iWeb: Great Dedicated Hosting in Montreal

Our clients often ask for their site to be hosted with a Canadian provider. Some do this because they are government organizations with specific purchasing guidelines and some do it because they are patriotic and like the idea of having their site hosted locally. Practically speaking, if most of your visitors are from Montreal or Quebec, a locally hosted site will load faster than one hosted abroad.

When we started out, we weren't always sure what to tell our clients. Most Canadian hosts seemed either sub par or expensive in comparison with their American competitors.

So you can imagine our excitement when about a year ago, we heard of iWeb, a Montreal-based hosting company. They're reliable, well-established (traded on the TSX since 2004), and most importantly, local. See Montreal Tech Watch's description of a tour of iWeb's data center on Nun's Island.

Did I forget to mention how competitive their rates are? Dedicated servers start at $59/month. They also frequently have sales that are nothing short of mind-blowing: as low as $29/month for your own Celeron 1.6ghz / 1GB RAM / 160GB / 1500GB bandwidth.

Although we've had some snafus with the sales process (i.e. convincing them to bill us in Canadian dollars), our overall experience with iWeb has been great. We've recently ordered our fifth dedicated server from them and have recommended them to a number of clients and associates. Given that Evolving Web is now integrating Apache Solr search into all our majour Drupal deployments, it's safe to assume we'll be needing more of their servers soon!

Disclaimers and further information:

(1) IWeb has indicated an interest in sponsoring the next DrupalCamp Montreal.

(2) IWeb is also currently in the middle of a great 30-day sale where each day at noon they offer a dozen servers discounted by 50% or more. The prices for one day's batch might be $120/month and those for another day may be $39/month, but in each case you get an amazing box for the price. The best deals are gone in 10-15 minutes, so be sure to check http://iweb.com at 12 PM sharp.

(3) Finally, as part of iWeb's sponsorship of last week's WordCamp Montreal, they are giving away a year's worth of hosting to the participant who can get the most supporting votes.

So, please vote for us under the name of Alex Dergachev at http://blog.iweb.com/en/2009/07/iweb-microsoft-canada-vote-race/2799.html.