Bliznet™ Web Hosting of North Georgia

Bliznet Web Hosting provides hosting, site development, website design and maintenance, and site promotion. We are reasonably priced, not cheap, and not oversold. View our pricing and plans.

Why Blizzard Digital as your host?

We host our client sites on highly available, scalable, Quad-Core Xeon servers running Windows Server operating systems. These web servers are located in state-of-the-art data centers. We configure, provision and maintain our own servers. All sites are hosted on Windows Server™ 2003. All servers are running RAID configurations for data redundancy and we do nightly backups to other servers.

Your mail and your website are hosted on separate servers. We don't let our primary mail service use the same processor, memory, or bandwidth that serves your web pages. We maintain a secondary email server in a different geographical region than the primary mail server. We put you in charge of your mail service, but you can always request mail service changes be made by our technicians at no extra charge. Hands-off or hands-on, we take care of our clients.

We also provide reliable, managed, domain name service with auto-renewal, privacy email, and annual invoicing for peace-of-mind service. We take care of your web services while you take care of your business.

Why our email servers are better.

One of the big reasons we feel we are better is the fact that we don't share our email servers with thousands of personal users. We don't lump our clients into a single web/mail server with a single IP address. We don't encourage abuse by offering unlimited accounts and bandwidth. Some Blizzard Digital clients have switched to our servers just to get away from their ISP's unreliable email services. Why put your business email on an ISP server with thousands of dial-up, DSL, and possibly cable subscribers? Do you really want to be lumped in with thousands of others on oversold servers? You deserve individual attention and that's what you will get from Blizzard Digital.

With Bliznet you get webmail and e-mail administration with all of our web hosting accounts. An added feature is our managed junk e-mail (SPAM, UBE - Unsolicited Bulk E-Mail) removal system. Small businesses don't have time to waste sorting through unwanted mail. First: we ban complete blocks of IP addresses of known spam marketers and abusive foreign networks. Second: We check incoming mail services for reverse DNS records and SPF records. We assign a weight to the results. Third: we check incoming mail services against known DNS block lists (DNSBL). These lists maintain records for reported spammer IP addresses. We then apply a weight to those results. Fourth: We use Bayesian filtering to add another weight to the check results. Bayesian filtering learns the type of e-mail that is common on our mail servers. Because we are not a bulk web host this actually works very well. We never block for failed Bayesian filtering only. If all the scores add up to SPAM then it is most likely SPAM.

What we don't do is specific keyword filtering at the global level. We let our customers manage all other spam filters at the domain level. This includes word and phrase filters. Just because we think a word or phrase is bad doesn't mean our customers do. This is probably one of the biggest reasons other mail services appear to be unreliable. You shouldn't lose mail from a friend, relative, or business contact because they used a "filtered" word or phrase. We put you in charge; you can even turn off our default spam blocks (excluding known bad IPs). We will white list any addresses you report or we find that are being unfairly blocked by our checks or with our total control system you can add allowed senders yourself.

View prices and plans.

Why should I host with Blizzard Digital and not my ISP?

First, we don't share our bandwidth with thousands of dial-up, DSL, or cable subscribers. Our servers are connected to the Internet on a network designed to provide constant connectivity without the ups and downs associated with oversold ISP networks. All Bliznet servers are connected via redundant multi-router GigE connections. This virtually eliminates the risk of a single point of failure.

While most of our clients use a combination of our web hosting and email services, some of them never intended to a web page; they just needed reliable email service. We use a four step spam removal system, and we give them total control over their email accounts. Each client gets his own virtual email server. We also provide two secondary mail servers just in case a network issue causes our primary server to be unreachable by certain parts of the globe. You can be assured the mail will go to our backup mail servers and then be forwarded to our primary server. Most web hosts don't even provide redundant mail service and many host your mail service on the same single server your website is hosted on. As a matter of fact, you can find out if your host has redundant mail service, and, while you are at it, check to see if they have their DNS service configured properly. We run our primary and secondary DNS service on 2 different servers and networks for redundancy. We maintain a 3rd DNS server for recursive lookups. Get a DNS report and decide if your host is providing reliable, redundant, well-configured service.

Why do some Web Hosts offer more space and email accounts for the same price?

You will find that most low-priced hosts do not offer hosting on Windows Servers. If they do, the prices for their Windows hosting is usually higher. Many web hosts are only concerned with bulk sales. We have heard of some hosts that will put 1,000 websites on one server all using the same IP. We put reasonable limits on our web hosting plans so our clients are not affected by abuse or excessive use.

We base our service on reliability, service, and our customer relationships. Imagine the wasted bandwidth if a number of clients give away hundreds of free email accounts just because they have them, not because they need them.

We target serious small business owners that understand the need for rules and limits that ensure reliable performance and customer service. We work with our customers to tailor our hosting packages; you are not stuck with cookie cutter plans with no room to grow or dead-end support.

We provide website and mail maintenance. We monitor spam traps and we have automated services that delete the unwanted mail on a regular basis, always leaving up to 3 weeks of filtered mail in case you need to review your filtered mail. We automatically remove deleted items over 2 weeks old and sent items over 28 days old. With most services, you will have to configure and clean out your own spam traps, deleted and sent items which could result in undelivered mail by exceeding your mailbox limits. We receive automated e-mails to our support ticketing system if you reach your mailbox limit. We will temporarily increase your limit while we help you reduce your mailbox size. At Bliznet, we do it for you but leave the option for self maintenance open.

As of January 1st, 2006, we no longer allow clients to directly edit their web sites. This reduces the number of users with access to the servers and allows us to validate the code that is running on our servers. All of this means more uptime and less worries to our clients. Our service is geared toward clients that want their email and web services managed so they can spend time dealing with their business and not their web site.

Can you get me a good position in the search engines?

The simple answer is yes! Not everyone knows the "tricks of the trade" for search engine optimization (SEO). But we will give away one of the "secrets": be honest about what you sell or do. We have proven results with search engine listings, rank, and placement. We don't mislead customers with empty promises. We tell it like it is. Our site promotion and Internet marketing service is reliable, honest, and gets results. If you are looking for top results in a saturated market, we won't lie about how you will be number one any day now. If you have something to offer and good content, you will get listed in the search engines. Website promotion, or Internet marketing as some call it, is extremely important for a successful website. With our free site statistics software, you will be one step closer to optimizing your site for the search engines. Get prices and tips for search engine optimization.

Here are a few examples:

This website for Mountain Meadows needed area coverage so we targeted their city and what they do—sell land. This site gets hits for the phrase Ellijay Land and Ellijay land for sale because that's what they offer.

The web site for Harmon Trophy Hunting Products needed to be listed by the products they manufacturer, deer scents, and not limited to a search that includes their location, because they sell on a national level. This client is selling products on their website as a result of our work and their fine products.

One client needed their web site to generate results for the phrase North Georgia Lake Community. They needed to be listed for their exclusive lake property and homes, Tranquility at Carters Lake, a unique real estate experience.

Why Windows Servers?

Our main reason for using Windows Servers is our background in Windows administration as well as the methods made available by Microsoft for rapid development and deployment of e-commerce and database-driven web applications. We can also provide full support for ASP, ASP DOT NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Access databases, and MySQL all on the same platform.

Security

At the data center level our servers have network IDS, IPS, and DDOS protection. You can read about Tipping Point here. At the server level we have firewall protection as well as Industry leading anti-virus scanning for your e-mail. These protections along with the limited access provided by not allowing direct client access to the servers keeps our services running without the hiccups associated with bulk hosts.