Web Hosting in Buffalo, NY

We are actually here

Most hosting is sold by companies with no address you could visit, or with a hundred addresses that all resolve to the same call centre. We have one office, in Buffalo, and we have been at this since 1999.

That does not make the hosting faster. It is worth being honest about what it does change. It means you are dealing with somebody on your time zone, who knows what a February week does to a service business here, and who is not going to disappear behind a ticket queue when something breaks.

What twenty-five years in one city actually buys you

Mostly it buys pattern recognition. We have seen the same handful of problems arrive over and over from businesses in this economy: a site built by somebody who left town, a domain registered to an email address nobody can get into any more, a hosting renewal that quietly tripled, a medical practice sitting on software four years out of date.

• We have moved sites off nearly every host a local business is likely to be on.
• We know what an old site built on a dead platform looks like before we open it.
• We can tell you what a website here costs to run in a year, honestly, on the running costs page.
• If you inherited a site and nobody will hand over the login, that is a known problem with a known process. See taking over a website.

Being local is a reason to trust us. It is not a reason the hosting is better. Those are different claims and we are only making the first one.

Moving a site without losing the email

Most people who call us are not launching something new. They are leaving something: a host that got slow, a plan that jumped at renewal, a person who stopped answering. That is a migration, and migrations are routine right up until the email stops.

The order of operations is what matters. Copy the site to the new server first. Test it there, on a temporary address, until it is genuinely working. Only then point the domain across. Done that way the site never goes dark, because the old server keeps answering until each visitor's connection catches up.

Email is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong the same way nearly every time. Somebody rebuilds the DNS from scratch at the new host and does not carry over the mail records. The site looks perfect and the business loses a day of enquiries before anyone notices the phone is too quiet. Write the existing records down before touching anything. The full sequence is on the website migration page, and moving mailboxes specifically is covered under email migration.

If you are moving a practice or a shop that takes enquiries by email, we schedule the switch for a quiet morning, not a Friday afternoon.

What local really means for web hosting in Buffalo, NY

Here is the argument against us, made properly. Your website does not live in Buffalo. It lives in a data centre, and which state that building is in makes no measurable difference to somebody loading your page across town. We are an independent authorised reseller, not the owner of the machines. Any competent host anywhere can serve your site to this city just as fast.

So distance is not the thing you are buying. What varies between hosting companies is who answers when something is wrong, how long it takes, and whether that person will still be there next year.

That is the part where being here helps. Not because we can drive over, though we sometimes do. Because a company with one office in one city has to live with its reputation in that city. There is nowhere to hide from a business across town who tells everyone we were useless.

If you want the fastest possible page in Buffalo, the answer is not a Buffalo host. It is resized images and caching. That is true everywhere and we would rather tell you than sell you a plan that does not fix it.