This post is really old. Dan now recommends Big Scoots for just about all hosting. But read on for boring stuff about hosting more than a decade ago.
Dan Dreifort and Tim Hibbard, both confessed IT geeks, grew tired of listening to their peers (and each other) griping about the sad state of the web hosting industry. Some sick combination of financial, marketing and executive visions had largely polarized hosting offerings into two distinct, silly camps. At the enterprise level, big businesses can pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month for robust managed servers while consumers increasingly had to choose from among countless bottom feeders. These hosts, like Godaddy, 1&1 and their ilk put thousands of customers on a single box sharing a single IP address.
SEO friendly hosting
When your web site shares an IP address with “unscrupulous” sites (e.g. pornographers or spammers,) the Googles of the world associate you with that seedy content and rank your content lower in the search engine results. If you rank highly for the right terms, your web traffic and business should skyrocket. It’s easy to see why a dedicated IP address is key to a comprehensive search engine optimization plan. Another important part of your web business is uptime. If your host is having problems, customers can’t get to your site, contact you or purchase your wares.
Calico Hosting focuses almost all of its efforts on uptime. We’re able to do this by ignoring that which becomes unnecessary when things just work as they should. While almost all if not all hosts dump considerable resources into the bottomless pit of offshore phone support, Calico does not offer phone technical support. We don’t need to. If things are working as they should, customers don’t need to contact the host. In 2008, Calico experienced their first minute of downtime after several hundred days and quickly traced the problem to single client’s script. We restored service in quick fashion and took action to prevent the same sort of problem from occuring again.
Redundant Hosting
Calico’s six multi processor servers currently handle about one hundred domains. We could cut expenses and host ten times as many sites on a single server, but reliability and speed would suffer. Each primary Calico server is mirrored. An identical server with the same data sits ready should hardware malfunction on a primary server. This redundancy hurts our bottom line, but supports that of our clients.
I’ll blog more about my great reliable host in the future. Until then, use some of the links in this post to read more on our site. I really love Calico.
Dan Dreifort 