If you are a dentist and you "just want your website hosted somewhere safe and reliable" then you've come to the right place. In addition to providing a rock-solid platform for our clients, our hosting services are designed for the dentist who wants to have a reputable web hosting provider, but doesn't want to be locked into paying for long-term marketing contracts loaded with services they just don't need.
Unlike many other dental web hosting providers, we allow our clients to have full administrator access to their websites. In fact, many of our hosting clients are dentists who don't want to pay exorbitant monthly package fees for services they don't use, and come to us for a la carte enterprise-level Dental WordPress website hosting at an affordable fee.
Your website is yours. And when you work with Short Hills Design, your website and all associated accounts (Godaddy.com, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, etc.) remain 100% yours.
If you'd like to make your own website updates such as adding and editing text and images -- no problem! It's your website.
If you'd prefer to have us make website updates for you, that's also no problem. We bill hourly and only invoice for time that we use. If you don't need us to make any updates, you don't get an invoice.
Website maintence in included. Maintenace is defined as the tasks related to keeping the website live on the internet including: keeping the WordPress software and plugins up-to-date, and making sure the site stays fast-loadimg, SSL-secured and malware-free. See our Website Mainteance section below for more details.
One of the big problems with many dental marketing companies is that they won't allow other companies to work with their clients.
We take the 180 degree opposite view - we are here to help you in any way that we can, with any or all services that we offer. If you want to use another service for SEO, for maintenance, or for PPC -- then no problem. Just tell us what you need and how we can help.
Our Google Page Speed results speak for themselves:
Our fees are low because we don't bundle services that our clients don't want or need. Other companies charge a much higher monthly fee because they include services that may not be necessary -- especially for "website maintenance" which the client may never use (see the next section below).
The next big question is how hosting a dental website differs from maintaining or managing a website, so let's review that now.
At Short Hills Design, hosting includes everything you need to keep your website up and running on the Internet, securely with rock-solid performance. We update the core WordPress software as needed as well as WordPress plugins, and we provide rapid security updates if critical patches are released.
Website maintenance is the term we use for making website updates such as adding or changing content, images, layouts, and the like. The reason we separate out our hosting services from our maintenance services is because our clients -- with full website access - are able to and are encouraged to make any website updates that they would like on their own. Thus, it's not fair to charge clients for a bundled service that they simply will never use. Remember, one of the beauties of using WordPress is that as a website owner you are not tied into one particular host or locked into having only one company being able to provide website maintenance.
Website hosting is the process of storing your dental website's files on the internet so that people can access your site online. Every website that wants to be found online needs to have a web host.
A web server is a computer that is connected to the internet which "knows" how to display your website when someone asks for it (e.g. visits your site online).
The website registrar (such as GoDaddy.com) is the service you use to register (rent) your domain name. You can think of the registrar as the post office - the registrar stores information about your domain so it can be found on the internet (like driving directions).
The SSL certificate is the padlock icon you see at the top left of a search bar that shows people that your site is secure. We could debate about why a dental website needs to be SSL secured (you're not taking credit cards or SSN#''s directly), but it's been a ranking factor for years so it's critical to have a valid SSL. Plus, if you don't have an SSL certificate, people will see a "not secure" warning when they visit your site which can scare many people - especially those that aren't tech savvy.
No. Google Workspace and Office 365 are affordable, reliable email providers and we recommend that our clients use one of these services for their practice's email. One of the reasons you want to have your email separate from your website is that email services can be difficult to move from one provider to another, so having your email services independent of the website gives you significant flexibility.
We have servers across the United States and Canada, and we will match up your practice's location with a datacenter that is close to you. If you are on the East coast, for example, you will be hosted on an East Coast Server.
Domains do not need management other than that they need to be renewed when they expire. And make sure that you own your domain name and not your marketing company or web hosting company
There is no such thing as "HIPAA Compliant" dental website hosting. However, our dental website hosting is designed with security best practices in mind and avoids improper storage or logging of protected health information. We also help ensure that contact forms and integrations are configured correctly with HIPAA-compliant tools so any potential PHI is handled only by appropriate, compliant systems
Yes. We handle the full migration process including pulling a backup of your current website and testing the backup on a private development server so we can make sure that everything looks ok before we switch over. We take this type of planned approach to minimize downtime, and we verify that everything is working properly before and after the site goes live. As part of the process we will also configure your website performance to take advantage of our server's power as much as possible.
Our hosting includes uptime checks every minute along with home page screenshots taken every 6 hours. We take daily backups via three different approaches (on server, and two off-server) and can restore a site within a matter of minutes. With these systems in place we quickly know if your website is not responding properly, or if a WordPress update or problem has affected the site, and thus we can remediate and fix the problem quickly.
Yes and yes. Website speed is one among dozens of ranking factors that Google uses to position your website in search results. Our hosting is designed specifically for WordPress websites to help ensure fast load times and consistent availability.
No! One of the great things about WordPress is that we can take a backup of an existing site from one web host and migrate it to a different web host in what is usually a seamless process. So while you can always rebuild your website, changing your web host does not mean you need to build a new website.
No problem. While we always want all of our clients to stay with us, we understand that needs change. Because we use WordPress you are not locked into a proprietary software and your website remains a standard WordPress site. We want our clients to work with us because we are reliable and because they trust us, not because of technical lock-in.
If you have questions or you're ready to talk about migrating your hosting to Short Hills Design, contact us to setup a call with Dr. Wank.
