Pella Hosting & Website Solutions

12/23/2025

🎄✨ Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from Pella Hosting! 🎉

Thank you for an incredible 2025, amazing business clients! We've loved building, hosting, and keeping your websites running smoothly with that extra digital sparkle. 🌟💻

**Holiday Hours Reminder:**
We'll be closed December 24, 25, and January 1 so our team can recharge with family and hot cocoa.

Your sites will stay up and shining 24/7 as always – because servers don't take holidays! 😄

Wishing you joy, booming traffic, zero downtime, and a fantastic 2026! 🥂

❤️ The Pella Hosting Team

01/23/2024

WWW hasn't been needed for 20+ years. It is time to update your branding.

In the dawn of the internet age, "www" became a standard prefix for web addresses by accident rather than necessity. As time has evolved and technology has advanced, holding on to this once-ubiquitous trio of letters may not be serving your website any longer.

Here are ten reasons why it's time to say goodbye to "www" in your site’s URL.

1. Redundancy in the Digital Era
The inclusion of "www" in URLs is a relic from early web days and isn't required anymore. Today, domains are recognized with or without it, making the "www" prefix largely unnecessary.

2. Speech and Syllabic Excess
Pronouncing "www dot" adds an unwieldy ten syllables to a domain name; a mouthful, considering that each "w" contains three syllables — the most of any letter in the English alphabet.

3. Typing Efficiency
The extra keystrokes needed to type "www." increase the strain on the 'W' key and slow down the user's experience in reaching a website, which can be particularly noticeable when typing out long URLs.

4. Screen Real Estate
On mobile devices, screen space is at a premium. "www" consumes precious address bar space, potentially hiding essential parts of the URL on smaller screens.

5. Data Usage Considerations
While seemingly negligible, the four additional characters in "www." include 32 extra bits of data. In the grand scale of internet traffic, this accumulates into significant additional processing and bandwidth usage.

6. User Confusion
The ambiguity around requiring "www" in web addresses is avoidable. Some websites don’t use it at all, while others redirect automatically, but eliminating it resolves any confusion from the get-go.

7. Email Miscommunication
Less tech-savvy individuals often mistakenly add "www" to email addresses, leading to bounced emails and missed communications. Dropping the prefix from your site could reduce this error.

8. Brand Consistency
For those who incorporate ".com" within their branding, starting a domain with "www" seems inconsistent. Streamlining the web address to exclude "www" aligns more closely with brand identity.

9. Outdated Terminology
The term "World Wide Web" has fallen out of common vocabulary, much like "cyberspace." Using "www" is a nod to an era that feels increasingly distant and outdated.

10. Embracing Future Trends
Modern websites, including some of the world’s most visited ones, are already abandoning "www." This forward-thinking trend aligns with a cleaner, succinct future of website addressing.

Technically Speaking...
Removing "www" can also be advantageous for securing your website with SSL certificates. Wildcard SSL certificates (*.example.com) will cover subdomains like support.example.com without the need for multiple certificates – which you would need if "www" were included (www.support.example.com).

By dropping "www" from your website, you're taking a step towards a more streamlined, efficient, and modern web presence.

11/15/2021

Having an awesome website is important, but only if people can find it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical piece that requires ongoing management.

What is SEO? If you have a website, you will want to know. In this post, we'll break it down for you and help you get started!

09/21/2021

... and the BEST place to grow your business!

06/14/2021

Check out Eric Recker's new book on the False Sense of Urgency and How to . Putting this one on the top of my July read list!

The false sense of urgency is a real thing. It’s that nagging feeling that there is always something more that you’re missing out on. Am I good enough? Is there more to life than this rat race?

05/24/2021

Not sure where to start with getting traffic to your website? The first step we recommend is setting up your Google Analytics and Search Console. Both these tools are crucial to getting the awareness you need to make your site the best it can be in your industry.

SEO (search engine optimization) is as much an art as a science and there are no hard and fast rules that are set in stone. Google's algorithm is cryptic and to date, there are 200 ranking factors that Google looks at.

What it all comes down to, focus on how valuable the content is to your visitors.

A complete list of Google’s 200 ranking factors, sourced from SEO experiments, Google patents, and more.

05/17/2021

If you've done research on how to brand your business, you've probably run into the term "brand voice." Usually buried somewhere between mentions of branding assets like logos, color palettes, and fonts, brand voice tends to get less attention: you'll hear that it's important, but you won't learn what it is or how to create it.

Here, we'll get specific. Using examples from Looka's brand voice, I'll walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a consistent brand voice.

Like many terms in the world of branding, "brand voice" gets thrown around a lot without a solid definition to weigh it down. Here, we'll get specific: I'll walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a consistent brand voice.

08/13/2020

WordPress just introduced its latest release, WordPress 5.5. It’s nicknamed “Eckstine” in honor of Billy Eckstine, an American jazz and pop singer. Your site will get new power in three major areas: speed, search, and security.

WordPress comes out with major updates a few times every year. These major updates offer new features and improve performance and security. However, we recommend waiting several days before updating to WordPress 5.5. This gives all the plugin and theme developers time to do any updates on their end. For those on our website maintenance plans, we will take care of this for you after it has been fully tested by our staff.

Get the details here: https://wordpress.org/news/2020/08/eckstine/

03/23/2020

Our staff is hard at work on developing websites and digital marketing materials. While we may not be quite this remote, we are working in our own spaces for the next few weeks.

Please call our main number at 641-613-3406 or email [email protected] if you need us! We are available for web-based meetings during normal business hours. These can be scheduled on our website at https://pellahosting.com.

01/16/2020

Naming your new business venture is something that should be taken very seriously. Here are a few quick tips:

#1. While input from key stakeholders is important, don't decide by committee, especially a large committee.

#2. When forced to come up with a catchy name, many aspiring entrepreneurs simply take part of an adjective and weld it onto a noun, essentially colliding the two words head-on to create a new word. The results are names that have a certain twisted rationale to them, but look and sound awful.

#3. Use words that will stand out in a crowd... and make sure there is a domain name available that matches your business name. Stay away from generic names.

#4. If your business has the potential of serving more than your local community, do not use the location in your name. This is especially true for traditionally local services like plumbing, pest control, etc.

#5. Avoid over-used metaphors. For example, since many companies think of themselves as top in their industry, the world is full of names like Summit, Apex, Pinnacle, Peak and so on.

#6. It's great for a name to have a special meaning or significance. But if the reference is too obscure or too hard to spell and pronounce, you may never have the opportunity to speak to customers because they'll simply pass you by as irrelevant.

#7. Driven by the need for a matching domain name, many companies have resorted to awkwardly constructed or purposefully misspelled names. Avoid using a "K" in place of a "Q" or a "Ph" in place of an "F." This makes spelling the name -- and locating you on the internet -- all that much harder.

#8. Be willing to change your name if needed. Many business owners know they have a problem with their name and just hope it will somehow magically resolve itself. It won't.

In the fever to start your new business or expand a current one, take time to think through some of these issues. By tapping into your creativity and avoiding these potential pitfalls, you'll be able to create a name that works for both the short and long term. Like the original cornerstone of a building, it will support upward expansion as your company reaches new heights.

When choosing a name for your new company, keep these tips in mind to help you find one that will work now -- and in the future.