Brinker Brown is a leader in providing products and value-added solutions for the construction industry. We specialize in power tools, fasteners and supplies while building partnerships for success.

Our pledge is to establish lasting relationships with our customers, vendors and employees by exceeding their expectations and gaining their trust through exceptional performance and the highest quality products.

Brinker Brown has a truly beautiful show room of the highest quality consumer and commercial quality power tools and even if you are not in the market, I highly suggest you check it out. This is a truly amazing story of a small business that quickly took off and has become a dominating force in the powertool industry. We look forward to working together with Brinker to market their offices, services, and showroom to a local audience and help them grow through time.

With our attention to detail, we help our clients obtain the highest possible level of compliance. The unique system we have put in place will allow us to meet the needs of our clients quickly and efficiently. As we assist our clients in reaching their compliance goals, we will give them a way to make their loans more saleable in the secondary market, minimize the number of foreclosures they deal with through our pro-active approach to mitigation, and lessen the amount spent on audits.

FileUs offers the following services:

According to the website:

Our family-owned and operated restaurant offers 30 TVs (three outside) for all sports fans, a complete menu and a full-service bar. Come for the food, stay for the game, and enjoy the company!

So, if you are looking for great food or pizza in Fort Myers, we highly recommend you check out the Nick & Stella’s website and Nick & Stella’s family sports pub! It was a pleasure working with the whole family and we look forward to growing with them over time.

Well, this morning we received another comment on our very popular blog article “What Does a Website Cost?” additionally I was just visiting the blog of the commenter and noticed that in their portfolio they had this website called: “cheap web hosting” which features a list of hosting companies with their price per month as well as their disk space and monthly bandwidth.

What is Hosting?

First of all I thought I would briefly explain what hosting is. If you are thinking about getting a website you’ve probably heard this term. If not, I’m happy to introduce you. Hosting is like rent for your website. Every time you visit a website there is a computer out there (in the ether) that serves you the website, delivering it to your home or work computer. Very summarized, your computer makes a request for the html, design, images, everything… a server delivers it, and your computer assembles the website. The process of storing your website on that server, so that users can visit your site, download it, and see it is what is referred to by the term “hosting.” Hosting is typically a monthly fee.

Besides the hosting of your website you should know that, conventionally, there are no other fees for your website. This is something we get asked a lot. How much does my website cost per month? How much is ongoing maintenance for my website?

Your development company may be able to setup some kind of maintenance, marketing, or search engine optimization package, that will involve additional fees, but usually, for a smaller site (brochure site with 10 pages) this will not be done nand may not be necessary. So hosting is your only necessary recurring fee.

Just to be totally clear there may be yearly fees associated with the purchase of your domain name (website name, example: www.example.com) as well as other fees depending on your website type. Ecommerce sites for example typically need to purchase an IP address & SSL & usually have separate fees for payment processing.

Types of Hosting

Before we get to cost I wanted to mention the three conventional types of hosting:

Shared Hosting - Single account where you are given a certain amount of space on a server.
Pros: very cheap
Cons: Unreliable, share resources with up to thousands of other sites

VPS (Virtual Private Server) - Is a type of hosting where a physical server has been split into multiple servers (through fancy software) such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.
Pros: full control over your part of the server, still pretty inexpensive
Cons: share resources with others on the same server, requires technical knowledge of running a webserver

Dedicated Server - When you have access and control over your own server.
Pros: lots of space, full control
Cons: more expensive, requires technical knowledge of running a webserver

So How Much Does Hosting Cost?

Again, this depends, both on what you need or what your website needs, what your are looking for in a service provider, and what service provider you choose. Numbers vary widely. For the very low end, for shared hosting, you can take a look at the cheap hosting resource I mentioned above with prices ranging from $5.00/month to $60.00/month for a shared hosting environment. For the middle range a VPS will usually run around $30 - $150/month. A dedicated server will run about $100 to many thousands/month.

At Atilus we’ve been through all of the above types of servers/hosting environments. In fact, my first company was a hosting company. I choose to become a reseller of shared hosting accounts and offer hosting to clients locally and on the web. Unfortunately many times there are many multiples of resellers, meaning thousands of websites are on one server, making reliability an issue and technical support is not available (a reseller, not having full access to their server cannot always diagnose and trouble shoot or fix problems).

Throughout the years we’ve been upgrading, and at every step providing a better experience for our clients (uh-huh sales pitch time). I don’t want to go down the sales pitch road, but I do want to explain some of what goes on in the back so that you can understand and make a good decision proceeding with hosting. We dealt with shared accounts through a reseller account, which led to both unreliable service, and technical support frustrations (for our clients as well as for us, as we could never get anyone on the phone). We upgraded to a VPS, which meant we had direct access to the system and weren’t dealing with a reseller, meaning better uptime, and more technical support. Unfortunately, spotty, fast-growing hosting companies still led to poor support experiences and general uptime and reliability was still unreliable because of the shared resources of a VPS. Next we went with a dedicated server, which meant some more work for us, in maintenance and technical skill, but solved many of our performance issues, but physical support was still an issue (if your dedicated server’s hard drive fails someone needs to replace it). Finally, we bit the bullet and have switched to leasing a dedicated server, at a datacenter, and by a company that promises and delivers 100% uptime and incredible support. The experience has been great for our clients as well as our team.

Recommendations

That was a big tangent, but the point is, that to have the best experience possible, you want the fewest hurdles between your website and the computer (and the team that manages that server) that actually serves it. If your website is small, I highly recommend going the shared hosting route, but not your conventional shared hosting route. Although Godaddy and others have their place, ponying up a little extra per month will greatly increase your ability to consistently deliver your website to your visitors, ability to send/receive email, reduce any costs associated with downtime. At this level prices will probably be around $20 - $60/month.

Go with a smaller hosting company, but be sure to ask questions such as, how many websites are on the server, do you own the server or manage it yourself? You can also ask for referrals to get a better idea of the experience others have had. These packages will be more expensive but, many times have additional incentives (greater support, better uptime, better security, website maintenance) to make them worth your while. For all but the most extreme cases, a VPS or dedicated server is simply not a viable option for a company website. But, there are exceptions.

If you’d like to talk more about hosting your website, please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Ok, so not really. Just thought you might enjoy a chuckle. Found this by way of BNET.

This new website was completed just a few weeks ago and we have been busy adding content, and establishing relationships with local businesses and local business resources in order to make it a success.

What is Bonita Business?

BonitaBusiness.com is a resource for everything business in Southwest Florida, the website includes the following:

• (Fort Myers, Naples, Bonita Springs) calendar of networking events
• information on local companies
• additional links/resources for anyone thinking about starting a business, new businesses, or existing business
• articles across 7 categories relating to business authored by business leaders

In the very near future we have plans to release a business forum, where young, old, seasoned and new business owners or those with a love of the business, can get together and discuss topics relevant to the Southwest Florida community. We also have plans to implement a job board, for finding jobs at local companies.

Personally, this project was started to give back. My partner and I are small business owners and have had an amazing journey throughout the last couple of years. We will be documenting that journey across the pages and posts in the website, revealing the secrets and hurdles we continue to implement and leap over to get where we are today.

The articles on the site will be in the following 7 major categories:

• Entrepreneurship
• Finance
• Legal
• Management
• Marketing
• Real Estate
• Technology

Each category will feature posts by experts around Southwest Florida, each experts in their fields.

If you have any suggestions for the growth of the site, or would like to partcipate, please feel free to contact us, leave a comment… and go check it out!

The businesses span the gamut from conventional product manufacturing and distributing

My own personal opinions on young people running companies aside, there was a very interesting quote:

“We’ve been seeing kids creating businesses for a long time, but most were service businesses that were difficult to scale. The Internet is the great equalizer.”

It’s true, no matter what your age, or experience, the Internet is equalizing or minimizing the cost and effort it takes to test an idea out. So, what are you waiting for, why not start a business today? You can start by getting some ideas and figuring out what made these young entreprenuers so successful.

At first, we weren’t much for power tools. In fact a few members of our staff were laughed at for not knowing what “Makita” was (it is a brand of tool), but after seeing a catalog with some interesting mascots, our interests were piqued and we got to work. Over the last few months we’ve learned a lot about power tools, about the industry, and look forward to continually marketing wholesalepowertools.com in an effort to make it the #1 online distributor of great price powertools.

As always, it was a pleasure working with  the WholeSalePowerTools team and we look forward to growing with the new site.

Some, mainly league officials, coaches and fellow players, have been voicing their own opinions and distaste for athlete-blogging. And they should be scared, as blogging is the voice of liability forcing individuals and entities to be responsible. The doors that have been secretively closed for so long are now being blown wide open… or are they?

The voice of reason seems to be setting in for the these athlete bloggers, though. A “bite the hand that feeds you” feeling is washing over them, and making it very difficult for athlete-bloggers to be as candid as they would like to be.

“As successful as Benson has been with his creative endeavors, the possibility exists that they could have a negative impact — that the stigma of being a blogger could actually keep a talented 6-10 athlete out of the NBA. Says Benson’s agent, Bill Neff, ‘One GM told me that [the blog] was a red flag, and he wasn’t the first. There’s an insecurity, from NBA guys, about the blog that shouldn’t exist, because Rod is just hysterical. People may end up looking at him less seriously, even though he averages more rebounds per minute than any pro other than Dwight Howard. Instead of thinking of that, [GMs] may be saying, ‘Do we want this guy writing about us?’”

Read the very eloquently stated response of Rod Benson.

All joking aside, it’s actually Tropical Storm Fay, but by landfall tomorrow it is expected to have become a Category 1 hurricane. According to MarketWatch.com:

Fay is expected to become a hurricane as it nears the southwestern Florida coast on Tuesday, NHC said in an advisory issued at 11 a.m. Eastern.

Fay’s maximum sustained winds are near 60 miles an hour with higher gusts, and some strengthening is forecast during the next 24 hours.

Atilus’ offices are directly centered around the spaghetti lines and in the middle of the cone of uncertainty. Check out the picture below to see exactly where we are in relation to where the storm is supposed to go:

We are the red dot with a white border.

Having personally been through Hurricane Charlie and the other storms during that crazy 2004 season I am not too worried, but definitely prepared. Atilus will be closed tomorrow because of the storm and we are expecting to open up again first thing on Wednesday. We will all be working from home though so should you need to contact us email would be best.

A quick note though, on doing just a little bit of research for this post I stumbled upon MyFoxHurricane, a very intense site dedicated to tracking hurricanes. Although it is targeted around the Tampa Bay area it has valuable information for anyone watching this or other storms. And… it also offers live chat, if you’re so inclined.