Phosphorus and Lime

Introduction
I'm lead developer with a small company (three people at present) preparing to launch a commercial website built with PHP and MySQL that has been in development for the last 18 months. I am responsible for overseeing both its development and its deployment. Securing quality reliable hosting will be a major factor in its success.

I have quite a bit of experience with low-cost shared hosting and have successfully launched and managed smaller projects, but this is new territory for our company and a step up for me as a developer. Although I have spent many hours over the last several weeks researching this subject, I still approach the task with a healthy amount of uncertainty and trepidation. Based largely on the strength of online reviews and existing customers recommendations, your company has attracted our attention and we have added you to our short list of hosting company with whom we are inquiring about hosting our project.

I am writing you with a brief overview of our project, an outline of its hosting requirements, and a few questions that will help us assess our options and come to a decision. We appreciate the demands of managing a successful business in a competitive market, so any specific information or details you can offer in response to this query will be highly appreciated.

Business Model
Our website will feature user-generated content in a custom-built content-management framework. It will be text for the most part, so it should not be especially bandwidth intensive in that respect. In its first phase, the business model for our project is based upon building up a moderate user base and collecting pay-per-click ad revenues. The second phase will feature user subscriptions and fee-based online services. Our site is aimed at a unique and largely overlooked market so we are optimistic about its prospect for developing a thriving community and developing as a viable business. But as we currently have no revenues and are completely self-funded, we want to start small, flexible, and lean and expand as the business model proves itself and we grow.

Hosting Requirements
We are looking for what we like to call "cradle-to-grave service" (with the grave part hopefully coming in the long distant future.) That is, we'd like to start off with a managed hosting plan on a shared server or VPS in the $20/mo - $50/mo range and scale up to more costly managed hosting as the site develops and expands.

Our specific technical requirements are as follow:

Immediate
Managed Hosting on Linux Box
Monthly Bandwidth: 300-400 visitors/day on PHP/MySQL CMS to start
Data Storage: 5 GB to start
No or High Email Limits -- need to send several (hundreds?) script-triggered emails (user/admin notifications mainly) per hour
PHP 5
MySql 4+
PHPMyAdmin
CPanel (or other Control Panel)
Cronjobs
Minimal Downtime
Monthly or Quarterly Billing

Near Future
https certificate
seamless upgrade of bandwidth
seamless upgrade of storage
eventually, a managed dedicated server

Questions
The following questions are selected from a list presented on whreview.com (http://whreviews.com/presale-questions.htm). Detailed responses will help us immensely.

1. Do you have uptime statistics from a third party monitoring service like Alertra or some others? Could you share a link where we would be able to easily view them?
2. What's the expected time for initial response on support issues and what's the average time until final resolution? What means of contact do I have, as a customer, to get in touch with your support team? Is the support free?
3. Do you have your own datacenter?
4. What's the maximum amount of CPU usage I'm allowed to use on a consistent basis? What's your general "resources abuse" policy? How are the offending websites treated? What's your servers' average load?
5. Is there a limit on how many emails can be sent per hour? Have you had any issues with email from your servers being blocked or blacklisted?
6. Is the account scalable? What's the price for excess bandwidth and space?
7. How often will you back-up my website? Are the backups kept on or off site?

Request for Quotation
If you believe you can meet these requirements and fit within our budget, please feel free to include a quotation in your response. In your quotation, please include all set-up fees and total costs for the first three months of service.

Conclusion
Ultimately, we are looking both for a vendor and a long-term partner that can help us succeed with our business plans and we plan to give full credit to our host. I will be updating some inquiries I have posted on webhostingtalk.com and I am documenting our search on my blog, both as a record for us and an aid to others:

http://phosphorusandlime.blogspot.com/2006/10/letter-to-companies-on-web-hosting.html

If you prefer not to have your response to this query posted on our blog, simply let me know in your reply.

We also work with other small and medium-sized companies that occasionally inquire with us about hosting services, so we would be happy to be a referrer for them, too.

Please reply at your earliest convenience either by replying to this email or contacting me by phone.

Sincerely,