HOSTING
Enterprise Grade Servers
Designing and creating the content for a web site is the first step towards having a presence on the internet. Your web site needs a home and an address. The home is a hosting service and the address is your domain name. Shore Fx offers a superior level of fully managed hosting. We use only the highest quality server-grade hardware and software, optimized for performance and hardened for security. Our servers are monitored 24/7/365 and housed in private datacenter space in the newly renovated 427 LaSalle data center facility located adjacent to the Chicago Board of Trade in downtown Chicago. This facility provides an optimum location for internet access. Almost all of the fiber optic links between the East and West coast run through Chicago, yielding low latency to both coasts as well as to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Beware of Budget Hosting
Shore Fx does not offer budget hosting. In our experience hosting is a prime example of: "You get what you pay for". Budget hosting providers typically overload their servers with hundreds of web sites. While they may say you have unlimited space and bandwidth, no hosting provider can honestly make that claim (read their terms and conditions carefully to spot the exceptions) - this is called "over-selling" in the hosting industry. The impacts of using a budget host are numerous and often not immediately obvious. For example you typically share far more than just the space used for your web site. You share an IP address and an email server too. Just one spam blacklist entry against your shared server potentially blocks your valuable email from being received by your most important customers.
We maintain exclusive access to our servers. We take great care to tune our hosting solutions to a client's specific needs and minimally load our servers. Contact us for more information on our hosting plans, hardware and 100% network uptime record.
Domain Name Management
Shore Fx can register and manage any domain name for you at competitive prices. If you already own a domain name, we can transfer it to Shore Fx with no impact to your existing web site. Domain name management includes annual registration, initial configuration and on-going maintenance of your domain settings. Domain settings define how your domain name directs network traffic to your web site, email server, ftp server and sub-domains. We leverage our expertise in network management to ensure the optimum configuration for these settings. Today's advanced anti-spam blocking techniques, built into destination email servers (and our own), often interogate specific domain name settings. We will ensure your domain is configured correctly to ensure un-interrupted email delivery.
Use the domain name checker on our home page to determine availability for some of the most common top level extensions.
All Shore Fx hosting packages include email hosting associated with your domain name. The number of email accounts and feature set varies by hosting package. All accounts support email retrieval using standard email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird. In addition, all accounts include webmail access for use when you are away from the office.
Specialized Options
Contact us for more information on specialized hosting options such as podcast and streaming video. There are a wide range of options for larger web sites with more demanding requirements such as high data volume, secure data access and e-commerce. We can help you apply for and install SSL certificates of any type (required for https://... pages). We offer a variety of e-commerce solutions and can recommend a payment gateway service tailored to your budget and requirements.