While you are not required to have your site hosted with us, there are many benefits in doing so. First, we have a better knowledge of our own servers than any servers out there. This allows us to troubleshoot problems much faster. We also have direct access to our system administrators if issue do arise. These benefits have actually caused over 95% of our clients to host with us.
This is definitely a choice you have, however, if you decide to go this route, there are requirements that the host must meet before we will (or will be able to) install our site system on the server. The main requirements are the following:
If you would to have the freedom of having your own account with a hosting company, we recommend either www.hostdime.com or www.hostgator.com.
This is a basic hosting package that is available to the client, if they so choose to host their site with us. It tops out at roughly 10GB of harddrive space and 50GB of bandwidth each month. If you compare this with many other hosting companies, it doesn't seem like much. But, interestingly enough, only about 5% of our clients ever move beyond this amount. Hosting companies know this, as well, so many promise a gigantic amount of space and bandwidth, expecting customers never to reach this. This is called overselling, and almost all overselling hosts start out the same. Clients have great uptime, servers are fast etc. As more time goes by the server, becomes more and more filled from customers using what they purchased and downtime gradually gets worse. The host has no control over future growth. Because of this, we do not promise clients what we don't have.
Sometimes a client will ask us to purchase an item on their behalf for their site (i.e. music, special software, etc.). We will be happy to purchase this for you and just add it to your invoice.