART of our marketing efforts and they receive high traffic.

We do an incredible amount of research on other company’s sites and how they present themselves online so we can stay ahead of our competition. To do this we work with one of the best web full service web design firms - Atlantic BT. Atlantic BT is located in North Carolina and they are one of the best known Raleigh web design firms. The nice thing about the company is that they offer web design, hosting, programming and marking services for small to medium sized businesses. That was perfect for us, but still not the most important reason we use them.

The main reason we LOVE Atlantic BT is the people who work there. They understood what we were trying to accomplish with our websites and they were willing to listen to our ideas and not just try to cram what they thought down our throats. And when we did want input from them, they hit home runs with everything they suggested. They also built us fantastic back end controls so we could make most of the changes to our sites whenever we wanted to. This gave us the flexibility to make instant changes to the site.

One of our sites was recently profiled. You can see it here. I highly recommend Atlantic BT if you need a site built. It is a good company with talented people who will make your web site stand out from all the rest of the sites out there.

MANY of my readers here at PD are webmasters, blog owners, and forum owners. Each of us can attest to the daily worry we all share about the web hosting companies where our domains and site files reside in rented space.  For some of us these websites are our business, our lively hood, and our emotional outlets. They mean A LOT to each of us for many different reasons.

So what do we do? We trust unseen people (some in far away countries) and unknown (and potentially unreliable) computers to be completely in control of our precious files, databases, images, and in many cases years and years of information. In what other situation do we do something like this in our daily lives? Do we put our children in daycare centers without checking them out first and visiting them every single day to actually see the people working there and the conditions of the facility? Of course not! Similarly would we choose a President without first learning what they stood for, how they had voted in the past, and what their political agenda was? Again - of course not!

It was a scary realization the day I finally understood how little control I really had with my sites. I could not pull up one of my sites and immediately went to the web hosting company I was using. To my horror I could not get their site to come up. It was literally gone. No message. No notification of what had happened. Nothing. I was screwed. The hosting company had disappeared and taken my site with them. I literally had no recourse at that very moment. From that day forward I decided to not allow myself to be in that situation again. I had to either know more about the companies I was trusting with my sites or buy my own server.

Since buying a dedicated server was to expensive for me I opted for doing the research. I would never allow my thousands of hours of hard work and sites to be put at risk again. At the time I had knew little about sub domains or managed hosting options. But I was determined to learn everything I could. I also found sites like Web Hosting Rating, which rates the top web hosting companies based on a variety of factors and then posts reviews about them with links, rates, and features available.

Basically the hosting companies are in complete control of our websites. It literally PAYS to learn as much as you can to safeguard your valuable websites.