A New Year – A New ProVista Technologies

January 7, 2017

Happy New Year!

As we enter our 14th year in business, we reflect on the journey we’ve shared together. Our beginnings as Xcel Hosting, a brand that exclusively offered shared hosting services established the foundation for quality and affordability that remains core to our business today. Our transformation to ProVista Technologies incorporated the concepts of professional expertise and broad industry perspective into a name. We deliberately dropped “hosting” from our name as our services were evolving and the industry continued to explode with new hosting providers. What has always differentiated us is not the technology that we deliver – you can get that from plenty of places, but how we deliver it (system design is not a lost art!) and our engagement and partnership with clients. We want to be a firm you can trust to provide the value that others don’t. As we enter 2017, those values ring more true than ever.

The new year brings some great positive changes for ProVista. After nearly a seven year run with our previous website, it was time to ship it off to the archives. We just rolled out a brand new website that speaks to our values and introduces some significant product changes with more to come throughout the year.

One thing that our clients may notice is the decision to drop dedicated servers from our mainstream product line. In fact, this has been a change long in the making. Our opinion is that dedicated servers are a thing of the past. The industry is moving to virtual and cloud technologies – and for good reason too! 10 years ago, these technologies were cutting edge and had plenty of problems, but the maturity in this space has been incredible and we’re now able to achieve the same performance with virtual servers that we can with physicals. In place of dedicated servers comes our new Cloud VPS (Virtual Private Server) product, a highly competitive offering that we’re sure will be a hit with clients. While most firms are offering virtual servers on over-committed servers and sub-optimal storage with redundant nothing, we’ve done the opposite. We started with redundant everything and used commercial products trusted by huge enterprises to power our infrastructure. Everything we host uses this same design, including our shared hosting and custom hosted infrastructure solutions. Our existing clients with virtual servers already enjoy the reliability and power of this environment, and now that we’ve built the automation and supporting services that allow us to offer this more broadly, it has become a featured product. The scale and flexibility of this platform enabled the offering of a Cloud VPS at an affordable cost without the need for users to manage complex cloud workloads. Look out for a future blog post with more details on the powerful technologies behind this platform.

The new Cloud VPS offer isn’t the only big change you’ll see in the beginning of the year. We have performed a major overhaul of our shared hosting plans. And when we say major, we mean it! We’ve moved from four distinct plans to only three, retiring the former “Professional” plan.  We have simplified the feature set associated with our three plans (Starter, Business, and Advanced) by including all features in every plan.  And now the best part – the space and data transfer allocations for each plan have EXPLODED!

  • Starter moves from 4GB to 10GB of disk space and from 100GB to 500GB of data transfer.
  • Business moves from 10GB to 50GB of disk space and from 200GB to 1TB of data transfer.
  • Advanced moves from 20GB to 150GB of disk space and from 500GB to 10TB of data transfer.

Pricing for these plans is essentially the same (actually we’re just rounding up from 95 cents to the next whole dollar – don’t let anyone tell you can’t get much for a nickel!).  The plans are now priced at $5, $10, and $20 for the Starter, Business, and Advanced plans respectively.  This isn’t a promotion or a limited time offer – these are the new plans.  Existing clients have not been moved to the new plans because of the change in pricing and the impact that the adjustment has on existing billing arrangements.  Those wishing to move to the new plans can do so in the client area or by just contacting us.

The last major change is the formal introduction of Spam Filtering, which is actually a service that we’ve been offering only to select clients for a little over a year.  This is a powerful tool for businesses looking for an easy to manage solution for handling spam for their employees.  The value of this service comes with the highly configurable options that allow you to make sure that you’re getting only what’s relevant.  With over 86% of the world’s email traffic comprising of spam, a robust anti-spam solution is important for business. Those looking for protection beyond the basic controls of a shared hosting plan will find great value in this solution at only $10 per month.  We’re offering a 30 day risk free trial for those that wish to give it a shot, but we’re confident that once you see the impact it makes on your inbox, you’ll be a lifelong fan.

So that’s how we’re kicking off 2017. We hope you agree that we’re off to a great start, but stay tuned as we have more products and services in the pipeline for release throughout the year.  Thanks for reading and we wish you a fantastic new year.