A web host or web hosting company is a company that provides you with server space for your website, including all of the files associated with your site. When your web address is typed in a browser, the web host serves up the pages.

There are a few things to consider when choosing where to host your website:

• Where are the servers? Many web developers will arrange for your web hosting. It’s important to know that you have the right to choose who you do that business with. Oftentimes, the server that your site is with may actually be out of the country.

  At CharlesWorks, we have our own servers and infrastructure in the northeastern United States, making sites available to our clients as needed, at any time of day. We also have servers and infrastructure available to us in other parts of the United States. We can truly say we are a local, American web services company.

• Costs: Our costs are comparable with other hosting companies, but our personal service is priceless. Cheap hosting also often comes with little or no service, supported by providing opportunities for advertisers. We at CharlesWorks know and care about our clients and make ourselves available for them and keep the services available round the clock.

  What is a referral worth to you? At CharlesWorks, we actually refer our clients to those needing their services every opportunity we get. That simply doesn’t happen with the big companies where clients are simply anonymous account numbers for the most part.

• Options: We supply services mostly on Linux platforms. Our servers will support sites created using HTML or PHP. We also handle most Content Management Systems, and MySQL database driven systems. We especially shine at WordPress sites. WordPress accounts for more than 40% of all sites on the planet.

• Back up: In case of power outages, lost data, equipment failure, hacked sites, does your current web hoster maintain a backup of your files?

  At CharlesWorks, we back up ALL of the websites we design on a regular basis that we maintain for those unforeseen circumstances. Bear in mind that at CharlesWorks you can have your own web developer or even maintain your site yourself should you wish to do so. In such cases, you are responsible to ensure your site materials are backed up, as we cannot assume responsibility for sites we do not maintain.

• Contracts: We do not require contracts on any of our services. We feel that by providing quality service to our clients, contracts are certainly unnecessary. On some products that are prepaid, additional charges may apply for early cancellation, as with email packages we will waive setup fees when prepaid by the year. Early cancellation requires that we charge those fees prior to any refunds. Nearly all of our competitors do not issue refunds at all.

• Server space: 5 gigabytes of server space is provided for most websites. That is plenty of space for a very large website. If more space is needed, we of course will provide that.

• Stats: “Stats” is commonly the web slang word for web statistics. It is simply seeing how often and from where a web site is being visited. More sophisticated stats software helps the user understand how the visitors came from where they did as well.

  On our Linux platforms, we provide the popular AWStats software to monitor website traffic.

  The user can always choose to install and use Google Analytics into their website coding as well.

• Support: CharlesWorks provides down to earth, friendly support, avoiding technical jargon! We like our clients to feel comfortable calling us with questions or for help, without their having to feel like they ever have to be a web guru!

  Our best testimonials are received as a result of our service. People want someone to talk to who they are confident will talk to them and genuinely interested in helping them resolve problems when they arise and not just try to upsell them. That’s what we do.