How we operate at HMon
Listing the same technical jargon that you read everywhere else will tell you very little about HMon and the type of business that we operate. Rather, understanding how we operate will give you the clearest picture of HMon. We are a business that operates on the principles listed below and we feel that these principles will provide you with the best possible customer experience.
Availability - the cornerstone of our business.
This is by far the thing we feel is most important in providing quality hosting and data center services. There are two extremes found all too often in our industry and we vowed from day one to never provide our services in this manner.
The first is a person running a hosting business on the side and not giving it absolutely top priority. So many people get swept up by an unusually low monthly price for hosting, only to discover at some point that they're having a problem and haven't been able to contact the provider for hours - sometimes even days.
The second is the huge provider - long hold times, speaking to a helpdesk tech that can't help with anything, being transferred from department to department, trouble tickets that they respond to within a few hours if you're lucky and worst of all, all you are is an account number. That's great that they host 20,000 sites - but how important do you think YOU are to them?
Short term contracts without price gouging
Our customers stay with us because they want to - NOT because they're bound by contract. When you work with HMon, you commit to three months at a time. We're not sure why standard contract terms in the industry seem to be inscreasing while the price of connectivity is decreasing. We find it especially unethical that other companies will sometimes more than double the monthly price for a short term contract. At HMon, your contract term is always three months auto-renewing.
Setup fees
With a few exceptions, we believe that charging setup fees is simply not fair to the customer. In some cases, there are hard costs that need to be recovered, but the rest is overhead. Why should you pay us for the privilege of being our customer? You will find that HMon will rarely ask you to pay a setup fee.
Quality hardware
Since day one, we have always insisted on high quality server hardware for reliability and performance. You will find many hosting companies that run their hosting services on upgraded PCs with no redundant hard drives, no redundant power, and nothing that would qualify the machine as a true server class machine.
We don't do that. Our production servers are all server class machines with at least RAID 1 SCSI/SAS drives and redundant power. If it were any other way, we wouldn't be able to sleep.
Focus
We focus on data center services. That includes web and email hosting, colocation, virtual server hosting, and other services directly related to those. While the trend is to become a one stop shop, we believe that if you're all over the board, customer service suffers. While it may be profitable to jump on the security services bandwagon, we feel that it's better to continue to focus on the data center.
Straight forward
As our very first customer told us, "Every provider has problems sometimes. It's how you handle the problems that will make you better." We took that advice to heart. If we're having a problem, we'll make every attempt to proactively let you know as soon as possible, and we will just tell you what's going on, without trying to sugarcoat it.
Sales - It's always been our position that if you ask for a quote, we should be able to provide it for you immediately. Our experience has been that the company that takes days to provide a quote on the basis that they're "custom designing a solution for you" is really telling you, "we need to figure out how much we can get you to pay."
Doing the right thing
If you have been patient enough to read through our principles, it should be evident to you that we don't always do things just because they've become standard in the industry. This is especially true in our pricing. Just because the rest of the industry is getting away with it does not mean that we should try too. In other words, just because it's legal doesn't mean that we should call it ethical.
