I for one appreciate the opinion Darin. When we started out with Dryline Hosting, we never intended to be the cheapest, get it all for a couple of bucks, web host.
I had plenty of those packages myself prior to DH and inevitably there were unacceptable problems. What often happens is the servers are overstuffed with customers to the point they start lagging or crashing or any other of a host of issues.
A web hosting company cannot make a server profitable selling ungodly amounts of drive space for essentially pennies. Why? Because hard drives are not unlimited in size and individual servers can only handle so much traffic. And it's not just the server they have to pay for. Out of that $5.00, credit card processors take a chunk, something has to go to your support people, server monitoring services, SSL certificates, etc etc etc. So in many cases they either end up being a host with many, many problems, or they go out of business.
In the case of GoDaddy, from what I hear there aren't that many problems with the hosting. They use web hosting as a loss leader, meaning they don't make a profit off the hosting but off the other services. If you ever buy anything there and go through the checkout you will understand what I mean. You have to click through 3 or 4 pages of things declining them just to by a domain name. They count on the upsells to pay the bills, and I guess it's working for them.
As I said, we know we aren't the cheapest, and we never intended to be. We did however intend to be GOOD at what we do, and communicate regularly with our customers. As all the things you mentioned, that is the added value of hosting with Dryline Hosting. No one will ever be just a customer number with us. I expect anyone on my staff to treat everyone just like they want to be treated. It's my promise to everyone that it will ALWAYS remain that way as long as I have anything to do with it.
We have also taken steps to streamline servers to work better with the types of websites that photographers and storm chasers most often have. Heavy on the pictures and videos. Right now our primary niche market is storm chasers, photographers, and artists.
There are also things like, I have had some chasers contact me that were going through some financial difficulties, but didn't want their site deleted if they closed their accounts. I worked with them on it, and we just put it suspended status for a few months, still preserving their account files until they were back on track again. In one case I did that for over a year. I can almost guarantee you that is something you won't get with just about any host unless you know someone.
I feel like we have succeeded in our goals. We are a debt free company, and 98% of all the customers that have signed up with us in the 6 years we have been in business are STILL with us, the vast majority are storm chasers. I feel like we must be doing something right. I continue to look for ways we can improve the service or add new features without compromising anything we currently have going on.
I'm currently working on a new site design, and we have some new things and services coming, but as always I am always open to hear input and suggestions on how we can improve things if needed.
Now, in regards to Joomla, you are correct, it's open source and if you have the skill you can install it on just about any host account that you have that allows you a MySQL database. I think that is why Steve recommended the middle packages because our F0 and F1 package does not have the databases on them. We also have something called Fantastico (many hosts have this) that allows simple installation of a full Joomla setup with a couple of clicks in as many minutes.
