Modwest Blog

Modwest Celebrates 10 years of Hosting

Friday, January 15th, 2010, is the 10th birthday of Modwest!

More specifically, it'll mark the 10th anniversary of the co-founders' purchase of missoulaweb.com, the original name of the company. It was roughly a year and a half later that we changed the name to Modwest.

Over the years our website and services have undergone various facelifts. Here's a quick retrospective, and you can vote on your favorites!

	First, the original MissoulaWeb site. I seem to remember there being some text about "bright ideas" to go along with the light bulb. That first year, most of our revenue came from web design and custom programming for a handful of large customers, allowing us to develop our first iterations of hosting signup automation and control panel.
	By mid-2001, we'd changed our name to Modwest, simply because most of our customers were not in Missoula. This was around the time we rolled out our managed dedicated servers.
	In 2002 we introduced Miva Merchant plans, allowing our customers to sign up for hosting and get started with e-commerce at the same time.
	2003 and 2004 introduced a sleek silver machine-like look. This was a period of continued fast growth as our new load-balanced architecture had been deployed and we rolled out the Starter Plan at $8.95, our lowest price to date. We also moved into a new office and datacenter during this period and were hiring frequently.
	2005 and 2006 saw the introduction of our first toll free number.
	2007 brought a new redesign, with the Starter Plan prominently displayed, the absence of our Miva-powered ecommerce plans (due to some issues we experienced with Miva), and the addition of Modwest VPS plans and (finally) the Modwest Blog!
	Finally, our new 2010 design introducing the new Modwest® Yep web hosting plan and our managed VPS plan.

Our first decade has been a whole lot of fun -- and really hard work. We're looking forward to continuing to provide cooler features, better service, and impeccable reliability in the years to come.

Which designs do you like? Modwest customers can vote here:

Five Improvements for the New Year

We've been working for months on a number of improvements to our web hosting services, and we've just unveiled several new features and improvements. Check it out:

1. Auto-installed applications: We've started with Wordpress as requested, which may now be added easily in OnSite under the "Other Tools" menu.
2. Prepayment discount: As requested in the Modwest Community, we now offer substantial prepayment discounts on our new web hosting plan.
3. Affiliate program: For a limited time, we've increased our referral credit to $50. There's no better time to tell your friends & colleagues about Modwest!
4. Community upgrade: You'll now notice that we provide Google Images options while you're adding new topics and answers in the Modwest Community.
5. AWStats: now available as an alternative website traffic reporting program for just $1/month. Add it under 'Request Add-ons' in Onsite.

We hope you enjoy these upgrades, and as always, we're eager to hear your feedback in the Modwest Community. Here's to starting off 2010 right!

-JM