Law firms
Practice pages, attorney profiles and published writing all have to load fast and stay at the same web address for years, because other people cite them.
Law firms hosting
Washington, DC
Web Hosting in Washington, DC
Washington runs on government, law and associations, and that last one changes how websites get bought. A membership organisation does not buy web hosting in Washington, DC, the way a shop does. It chooses by committee, on a fiscal year, and often nobody in the room knows where the domain is.
We are not in Washington. AldoMedia works from one office in Buffalo, New York, with no DC address, no local number and nobody to send across town. Setup, migration and support all happen remotely, which is how hosting has always worked.
Associations buy hosting differently, and it shows
There is an unusual density of nonprofits, membership bodies and professional associations here, and they behave nothing like an ordinary small business when it comes to their website. A contractor decides on a Tuesday and pays on a Wednesday. An association decides in a meeting, in a quarter, against a budget somebody wrote last year. That is not a criticism, it is a different set of pressures, and most hosting companies are not built around it.
Nobody remembers who owns anything
Staff turn over. Boards turn over. Volunteers turn over faster than either. Four people later, the domain is registered to a personal email address that no longer receives mail, the hosting invoice goes to somebody who left, and the only person who knew the login moved on two roles ago.
It stays quiet right up until it is an emergency. A renewal notice goes to a dead mailbox, the domain lapses, and the site and the email go dark on the same morning. Read what happens when a domain expires before you need to.
- Register the domain to the organisation, not to a person. Use a role address that outlives whoever holds the role.
- Keep one written record of the registrar, the host and the email provider. Three separate things, often three separate companies.
- Turn on auto-renew, then check once a year that the card behind it has not expired.
- Put the handover in the offboarding checklist next to the keys and the credit card.
The budget cycle, not the sales cycle
Money for a website often arrives tied to something: a grant, a programme, a fiscal year that ends on an awkward date. That produces two habits worth naming. Spending in a rush before a year closes, and then a long stretch where nothing can be touched because there is no line item for it.
The practical answer is to keep the recurring cost small and predictable, and to do the one-off work when there is money for one-off work. Hosting, a domain and email should be a boring annual number you can put on a form. What a website costs to run sets out the pieces so you can budget them separately.
If your organisation has a fiscal year that ends mid-summer, put the domain renewal date somewhere it will not collide with it. A lapsed domain during the quietest staffing week of the year is a bad week.
Find out what you actually have
Send us your web address and we will tell you where the domain is registered, who the host appears to be, how heavy the site is and what it would take to move it. No charge for looking, and if everything is already fine we will say so.
What a member-facing site actually has to do
Associations ask their website to be several things at once, and that is where the weight comes from. A public face for people who have never heard of you. A reference library for members. A calendar. A directory. Somewhere to publish a document that somebody spent three months writing.
Almost all of that is light. What makes an organisation site slow is rarely the hosting plan and nearly always one of a short list of things.
- A homepage slideshow that loads every image before the first line of text appears.
- A membership or events plugin doing database work on every single page view, including pages that have nothing to do with membership.
- A document library where every file is a scan rather than real text, so it is huge and cannot be searched.
- Embedded feeds and third-party widgets loading before your own content does.
Fix those and a modest shared hosting plan will carry a site that serves thousands of members comfortably. Buy a bigger plan without fixing them and you have made a heavy page slightly less slow at a permanently higher cost.
Documents deserve better treatment than they get
Policy papers, agendas, annual reports and comment letters are the substance of a lot of these sites. Two things make them work. Real text on a page for anything you want found, with the PDF as the download rather than the only version. And a stable web address, because the whole point of publishing a document is that somebody else links to it.
Changing the address of a document every time the site is rebuilt quietly breaks years of citations. If you must move things, keep the old addresses redirecting.
Leaving a host mid fiscal year, without dropping the mail
Most organisations that call us are not launching something new. They are leaving. A host that got slow, a volunteer developer who stopped answering, a renewal that tripled without warning, or a site nobody currently on staff can log into.
The sequence of a move is the same everywhere and we have written it once, on the website migration page, rather than repeating it here. What differs by organisation is which page you insist on testing first. For a firm it is the published writing, because other people's citations point at those addresses. For a nonprofit it is the donation form. For an event team it is whichever registration page is open that week, since a closed one for an hour is money.
The part that goes wrong is email, and in a membership organisation it goes wrong loudly, because what silently vanishes is renewals, press questions and a board member trying to reach the director. Record every mail record you have before anybody edits DNS. Email migration covers keeping mail flowing through the change.
If you cannot find the login for your current site, that is a normal starting point and not an embarrassing one. Taking over a website covers how to work out what you have and how to get control of it back.
Why a Buffalo company, for a Washington organisation
Fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan. Hosting is not a local service. Your website does not live in Washington today, and it will not afterwards. It sits in a data centre somewhere, and which state that building is in makes no practical difference to a visitor a few blocks from your office.
So what you are really choosing is who picks up when something is wrong at four in the afternoon. That varies enormously between providers, and it has nothing to do with distance. We are in Buffalo, we work the same Eastern hours you do, and we have built websites since 1999.
If what you need is somebody who can walk into a board meeting, we are the wrong choice and we will tell you so. For registering a domain, setting up hosting, moving a site and keeping mail flowing through the change, being in another state changes nothing at all.
We resell the platform your site would sit on rather than operating the hardware ourselves. Worth saying out loud, because nothing in that arrangement rewards us for putting a document library and a calendar on a plan built for a shop.
We will handle the move
Copy, test, switch the domain, keep the mail records intact so nothing bounces. Your staff keep working while it happens, and afterwards there is somebody to call.
Where web hosting in Washington, DC, budgets get wasted
This is the part most hosting companies leave out, so here it is plainly. Nonprofit and association budgets get spent on the following more often than they should.
- A large plan for a small site. Most of these websites are text, documents and a calendar. That is light work for a server.
- A separate security product duplicating something already included. Ask what the plan covers before adding anything on top.
- Several email accounts for people who left. Audit the mailbox list once a year.
- A monthly editing tool nobody on the current staff has ever opened.
- Extra storage, when the real problem is nine near-identical drafts of the same annual report.
Spending more genuinely makes sense when the site takes payments, runs member logins, hosts a large searchable library, or when an outage during a comment period or a conference would cost you real work that day. Visitor numbers alone almost never justify it.
One thing that is worth paying for regardless is backups you have actually tested. Organisations with rotating volunteers are the most likely to have somebody delete the wrong thing, and the least likely to notice quickly.
What makes each of these three sites heavy
Telling somebody to keep their files small is useless in the abstract, because the offending file is different in every trade. In a government, law and association economy it is usually one of three, and each has its own fix.
- A firm publishing its writing as scans of printed pages. Every brief and comment letter becomes an image, so the file is enormous, nothing inside it can be searched, and a search engine cannot read a word of it. Publish the text as a page and keep the file as the download.
- A membership body loading a gala or annual meeting album straight off a camera. Two hundred frames at full camera resolution on one page is more weight than the entire rest of the site, and nobody looks past the first row. Show a dozen small ones and let people ask for the rest.
- An event team rebuilding the whole programme every year and leaving each previous year in place at full weight, with its images, its map embed and its ticketing widget still loading. Archive the old years to plain pages that keep working as links but stop doing work.
None of the three is a hosting problem, which is why a larger plan does not solve any of them. Fix the file and the plan you already pay for gets faster on the same afternoon. If you want the plain version of what a plan does and where its limits genuinely sit, that is on the shared hosting page.
Who this comes up with most
Three kinds of organisation whose websites carry unusual weight in a government, law and association economy, each with a page of its own.
Nonprofits
Donations, member logins and a document library on a budget approved a year ago, run by staff and volunteers who change more often than the site does.
Nonprofits hostingEvent planners
Conference and gala pages spike hard for a few days, then have to be archived rather than deleted so next year's registrations can find them.
Event planners hostingEvery trade we cover is on hosting by industry, and every city on our locations page.
Skyline photograph: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
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Common questions
Washington hosting questions
Our traffic in Washington arrives in short bursts around a comment deadline or an annual meeting. Will the site hold up?
Usually yes, if the pages people rush to are mostly text and documents rather than database work. A cached page is one the server has already assembled and can repeat cheaply, and that is what carries a burst. The pages that struggle are registration forms and member logins, because those cannot be cached. Tell us the date ahead of time and we will look at those specific pages first.
A volunteer deleted half of our published document library. Can that come back?
Usually, and this is the single most common call we get from organisations that run on rotating volunteers. A backup copies the site files and the database on a schedule, so deletions and bad edits can be put back. Two things catch people out. Mail lives with your mail provider and is not in that copy. And a backup nobody has ever restored from is a guess, so ask for a test restore once a year rather than finding out during a comment period. What a backup covers spells out the rest.
We are a law firm, a nonprofit or an event team in Washington. Do any of those need special hosting?
Mostly no, and anyone telling you otherwise is upselling. All three are light sites that shared hosting handles. The differences are in habits rather than plans. Firms need document addresses that never change, so other people's citations keep working. Nonprofits need access that survives staff turnover. Event teams need last year's pages archived rather than deleted, so returning attendees are not met with a dead link.
Most of our Washington members open the site on a phone between meetings, not at a desk. How do we test for that?
Office wifi hides almost every problem, and so does the second visit to a page. Take a phone off the wifi, stand somewhere with one or two bars, and open a page you have not touched today. Count the seconds until you can read something, not until everything finishes moving. Do it on the pages people actually reach for on the move, which for this kind of organisation is the calendar, one document and the contact details, rather than the homepage you were shown in the design meeting.
Tell us what you have got
Send the web address and whatever you know about who set it up. We will tell you what the site runs on, where the domain lives, and whether the plan you are paying for is the right one. If it already is, we will say so and charge you nothing.
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