Twenty-six years, still independent
IDLhost started in a spare room in Milwaukee in 1999, hosting sites for friends. We incorporated in 2000, and we are still here, still independent, and still run by the same people.
How we got here
In 1999 a friend needed somewhere to put a website. Then another one did. By 2000 there were enough of them that it made sense to make it a proper business, and IDLhost.com was incorporated in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The industry changed a great deal after that. Hosting companies were bought, merged, and bought again. The familiar names on the billboards became brands owned by holding companies, support moved offshore, and the business model settled into something predictable: advertise a very low rate, then raise it sharply at renewal and hope the customer does not notice.
We did not follow. We are the same company, with the same owner, run from the same city, with the servers and the support still in our own hands.
That is not nostalgia. It is a deliberate decision about what kind of business this is. We are small enough that keeping a customer for twenty years is worth more to us than any short-term squeeze. Several of the customers who signed up in our first year are still with us.
What we actually do
We run cPanel hosting on our own servers: shared hosting for businesses and individuals, reseller accounts for the designers who build sites for a living, and managed VPS and dedicated servers for people who have outgrown shared.
We also do the unglamorous things that hosting companies are supposed to do — patch the servers, keep nightly backups, and answer your ticket ourselves when something is wrong.
What has stayed the same
The people on the other end
Open a ticket and you get one of us. Not a queue, not a script, and not a different person every time.
What customers say
I have these guys handle all of my website hosting needs because they get the job done and need very little attention from me on a regular basis.
I like the reliability and responsiveness of IDLhost’s service and staff. It’s one less thing I have to think about daily.
Come and be a customer for twenty years
Shared hosting from $5 a month for your first year. No contract keeping you here, and the rate each plan renews at is printed on its card.