Facelift for Dogsbody Hosting

It’s been over 7 years since we launched Dogsbody Hosting to the masses.  Things have changed a lot in that time so we’re happy to have now completed a facelift for the site and are re-launching our new site today.

Dogsbody Hosting started out being a hobby that paid for itself and slowly turned into a business.  We are really proud of our roots and how we have had to do very little marketing over the years.  100% of our sales have come via referrals and 98% of the customers we had after year one are still with us to this day.

Our old site was looking rather dated though.  Back in 2003 the biggest browsers were Internet Explorer (IE6, IE5.5 & IE4), Netscape Navigator & Opera.  The modern markup that we have today was a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, and Javascript was used for web apps such as games on websites instead of one of the key tools in website development that it is now.

Our original site was written using the Mambo CMS.  As this CMS forked and grew into the Joomla! project we migrated our site a number of times.  When looking to redevelop our site we looked hard at sticking with Joomla! by utilising the new code and templates available today but as the site was so old (in Internet terms) there was too much of the old Mambo and old Joomla files around that would break things.

It became obvious we had to start from first principals again which meant that we were free to look at the other CMS systems around.  After much testing we settled on WordPress, an excellent CMS that has grown from strength to strength in recent years.  In fact over 70% of the new hosting customer this year are using our space to run a WordPress site.

During the years we amassed quite a collection of FAQ entries and pages for help and support.  While these were full of useful information we didn’t think that they were being used by our customers who can pick up the phone and speak to a person any time they want.  Why would they spend time crawling through a Knowledge Base when they could get an answer that was personal to them and their setup just by calling us.  We have therefore archived our FAQ pages.  They may come back in the future, but only if you need them.

The new website has given us a great opportunity to tidy up and publicise some of the great products we now have.  We have created a number of hosting packages for standard setups as well as launching a Secondary DNS service for companies that run their own servers but need independent redundancy.

We hope you enjoy our site and here’s looking forward to seeing it grow more in the future.