Earn Money by Blogging » Web Hosting & Servers

an Interview with the Man Behind McKremie Web Hosting Solutions

Joedel — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:09:26 +0000

The internet world has provided a good source of income for a lot of people including me. However, the internet is not all about business and making money. This is also a place where you can meet new people and find friends from all over the world. And speaking of meeting people, I was very fortunate to have interviewed Stuart C. McHenry; the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions. Here’s my one-on-one interview with Stuart:

Joe: Hi Stuart! Can you tell our readers a little something about yourself and your company?
Stuart: Sure, I’ve been involved with the Internet since 1999 when my wife and I started a hobby website for her. About five years after that we started working on client web sites in the Marketing and web development areas. We had numerous request to host clients web sites and hosted a few on our own servers. In 2006 we decided to really focus on web hosting and make this our main priority and re-branded as McKremie, LLC.

Joe: How did you came up with the name of your company as McKremie?
Stuart: The simple answer is it’s a tribute to my daughter. Here is the long answer; we were looking for a unique word that didn’t mean anything to most people. We spent days if not weeks trying to come up with the perfect brandable name. I want people to think of one thing when they hear McKremie and that’s web hosting and our specific company.

When my daughter was little she could not pronounce our last name, like most kids that could not pronounce harder words. So instead of saying ‘McHenry’ she would say McKremie (Mick-Crem-ie) and we gave her that nickname. So when we were trying to think of the perfect company name we kept coming back to the name McKremie.

Joe: Well, that’s an interesting story. Moving over to the next question… What motivated you to start a web hosting company?
Stuart: I knew, and my clients at the time knew we could do a better job. There are tons of web hosting companies out there that offer support with their hosting accounts but when it comes down to it they don’t deliver. Prior to running a few dot com companies I spent over 13 years in the customer service industry. My experiences are invaluable and has shaped the outstanding service levels customers come to expect with McKremie.

Joe: What are the challenges of being the owner of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions and how do you deal with them?
Stuart: When we first started we could not offer the service level we wanted to provide. This is always difficult for a new hosting company starting out. It wasn’t in the budget to have support staff working 24 hours per day 7 days per week and we had to build up to that level. We focused on small business website hosting in our local markets at first. In December of 2007 we were able to offer 24/7 support both phone and email. This was the single biggest accomplishment to date for McKremie

Joe: With a saturated market and high level of competition in the web hosting industry, what do you think is the greatest advantage of McKremie Web Hosting?
Stuart: Customer Service! We strongly believe we need to be available when the customers need us. If they happen to need us at 3:00 AM in the morning, we are available to take their calls or answer their emails. Our servers are fast and our uptime runs high (99.9%+) but that doesn’t really set us apart from the competition, only our great customer service does. We recently just upgraded our support ticket software to better handle customer support issues. We are always looking for ways to serve our customer better and faster.

Joe: In your opinion, how did the global recession affected the internet industry, especially web hosting businesses?
Stuart: This is a hard question for me to answer, I know other companies are having a difficult time but our growth has been very good over this past year. Most of our customers hear about us from our current clients via word of mouth. I’m sure we would be even busier if the world economy was better but I cannot compare since we have such positive growth.

Joe: Aside from uptime, customer support is one of the most important considerations in choosing a web hosting provider. How can you describe the quality of McKremie’s customer support?
Stuart: Top notch support! We have support staff always available via phone or email 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and even on all major holidays. We often answer the phone within a few rings and emails are answered within minutes. As the President of McKremie, LLC I actively monitor support tickets to ensure high levels of service. You can read a few reviews for yourself and see what customers are saying.

Joe: What other services does McKremie offer aside from web hosting?
Stuart: We offer Web Design and Internet Marketing services. We currently aren’t taking any clients for marketing but may again in spring of 2009. We are excited to release a new service in a few weeks that we are calling Kizzog. Once we are ready to announce this new product I will be sure to let you know more about it.

Joe: I’m sure many of our readers now know more about McKremie. Now, why don’t you tell us something about your personal life. Like are you are married man, do you have kids and what do you like doing during your spare time?
Stuart: I’m married and have a daughter that is 9 years old. We enjoy traveling, snowboarding and just hanging out at the beach. We have three dogs a Saint Bernard, Golden Retriever and a little Maltese. The Saint Bernard weighs about 140 LBS and the little Maltese weighs just over a 2 LBS.

Joe: Thanks for letting us know more about you and your company. Is there anything that you want to add or tell our readers?
Stuart: Thanks Joe! Just want to let your readers know that we started a web hosting blog a few months back that talks about McKremie but also offers general web hosting tips and tricks that apply to most web hosts.

Well, there you go guys, the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions – upclose and personal. Overall, the interview was a great experience for me and we got to talk about both personal and business matters. Being the president of a web hosting company, it surprised me how friendly and accommodating Stuart is. It really gives me a positive feeling about a McKremie Web Hosting Solutions after knowing that headed by a great guy like Stuart.

Deeper Into Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

Joedel — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:20:10 +0000

In my previous post about choosing a web host for your site or blog, I discussed the important factors to consider when choosing your web hosting provider. Of course, I also stressed that a web host is only considered good if it can meet your current web hosting needs and offer you some other useful features. The next question is: where can you look for web hosting providers to compare and evaluate?

Search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN, are the first resources that we turn into when we want to find websites or service providers in the internet. However, I really don’t recommend depending on search engines when choosing service providers because the search results that they provide are based on search engine optimized websites and not based on the quality of their services.

The best way to look for a web host providers are through independent web hosting reviews and comparison websites. Through them, you can find a good list of current webhosting providers in the internet. This makes it easier for you to find web hosts and compare their features side by side. Web Hosting Rating is an example of a web hosting reviews and comparison website. In resource sites like this, you will see webhosts that are ranked based on reliability, affordability and support. Each web host has a dedicated page where you can find its general, pricing, special features, bonuses and other specifications of their hosting service.

If you are after specific features of a web host for a specific need, like for a forum or blog, Web Hosting Rating has a web hosting awards section that groups hosting providers that is best for a specific feature. Other useful feature of this web host resource is their article section where you can find web hosting tutorials and tips. Reviews from actual web host users and customers, in my opinion, is the most accurate, honest and most importantly, useful. You can find actual user reviews in web hosting comparison resources and base your decision from them. Read about both good and bad experiences by webmasters with different web hosts that they have actually used.

In choosing a web host, you should take your time and give it your best effort. Once you have established your website with a hosting company it would be difficult to transfer to another. Web hosting review websites or resources are really helpful in making this crucial decision.

Choosing a Web Hosting Provider for Your Blog

Joedel — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:17:59 +0000

Another important part of establishing your weblog is choosing a reliable web hosting company. If this is your first time to establish your own first websites or blog, you could be asking yourself what a web hosting is. A web hosting company provides a server space where you can store the files that make up your websites and make them available and accessible to internet users.

Determine Your Web Hosting Needs

Before you can actually choose a web hosting company, you should first determine your exact web hosting needs. Some of the things that you should determine before choosing a webhost are:

Number of sites you are looking to host or store in your webhost – this is important because this will determine the amount of storage space and domains allowed that you require or need in a web host.
Estimated amount of traffic – it is understood that a new website or blog will receive minimal number of visitors. However, you should also anticipate the increase of your traffic. Determining your estimated traffic is important to know the amount of bandwidth that you need.
Programming Languages, Scripts and Databases to use – this is important to know what operating system your web host needs to run, scripts and programming languages that it supports and number of databases that it allows.
Additional Features or Services – determine what additional features or services that you require for your websites or blogs.

Choosing Your Web Host

After determining these things, you are now ready to search for a good web hosting service provider. Here are the things that you should take a look at when comparing hosting packages from different companies:

Disk Space is the amount of storage that you are allowed to use. You should choose the hosting company that can provide you the amount of storage that you need plus a little allowance for future expansion or adding more websites.

Check how much bandwidth or amount of traffic your web host is allowed to receive per day or per month. Exceeding the allowable bandwidth will make your website temporarily inaccessible. You should get a web host that offers high or unlimited bandwidth.

Another important consideration is the number of domains allowed in a hosting package. Of course, the more domains allowed, the better.

Price is one of the major considerations in buying any product or service but it isn’t necessarily the most important. Some good things in life are free but I’m afraid a web host is not one of them. There are companies that will offer you web hosting services for free but in exchange, advertisements in the form of banners, pop ups and PPC ads will pollute your site. I recommend that you get a cheap web hosting services rather than a free one.

You should also check the companies’ hosting payment plans. Some web hosting companies offer cheap monthly prices but they will require you to pay for 3, 6, 9 months or even 1 year upfront. It is lighter if you buy a hosting package the will require you to pay on a monthly basis.

There are 2 different operating systems that a web host runs: Linux and Windows. The two differ in the programming languages that they support. Windows support Active Server Pages or ASP. On the other hand, Linux supports Personal Home Page or PHP, Java, Perl, and Ruby. Future tutorials will focus on establishing WordPress Blogs that uses PHP so you will need to choose a web host that runs in a Linux server.

A database is where all your blogs’ content is kept. Choose a webhost that will meet the number of databases that you require. A hosting company can offer from 5 to an unlimited number of databases to be set up in a hosting account.

Reliability is a major concern when choosing a web hosting service provider and it goes beyond the measure of numbers. A good and reliable web host should offer you:

99% uptime for all your Websites
24/7 sales and technical support
Instant or scheduled backups
Money back guarantee

There are two web hosting companies that provide services for my blogs and websites. These are GoDaddy and Hostgator:

GoDaddy is well known company in the domain name industry and it has also become one of the most reliable web hosting providers. $6.99 can give you 150 Gigabytes of storage, 1,500 GB of bandwidth, 25 MySQL databases and host unlimited number of websites. They also provide a good email support to help you with web hosting related questions. However, there is one downside of using GoDaddy as your web host. It has a complicated interface that could give newbies a hard time in using. This webhost is more recommendable to more advanced webmasters.

Host Gator is the web hosting company that I can recommend to new webmasters and bloggers. This is because it uses a user friendly Control Panel. For as little as $7.95, you can get 600 GB of disk space and allowed up to 6,000 GB of bandwidth. You will have no problem for future expansions and increase in your weblogs’ visitors with this amount of storage and bandwidth. You are also allowed to host unlimited domains and database. This is the best hosting provider for new bloggers looking to set up a wordpress blog.

When choosing a webhost, or any product or services, keep in mind that “good” is defined by meeting your needs plus a little extra features.