About Laughing Squid What is Laughing Squid web hosting? Who is Laughing Squid web hosting? Will it always be this small? How do you promote your services? Why did you start a web hosting company? What type of sites do you host? How does customer support work with such a small company? What is Laughing Squid web hosting? We are an independently owned and operated web hosting company located in San Francisco, California. We have been hosting web sites since March of 1998. Laughing Squid web hosting is the business side of Laughing Squid, an online resource for underground art and culture from San Francisco and beyond. Who is Laughing Squid web hosting? Laughing Squid web hosting consists of Scott Beale, founder and primary tentacle along with technical tentacles Tom Spanky Kapanka, John McDonnell and Paul de Jong. There are two other partners in the operation: special projects coordinator John Law and evangelist David Klass. Will it always be this small? Dont worry, it is not our goal to go public as soon as possible or to be bought out by SuperMegaHosting, Inc. As we expand, is very important for us that grow in such a way that the quality of our service to our customers is not degraded. You have probably heard stories of ISPs and web hosts that grew to quickly or were acquired, and their customers suffered because of it. How do you promote your services? Most likely you are here because someone told you about Laughing Squid, you saw one of our Powered by buttons on a website or maybe you found us through an inter net search. We do very little outside advertising and we are mostly referral-based. We feel that this grass roots approach is the best way for us to grow the right way and serve our customers properly. When you see expensive TV and print ads for web hosting companies, you can pretty much assume that for them its just a numbers game. More domains = bigger profits, thats it. Their goal is often to just get big really fast and then sell their company to a larger host. Forget about any kind of genuine interest in helping a customer get their content out to the world. This is why so many of them vaporize within a few years. Why did Laughing Squid start a web hosting company? Back in 1997, Laughing Squid started off doing web design for people, primarily artists as a way to paid the bills for our not-for-profit operations. As we created new websites it was necessary to find hosting for them. At first we rented shared server space with some of the inter nets largest web hosting companies as a reseller. This was a very frustrating and unpleasant experience. The servers were always going down, their network connections were continually failing, and on top of that, the customer support was terrible to say the least. After moving our entire operation four times in 1998, we decided to setup our own servers and start a web hosting company. We knew that others must be having similar episodes of horrific hosting experiences and/or that they were tired of dealing with one of the many faceless hosting giants. So here we are. What type of sites do you host? Our focus is primarily on small, content-driven sites. The bulk of our customers are artists, writers, musicians, bands, filmmakers, and other creative individuals. We also host quite a few non-profits and small businesses, but we do not host any medium or large, resource intensive websites. Since our customers sites share our servers, we avoid hosting sites that could potentially drain the resources of our servers. Therefore, we tend to turn away high-bandwidth sites, overly complex sites running a large amount of scripts or large databases and so on. We primarily deal with small, independent website owners and developers. Here are a few of the customers that we host and what they have to say about us. How does customer support work with such a small company? We are available through our online Help Desk or by phone Monday through Friday, from 9:00am to 6:00pm, but we often check for Help Desk support tickets after hours and during the weekend. Our servers are constantly being monitored to ensure that they are running properly and their connection to the inter net is being maintained. If a server goes down or loses its connectivity, we are paged immediately and we are usually working on a solution before you are even aware of a problem. We do not offer 24/7 support because if is really not necessary for the type of sites or customers that we host. In general, our customers find that our support is much better than most large web hosting companies. We can usually answer your question right away instead of putting you on hold in order to try to find the person who has the answer. Many of our customers like the option of being able to take care of things on their own. By using their sites control panel, they can do things like set up email, change passwords, check quotas and so on. Additionally, since we come from a web development background, we understand exactly whats necessary to ensure that your site works the way you need it to. In fact, we host all of our own sites (side projects, personal sites, etc.) on our servers! So its equally important to us that the servers are always functioning properly.