Over the past couple of years the blog has gone through quite a few different designs. It’s hard to say if users prefer a company blog to be integrated into the design of the rest of the site, or as a separate entity. But in the end, it seemed like it’d be best to integrate and avoid confusion.

Over the next year, we’ll be interviewing PinchHost clients and industry experts, as well as providing some web hosting industry commentary.

If there’s any specific areas you’d like us to talk about, contact us.

P.S. If you hadn’t noticed, we’ve sneakily integrated our pricing plans into the sidebar to entice new readers.

As an extra bonus, thanks to our billing overhaul, we now accept Google Checkout… on checkout. Google Checkout has grown quickly since it launched and I know it’s some clients preferred payment gateway. If you’re an existing customer, just select Google Checkout when you receive your next invoice.

Over the past few works we’ve been busy overhauling our support, FAQ, affiliate and billing system. Previously all these systems worked as separate entities. Now they’ve all been packaged into one, WHMCS – an excellent billing and support system. This now means you need not have a separate login information for your support, billing and affiliate account. Instead, it’s all in one easy to use portal.

This is a move long overdue and it’ll not only make life easier for you, but also for us! (Support and Billing)

Along with the overhaul, we’ve also refreshed our pricing plans and now have 3 plans instead of just 2. Existing clients will continue on the same plan as they signed up with.

PinchHost is upgrading all current and future clients to new 16 CPU servers which should fix any issues that some of our customers have been seeing. If you have not yet received communication about this, you will be hearing from us shortly.

We hope you’ll feel the benefits, we’ve noticed significant improvements in performance. Let us know if you have any questions!

The first month since PinchHost opened its doors to… well… YOU is sadly over. But what a month! A relatively pain free month, which is unquestionably what you’d like to hear from a web host.

Let me start off by saying, all our clients have been amazing! We’d love to share with you some of the comments made. Cindy, (blogging at PouBou since 2003!) wrote a post regarding her move to PinchHost, the quoted text below describes Cindy’s situation, specifically at the moment in time when her previous host unintentionally wiped her content,

“I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.”

This also slots nicely into our ‘extra mile’ focus. We’ve really gone the extra mile for customers and non-customers alike. Last week we helped a University student solve a problem (PHP) with their Computing work. We were even contacted by a competing web hosting company regarding country-based (IP) redirection and happily passed on our methods. Clearly, we’re still young and eventually we won’t be able to allocate resources to quite so extraneous requests from non-customers, but take advantage, we’re not planning on stopping anytime soon.

Another user made this comment through Twitter,

“PinchHost has just set up 5 domains for me and is uploading themes now brilliant service.”

We’ve also managed to pickup a page rank 4, three weeks after launch. There shouldn’t be too much emphasise on page rank, but it surpassed of our initial target, equalling that of web hosts online for a number of years. Which is a great moral boost. Wikipedia definition,

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

In terms of support methods, ticket support has been used primarily, due to its prominence on the site. Telephone support has also been great, we haven’t left a call waiting for longer than 10 seconds! We’ll be updating the support section of the site in the near future to better present all of our support methods.

Twitter has been brilliant, we’ve picked up thousands of followers, admittedly not all of which we know intimately. We see Twitter as a great way to increase exposure and communicate with our customers and non-customers alike.

Our affiliate program, although quite hidden has received some attention from external web hosting related websites, no reports of any issues with the affiliate system, it seems to be running smoothly.

In summary, an excellent first month, thanks to all of our customers, affiliate members, followers plus all those who’ve been in contact with us!

Our affiliate program is a tremendous opportunity regarding earning online through advertising. For each paying customer you refer to PinchHost, you’ll receive 20% of the sale.

We’ve endeavoured to make the program as straightforward as viable. The process requires that you fill out a brief registration form, after which you’re immediately provided with your affiliate link. You can withdraw your funds after just one sale. Payments occur through PayPal, we payout 60 days after the sale to avoid fraud.

If you have any queries at all concerning our affiliate program, please don’t hesitate to submit a support ticket.

Today was our official launch after months of development and testing. Support lines are up! We have one in the UK (London) and another in the US (New York City).

UK: 020 3287 3336
US: (347) 414-8340

Find us on Twitter.

We’ll also be actively searching out websites that we feel are under performing and unobtrusively proposition the owner with an analysis and possible solution. If you’d like your site analysed for free then get in contact.

As a customer in the industry I’ve seen support that strives to squeeze every last penny, treats their customers with contempt, makes excuses for their own failings without any sign of compassion plus those that simply treat their customers like an idiot. With years of experience in web hosting and customer of dozens of diverse hosting companies I hope I can fulfil my vision to create a company that tirelessly aims to go the extra mile and provide a product with unrivalled support and maybe even make someone’s day.