If you follow the goings on at Online Marketing Blog, you’ll know we’ve had some issues with hosting the past few months. We had outgrown our host of 2 1/2 years and the subsequent host we moved to was not prepared to deliver the service we signed up for.
When looking for a new host, we realized there was already a proven hosting company right in our backyard that we’ve had experience with. Sometimes the thing you need is right in front of you and you don’t see it right away.
We’ve been hosting our PR agency web site with VISI out of Minneapolis for over a year and have been very happy with their service. VISI’s CEO, Mike Sowada has been a big supporter of the local interactive marketing community through MIMA and they actually had me give a presentation at the grand opening of their new St. Paul data center last year.
I contacted our Account rep for the the PR site to see about hosting Online Marketing Blog there on a dedicated server. Explaining that we had minimal resources to allocate to setup and support of the server, we also had a very short time frame to work with since our previous host realized we were not going to upgrade with them and were shutting us down with a 1, then 3 day notice.
VISI hosting engineers were able to get the dedicated server setup along with WordPress and MySQL over the weekend and along with our own refinements (Thanks Thomas!) and fine tuning, we were live by Monday morning. I am happy to say VISI came through for us in a bind from the start. It’s been a week so far and smooth sailing. No blips, no down time, no issues with CPU load, data transfer, etc at all.
Our PR site is on a shared hosting program and our blog is using the dedicated server program and I can honestly recommend either one. They also provide co-location hosting and a range of internet access services ranging from dial up to a DS3. VISI is one of the largest web hosting providers in the Midwest but the service has been very small town (as in friendly and responsive).
I think many business owners share a similar feeling as I do in that they just want a hosting company they can trust and that is responsive when they need it. I’m happy to say that VISI has seriously raised the bar on our expectations of and experience with a web host.
