eVerity’s Blog

I decided to keep the default title of “Hello World.” It is fitting for a first post, don’t you think? I guess its time for eVerity to have a blog. I would like this blog, as much as possible, to be relevant to hosting, and to contain information useful to eVerity customers.

That said, sometimes issues of interest will come up that are not directly related to web hosting. Opinions on those issues will differ. Please remember that an opinion is not necessarily right or wrong, and is based on an individual’s life experiences. If you feel the need to disagree with something that is said here, please do so respectfully.

There are so many topics to cover…

The companies out there that steal domains from their customers.

The massively oversold servers being peddled by other hosts.

Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Strategies.

The importance of downloading backups.

And whatever other issues pop up in the mean time.

Ok, so I guess the first post should be to introduce you to eVerity. The story begins way back when I was in college. How I miss those days, lol. I was your typical computer nerd, taking classes to learn C++, Java, Perl, etc. PHP hadn’t really caught on yet. (Yes, I’m that old, lol.) I wanted a “real” hosting account to test out the things I was learning in school, not unlike many of eVerity’s current customers.

So, I signed up with a cutting-edge host. My first hosting package was $7.95 for 10 megs of space. At that time, 10 megs was considered a super big mega plan! How would I ever use that much space?

I built a web site for my family. Then I started building sites for other people. In those days, it was a big job to build a site. I had to hand-code all the HTML. In PhotoShop, you had to manually splice each graphic, and write code accordingly so that it would line up seamlessly in different browsers. It used to take me a few hours to do what you can now do in 10 minutes with pretty much any web design software.

Anyway, I read a lot of books and learned how to make sites user-friendly. In fact, this became my focus. I am self-taught in that regard, of course, because in school they didn’t really teach programmers how to see things from a user’s perspective, which is kind of sad, but I digress. I began looking into the possibility of charging for my services, but didn’t know what to charge.

What I found was appalling. I spent the better part of an afternoon searching the internet for professional designers. The best I could find was charging $80 per page, and his portfolio was horrible. He probably spent no more than 15 minutes per page, on average. Worse, he was charging $25 /month for hosting.

You have to remember that a lot of people at that time didn’t even know what the internet was, but had heard that a web site would help their business, so they were understandably gullible. Still, I was mortified to see them being taken advantage of to such extremes.

At that point, I saw a business opportunity. How could I not? I talked to some people, and decided to start a web design business. I could make sites that were much better than my competition, and for much less. My prices were very reasonable, and still resulted in a huge profit. The business never really took off the way I had hoped. People were so used to being ripped off that they would sooner overpay an inferior designer than risk going with the “cheap” guy.

Regardless, I stuck to my morals, and the business grew, albeit slowly. The hosting side of things, however, was a much more steady and reliable income. I noticed that people kept their hosting with me, even when using a different designer. They said they liked the way I did business, and they liked my dedication. In reality, I give credit to my reseller host at the time, because it had good performance and great uptime.

Long story short, in 2002 I changed the name to eVerity and decided to focus on hosting. I don’t even get involved with web design these days, as the hosting side of things takes up all my time.

eVerity is not a big company. My goal is not to get rich or take over the world. My biggest pleasure in life is helping people, teaching them something new, getting them excited enough about technology to learn on their own, and seeing them realize their dreams.

The internet is one of the most amazing technologies of our time, and its potential has not even begun to be realized. Introducing people to it, and helping them get the most out of it, is just plain exciting. (Did I mention I was kind of nerdy?)

In the overall scheme of things, eVerity’s role in shaping the internet is a tiny speck, like a grain of sand lost in a massive beach. Still, it is a grain of sand that has been a major positive influence for a lot of people, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

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