Web Hosting in Boston, MA

An economy of experts, and the standard it sets

Two things shape almost every Boston website we look at. The buildings are old, so the trades that repair and rework them never run out of work. And the people living in those buildings are, on average, unusually credentialed. A city built on teaching and medicine produces customers who read carefully, compare three options and notice when something is sloppy.

That combination is unforgiving in a specific way. In a lot of markets a plain, slightly dated website is fine because everybody's is. Here your prospective client has already opened four tabs, and one of those four is a practice or a contractor who spent money on their site. You are being graded against them whether you agreed to it or not.

What that visitor is actually checking

Not your design awards. They want to know whether you handle their situation, whether you have handled it before, what happens next, and how to reach a person. A page that makes them hunt for any of those loses to the page that does not.

• A medical practice should name what it treats in the words a patient would use, not in the language of a referral letter.
• A law firm should say which matters it takes and which it sends elsewhere. To an audience trained to spot hedging, vagueness reads as hedging.
• A remodelling company should carry a tappable phone number in the header as real text, never sealed inside an image.
• Each of those three is made heavy by a different thing. The practice is carrying staff portraits shot at print resolution, the firm is carrying scanned filings, the remodeller is carrying one room photographed twice. Size all of it for a phone screen before it goes up, because nobody goes back and does it later.
• Read your own site on a phone on mobile data, standing somewhere between appointments. That is the condition it is actually judged in.

In a market where practically everyone is qualified, the credential is the ordinary case. What separates two equally qualified firms on screen is which one is legible in ten seconds.

Buying from out of state, and what you are actually choosing

Worth answering plainly rather than dodging. Whoever sells you hosting, your pages sit in a building neither of us will ever walk into, and no visitor in Massachusetts can tell which state that building stands in. Proximity is not among the things you are buying.

What you are buying is who picks up, and how long a real answer takes to arrive. That differs enormously between companies and not at all by mileage. We keep one office in Buffalo, we work the hours you work, and we have looked after websites since 1999.

If the requirement is somebody sitting at your desk in person, we are the wrong firm and we will say so early rather than late. For setting up hosting, moving a site, keeping mail running through the change and answering the phone afterwards, the state line changes nothing. There is more about who we are if you want it before deciding.

Ask any prospective host one question: on the morning something breaks, who specifically answers, and how. A company that cannot put that in a sentence has told you the answer.

The small technical things people check before calling

In a market this dense with practices, firms and licensed trades, a few small technical things get read as evidence of seriousness whether or not that is fair. They are cheap to get right and awkward to be caught without.

• A valid certificate, so no browser ever puts a warning in front of a prospective client. Details on SSL certificates.
• Email at your own domain rather than a free consumer address. It is the single fastest thing people judge.
• A site that is patched and not quietly running a plugin abandoned four years ago.
• Backups you have actually restored once, rather than backups you assume exist.

None of this wins you a client on its own. All of it loses you one when it is missing, because the person comparing four options has an easy reason to cross one off. If your site has been sitting untouched for a few years, start with website security and work down the list.

Ask somebody at your own front desk to find the site on their phone and book or enquire as a stranger would. Wherever they hesitate is where a prospective client leaves.