Free Business Email
Typcial web hosting comes with free email. This is should never be used for a lot of reasons, the most important of which has to do with your emails getting delivered properly. Your email is more likely to be trusted by SPAM filters if it is sent through a professional Email Service Provider like Google or Microsoft. In a shared hosting environment, the address from which your email originates (called an IP address) is shared with other websites (sometimes thousands!) on that server. If another website on your server sends email that, for whatever reason, gets consistently labelled as SPAM, then every site sharing that IP address can become 'blacklisted'. This results in mail sent from @yourwebsite.com also getting punished. It's tricky to fix - much better to avoid.
Web Hosting is for websites, not email.
At one time, both Microsoft and Google had free offerings for business email hosting. Eventually, both companies decided this didn't fit within their business models. Luckily, another company decided that it does! Zoho offers a finely tuned suite of business apps - some paid, some free.
Zoho Mail now offers free business email for up to 25 email addresses, with 5 GB storage per mailbox.
This is professionally hosted email for your domain without any advertisements or ad targeting. Plus their support team is fast and friendly.* It's really great news for small businesses, many of which will never exceed those generous limits. As it turns out, some of those paid apps are pretty great, and we wouldn't have kicked their tires if we hadn't started offering Zoho Mail setup!
WP Maintained Hosting is a Zoho Partner. We work together to migrate your email, or simply set up a new account if you're business is brand new.
Setup Cost: $150
Migrate Existing Emails: $50-250 (depending on size and complexity)
*up to 25 mailboxes. FYI your email is not connected to your WP Maintained Hosting plan. Once setup, it is forever yours. Your email is not maintained by WPMH, and support requests should be directed to: support@zohomail.com
Advanced Hosting Options
Your basic maintenance plan includes shared hosting, and a fresh, secure installation of WordPress if required.
If you're site is already hosted elsewhere, that's no problem. We maintain websites on WP Engine, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Bluehost, and others.
When maintained and secured properly, shared hosting - which means having multiple websites sharing the same web server - is an economical choice for most websites that act as a brochure for your organization. However:
If you plan on opening up a rival to eBay or Craigslist, then there are many considerations that will exceed the limits of a Shared Hosting environment.
In these cases, businesses used to have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per month on dedicated hosting servers. Many still do. The problem with dedicated hosting is that it's expensive to setup, maintain, and scale. Business booming? Huge one-day sale? Unexpected spikes in traffic can cause the server to overload, requiring hours to days of upgrades, and - most importantly - a website down during your most critical time!
The answer to this is called Virtualization. Instead of using a dedicated physical computer, we can now allocate the same server resources using software, to create a flexible hosting environment perfectly tailored to the needs of each website. WPHM offers Right Sized Hosting options that can be easily scaled to the needs of each website. Selling 100,000 products online? Getting a million readers per month on your blog? No problem!
Shared Hosting: Included in Fee
Advanced Hosting: From $20/month*
*depending on a thorough analysis of the anticipated volume of website traffic, disk space requirements, processing power needed and additional maintenance requirements.
Website Analytics
A fancy term for: how many people visited your website today? This week/month/year? What links are they clicking? Are they getting stuck somewhere and leaving the site? Which pages get the most views and longest reads? The answers to these questions help us to see where our website is performing well, and what areas may need improvement. Fortunately Google will track a great deal of visitor data and send you reports for free.
In addition to website visitor data, we can also use an email marketing program like Mailchimp to see who's opening our emails and how many times they open them. Do you think someone who opens your promotional email a dozen times might be worth reaching out to?
You can segregate all this data to create action plans for marketing efforts, sending tailored content to those who show interest in particular areas, and encourage or entice those fence-sitters to take action.
Google Analytics Setup: $35
Advanced Goal Tracking: TBD
Visitor Session Recording: TBD
Advanced Backups
If you need to roll back some major change to a page or layout, or some error occurs during editing, you can always request a rollback to the previous day - even up to 60 days prior! Our backups are accessible right down to individual files.
Did you delete an image by accident ... six weeks ago? We can track it down for you.
Daily backups are included with your standard maintenance plan. A 24-hour backup cycle is sufficient for most websites, where changes to content or images on the site are infrequent. But if you are:
- creating multiple blog posts per day;
- receiving regular comments;
- making sales or adjusting pricing;
- frequently tweaking to your content, images etc,
then you might need a more frequent backup schedule to avoid losing data. By special request, you can have your site backed up every 12 or 8 hours. For an $10 extra per month, you even can have hourly backups!
12/8 hour cycle: No extra cost*
Hourly cycle: $10/month
*While higher frequency backups do increase our overall load, we are happy to include this service by special request at no extra cost.