I have been searching for several weeks for a good web hosting company and Hostony.com seems to shine above the masses... I do have a couple of questions before I sign up though :?:

1. Hosted in Atlanta, GA and Outsourced to the Ukraine! Who owns Hostony.com? USA company or no?

2. I understand your Admins must have root access, but who is watching them to be sure OUR data is secure... i.e. no snooping or compromise of trade secrets, financial info or any other sensitive data? Does Hostony.com guarantee the security of our data?

3. Has your system been hacked or compromised in the past? What virus protection do you use on your servers? Thanks

I look forward to a long and profitable relationship with Hostony.com

Dave
LANWAN Systems Admin
Nashville, TN

. Is owned by company incorporated in US.
2. We know our admins because we have our own office in Ukraine and have managers who hire, train and watch people. Also they are bound with non disclouser non compete agreements for legal aspects.
OPn the other hand we cannot guarantee your data security because it is shared hosting and you are hosted with tens of other people on the same server. We don't monitor access rights on your files and if you make file to be read by all on the server everybody with access to the server will be able to read them etc. But the level of security in general is ok for majority of our users.

If you have too valuable data you should onsider buying a dedicated server and a personal firewall. Costs of the solution that can guarantee near to 100% security starts from about 1400+ and we are selling $9.85 that doesn't need increased security but rather a place on theweb for their domain.

It is not always economically wise for regular people to have increased security because it causts a lot. A tank can guatrantee near to 100% security for the person, but it costs too much to buy and people just drive cars. They are not 100% secure but affordable and usable.

3. We had our servers exploited twice before but problems were fixed fast enough and we had no downtime because of this issues. We have much more problems with spammers and script abusers. Linux is a good enough system not to suffer from viruses. There are couple Linux visruses but it is not a major disaster.

Spammerscreate us much more problems because we cannot see what a guy has in mind when he signups and can caught a spammer AFTER he makes an attempt to spam. To fight spammers we have our own monitoring system that notifies admins about suspicuous activity that looks like spam and most of the spammers are caught before they send out all their crap.

For informational purposes, I'd like to further explain some concepts relating to the incorporation of businesses in the United States.

A business that is incorporated in the U.S. isn't necessarily based in the U.S. In fact, a business can't actually be incorporated in the United States specifically, but rather in one of the several States. The laws of incorporation vary from state to state, but some only require that a business hold annual meetings and maintain a mailing address within that state in order to be incorporated in said state, along with certain other complicated business mumbo-jumbo having to do with taxes and licensing and other extremely boring stuff. This means that a company based in, let's say Ukraine, can be legally incorporated in the U.S. as long as it holds a 5-minute board meeting somewhere within its state of incorporation at least once a year and it's other business practices meet certain criteria.

It's up to you whether or not you want to do business with such a company. If it's your personal philosophy to do business with actual American companies, then Hostony is probably not for you. There is, however, no law that says you have to be an American to start a web hosting company. There's also good reason for a foreign web hosting company to base its technical facilities in the U.S.; the high percentage of American internet users being one and the economic strength of the U.S. being another.

The real question, then, is the reliability and integrity of a Ukrainian company. Decided for yourself whether or not they've done a good job hosting the web sites of others. Ask people for their opinions about Hostony. Keep in mind that web hosting is an expensive business to get into, not to mention the difficulties of maintaining an English-speaking staff overseas. Hostony has obviously put a lot of effort into achieving their current success. Most companies do not get into business for the purpose of mistreating their customers. The one issue I, myself, would be concerned about is the difficulty in dealing with a foreign company legally. This, however, becomes less of an issue when you consider their U.S. incorporation. You do not have to travel to Ukraine to issue a complaint to the local authorities.

All in all, I'd say I've wasted enough of your time. I felt it necessary to point out that a company "incorporated in the US" isn't automatically an American company. Enjoy!