What you get with Ideanode

# Posted Dec 14, 11:38am

Let's be honest. There's a lot of hosting companies out there, and a lot of them a little less each month than Ideanode.

Sadly, though, once you sign up with one of these companies, you quickly find out how they can do things so cheap: technical support only by email (that isn't responded to for days), sign up pages that make you wade through billboard-sized ads to click the tiny "Please don't sell me what I don't need" link, lots of extra charges for basic features.

Quite simply, we do web hosting the way we'd want it: highly-skilled people who can clearly communicate managing the best equipment available.

Great Support

On our site, you can get step-by-step visual support articles (like this one, that shows you how to setup Outlook 2003) that explain things simply and clearly.

When you need to talk to someone, you can contact us via email, instant messenger, or the telephone. Whoever you talk to can help you immediately, no escalations or forwards.

Great Web Hosting

Free Site Transfer

If you've got a web site on another host and want to move to Ideanode, we're happy to help you with the technical stuff. This includes sites that have database backends, or blogs from one system to another (like if you've decided that your Blogger blog isn't cutting it anymore and want to move to something like Wordpress). Just get in touch and we'll help you figure it out.

Content Compression

We automatically compress all text content served if the user's browser supports it, which means that you can serve more users, more quickly, for less monthly bandwidth.

Statistics

What good is having a great web site without knowing who's looking at it? Many of our competitors give you statistics only if you pay extra for it every month. That's crazy—it's like a mobile phone plan where the itemized bill costs extra!

Every Ideanode customer gets a detailed breakdown of who visited their site, where they came from, and what they looked at. Updated every night. Standard.

Control Software

We took a look at the popular software packages that most webhosting companies use to control their sites, and, well, we just didn't like them. They looked and behaved like a menu where there were no entrees—just five thousand items à la carte.

So we wrote our own.

It's called, cleverly enough, Control.

Shared SSL Certificate

Want to use your site for e-commerce, but are trying to do it as cost-effectively as possible? You can use our shared SSL certificate to protect sensitive portions of your site that deal with ordering or credit cards. Included with every plan.

Great Email

Lots of Storage

Our email accounts have a minimum of 200MB storage.

IMAP Support

We offer full IMAP support—which means that you can store your email on the server, and access the same messages and folders in mutiple email clients instead of downloading to just one. You could check your email from your home computer, your work computer, and our webmail client, all in perfect synchronization.

Anti-Spam

We have a zero-tolerance approach to spam, whether it's via email, web referrers, or blog comments. We've been managing high-volume mail servers since 1997, and every day it more of it keeps coming. Worse than being a complete waste of bandwidth and CPU cycles, spam is a waste of your time.

As spam has gotten more complex, so has our approach to it. The diagram to the left shows how we perform lots and lots of checks on spam to make sure that it doesn't get through to your inbox, and if it does, to give you the tools to quickly delete it or filter it away.

Over the last year with the increased popularity of tools like blogging software and the abuse of HTTP referrer tags, we've put additional measures into place on the servers that block this new form of spam, leaving you with real comments you care about, and web statistics that are uncluttered with junk.

Anti-Virus

All incoming mail is scanned for viruses and safely filtered out of your inbox, so the next time Uncle Sal gets infected with the virus-spewing trojan of the week, you're covered. We also block "phishing" attacks, were a spammer sends you a bogus email looking like it's coming from your bank or eBay, asking you to reset your password or your credit card (but it's really sending that info to the spammer to further abuse).

Our Servers

We take a different approach to our server setup than many of our competitors.

In most cases, for shared hosting, you're put on a server with a lot of other sites. That means if the one of your neighbors gets really popular all of a sudden, your site slows down. It also means that if the server you're on has a hardware failure, it's lights out for everybody.

We think there's a smarter way to do it, as companies like Google have taught us. Rather than buy faster and bigger individual servers, distribute the load out across the network. Grow the capacity for everyone at a time, rather than for select groups. Give everyone the reliability of a clustered configuration, which other hosting provider offer for thousands of dollars per month.

Even with that, you still need a solid environment. Physical security, reliable power supply, failover generator, serious climate control? Check, check, check, and check.

Great Software

Want to run a blog? An image gallery? Messageboard? Online community? No problem. Know your website needs something extra and could use some help figuring out how to do it? Just ask, we'd be glad to recommend an open source package, and install it for you if you need help.

Great Network

All of the cool software and server setups in the world don't mean a thing unless people can connect to your site quickly and reliably.

The Ideanode network connects to 8 Tier 1 Internet service providers in a mesh configuration, meaning, if a backhoe tears up a cable to one of these providers the traffic will automatically re-route to another (meaning, your site will always be available).

Anything Else?

If you want really low-level details that aren't answered here, make sure to check out the Plan Details (for geeks) page.

You can Sign Up, or Contact Us if you have any more questions.