New York
The largest business market in the country.
Hosting in New York
Hosting by state
Web Hosting in New York
New York is not one economy, it is four sitting in the same set of borders, and the website a business needs changes completely depending on which one it trades in. This is the one state we can say we are actually in, so we will be blunt about what web hosting in New York from a company in the state does and does not buy you.
AldoMedia is in New York. One office, at 656 North French, Ste 2, Buffalo NY 14228, and the number is 716-771-2536. That is Buffalo and only Buffalo. We have no second office elsewhere in the state, and everything outside this city is handled remotely.
The state where we are actually from
On every other location page on this site we open by saying we are somewhere else. Here we do not have to. AldoMedia has been building and looking after websites from an office in New York since 1999, and the businesses we have worked with longest are in this state.
It is worth being precise about what that means, because the state is enormous and the word local gets stretched until it stops meaning anything. We are in Buffalo. If you are in Buffalo, we can meet you. If you are anywhere else in New York, we are a company in your state rather than a company in your town, and you should treat us the same way you would treat any remote supplier: judge us on whether we answer.
What twenty-five years in one state does give you is pattern recognition. We have watched a lot of New York businesses go through the same three problems in the same order: a site built by somebody who has since stopped replying, a domain registered to an email address nobody can get into any more, and a hosting bill that quietly doubled at renewal. None of that is unique to this state. But it is what we see when a New York number rings.
If you want somebody who will come to your office and sit with you, that is a Buffalo offer, not a statewide one. We will not pretend otherwise.
Tell us which New York you trade in
Send us the address of your site and what your business actually does. We will tell you what the page weighs, how it behaves on a phone, and whether the plan you are paying for matches the work it has to do.
Four economies wearing one state's name
Ask what New York does for a living and the honest answer is that it depends entirely where you are standing when you ask.
In one part of the state the money is in finance and professional services, and the businesses around it are the ones that serve people who work long hours: legal, accounting, consulting, and a dense layer of hospitality and retail underneath. In another, the anchor is medicine, with hospital systems and research employing a large share of the working population and pulling in an entire economy of clinics, suppliers and specialist practices around them.
Move again and you are in manufacturing country, much of it precision work and contract production, businesses that sell to other businesses and whose websites are read by engineers and buyers rather than consumers. Keep going and you are in agriculture: dairy, orchards, vineyards and the food processing that follows them, with a season that dictates when the phone rings and when it does not.
Why that matters for a website
Because the four have almost nothing in common in what they need online, and any hosting company that gives you one answer for the whole state is not listening.
- A professional services firm needs credibility and a working contact form. The site is small, static, read on a phone between meetings, and the risk is that it looks abandoned.
- A medical or clinical business needs accuracy above all. Hours, locations, which insurers are accepted, who is taking new patients. Wrong information here costs real appointments.
- A manufacturer is selling capability, and the buyer wants specifications, certifications and drawings. That usually means documents to host and keep current, and a site that survives being read on a factory network.
- An agricultural or food business is seasonal and photograph-heavy, which is the combination most likely to produce a slow site exactly when the season peaks.
The hosting underneath all four can be identical. What differs is what you put on it and what you check before the busy part of your year.
What these four economies ask of web hosting in New York
Very little, in most cases, and we would rather say that than sell you something.
The typical New York small business site is a handful of pages that change a few times a year. That belongs on shared hosting and the entry tier is usually genuinely enough. Where the state's mix does change the calculation is at the edges.
Documents, which the manufacturing side lives on
A contract manufacturer or supplier ends up hosting specification sheets, certificates and capability documents. Those are small files, so storage is not the issue. The issue is that they go out of date silently and that somebody needs to be able to replace one without opening a design program. Plan for editing, not for space.
Photographs, which the agricultural side lives on
Anything that sells something grown, made or served sells it from pictures, and unresized pictures are the single most common cause of a slow site anywhere in this state. A larger plan makes a heavy page slightly less slow. Resizing the images fixes it. Do the free thing first.
Accuracy, which the medical side lives on
If your business turns on hours, locations and who you are accepting, the most valuable thing your hosting gives you is the ability to change a line of text in a minute without asking anybody. That is a smaller and cheaper requirement than most people are sold.
The general case for what any of this costs to run is set out on what a website costs to run, and we would rather link to it than repeat it here.
Same state, same time zone
We answer Eastern time, we have been doing this since 1999, and we will tell you when the answer is to change nothing. Moving an existing site is a job we do without taking the old one down.
Winter, and the one thing it genuinely affects
New York has real winters across most of its area, and a lot of businesses here have a season that swings hard. Trades that clear, repair and heat get their year compressed into a few months. Anything visitor-facing does the opposite.
The website effect is not what people expect. Snow does not take a server down, because the server is not in the weather with you and is not in this state in any case. What a hard season exposes is a site that was already too heavy, read on a phone, outdoors, on a bad connection, by somebody who wants a number to tap and nothing else.
The second effect is more boring and more expensive. Seasonal businesses stop looking at the site for months, and that is when a domain quietly expires, a certificate lapses, or an out of date site picks something up. If your year has a quiet half, put the renewal dates somewhere you will see them and read domain expiration before the quiet half starts, not during it.
The most common emergency we take from a seasonal business is not downtime. It is a domain that lapsed in February and got noticed in April.
Why a Buffalo company for a business elsewhere in the state
Being in the same state sounds like it should matter more than it does, so here is the straight version.
Hosting is not a local service. Your website does not live in your town today and it will not afterwards. It lives in a data centre, and where that is has no practical bearing on a visitor loading your page. We are an independent authorised reseller, not the operator of the underlying platform, and we will not pretend to own hardware we do not own.
So what you are choosing is not a location. It is who picks up when something is wrong at an awkward moment, and whether that person will tell you honestly that the plan you already have is fine. That varies enormously between suppliers and it has nothing at all to do with the distance between you and them.
What being in New York does give you is the small practical stuff: the same time zone, the same working week, the same holidays, and a phone number in the same state as your business. Those are modest advantages and we will describe them as modest. If you need somebody on site, we cover one city, and it is not yours unless you are in Buffalo.
If you are inheriting a site somebody else built, that is its own problem and it is covered on taking over a website.
New York cities with a page of their own
Two cities at opposite ends of the state, with opposite economies, each written up separately. We work with businesses everywhere in between as well.
Buffalo
Our own city: medicine, manufacturing and a revived downtown.
Hosting in BuffaloEvery state is on our locations page, and every trade we cover is on hosting by industry.
Photograph: Serebit, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Common questions
New York hosting questions
Are you actually in New York, or is this a listing page?
We are actually here. One office, in Buffalo, at 656 North French, Ste 2, and the phone is 716-771-2536. That is the whole of our physical presence. We do not have a downstate office and we are not going to imply one, because the state is large enough that claiming it would be dishonest.
Does hosting a New York business mean the server should be in New York?
No. The distance between a visitor and a server is measured in milliseconds and it is swamped by everything else on the page. A site that feels slow here is almost always heavy rather than far away. Check the weight of the homepage before you consider moving anything.
My business is nowhere near Buffalo. Is that a problem?
Not for hosting. Setting up a plan, moving an existing site, keeping the mail records intact and answering the phone afterwards are all done remotely, and they are done the same way whether you are an hour away or five. If what you want is somebody who will drive out to you, then yes, that is a problem, and we would rather tell you now.
My site gets busy for one season and sits still for the rest of the year. What should I be on?
Almost certainly a small plan. Seasonal traffic looks dramatic on a graph and is trivial for a server that is handing out cached pages. Spend the money on making the pages lighter and on remembering to check the site during the quiet months, which is when domains lapse and certificates expire unnoticed.
I inherited a site and nobody knows where it is hosted. Can you find out?
Usually, yes. Public records will tell us where the domain is registered and where the site is currently served from, and that is normally enough to work out who is billing you. Getting control back is the slower part, because it depends on what access still exists. Once the access question is settled, the move itself is routine and the site does not have to go dark while it happens.
One state, four economies, one number
Tell us what your site has to do and where in New York it has to do it. We will tell you what to fix, what to leave alone, and whether you are already on the right plan.
Get Your Web Hosting Plan Get help choosing
Or call 716-771-2536. We are in Buffalo, New York, so we answer Eastern time.