An Interview With Ben Welch-Bolen of Site5

Filed Under

1. Who Are You And What Are Your Responsibilities With Site5? How Long Have You Been There And Where Were You Before Site5?

Hi, my name is Ben Welch-Bolen and I’m the CEO at Site5 and co-owner. My business partner and I took over Site5 from the original founders in late 2008. I’ve been in the hosting industry since 2001 and worked with a number of hosting companies over the years.

2. What Makes Site5 Different From The Other Companies Within This Crowded Market In Your Perspective?

We focus entirely on the designer developer community and providing them tools to make their lives easier. For example in our control panel, Backstage, you can setup multiple users with access to specific websites and with certain access levels.

And it allows for multiple contacts so that a designer could be a contact on a lot of different accounts and easily jump between them in Backstage. We also support a wide range of programming languages and frameworks and work to ensure you can build just about anything in our hosting environment.

3. How Have You Seen Site5 Grow And Evolve As The Web Has Evolved As Well As The Demands For Hosting?

The biggest change has been adding locations around the world, we now offer customers the choice of 18 different locations so that they can choose the hosting closest to their visitors.

Plus all the work we put in to make sure we are the best option for designer developers and helping them swear less :).

4. WordPress Is Growing Fast And Is A Go-to Solution For Many People Now Powering Over 17% Of The Top 1MM Sites. How Is Site5 Involved In This Growth?

We power over 100,000 WordPress based websites and optimize for it every step of the way. Our support team is well versed in WordPress and it’s something we use internally for a wide range of products.

We also give out free WordPress themes and plugins at S5Themes.com.

5. What Can Someone Expect To See In The Near Future For Site5? Why Should Someone Who Is Considering A Switch Jump To You Guys?

We offer free migrations to help ease the move and an incredible environment for designer developers.

We are going to be launching Unmanaged VP later this year! And we have a lot of new tools coming in the next 24 months to help make it even easier for designer devs to manage their websites and web apps.

There are 3 comments

June 6, 2018 #

Danny Joe Brown

I need advice on how to legally complain against “Site5”. I manage in excess of 50 domains and websites. All of my domains are registered via GoDaddy and hosted by GoDaddy. Now, at every one of my email addresses, I am receiving invoices from “Site5”.

Obviously, “Site5” wants me to leave my current registrar and hosting company. However, the way they “advertise” is unethical. They aren’t “advertising” so much as they are attempting a “scam”. They send out announcements with an email subject line saying “Credit Card Payment Failed”. Then, attached to the email is a PDF file, containing an official looking invoice from “Site5” for a “Renewal Payment”.

I’ve never used “Site5”, and I never will.

What “Site5” is attempting is illegal.

To whom should I complain? FBI?

Thank you, and I welcome serious suggestions.
- October 3, 2018 #
  
  Mark
  
  Any Luck? We are now in the same boat as you and we cannot get any answers.
November 18, 2018 #

Patsy Dominick

Hey, let me jump in here….. I was a satisifed customer of ixwebhosting for YEARS. Then they sold off their business and my domains were transferred to Site5 with no notice. Have had nothing but trouble since then (early summer 2018). First of all they renewed several domains I had dropped without permission and after finally getting refunded have locked me out of my accounts until I send them a copy of my driver’s license and bank statement showing any transaction from them. I am at wit’s end and would LOVE to move my domains to another host but….. here is a good one…. my domains are marked transfer prohibited and my client access log is no longer valid. And oh yeah….. they post no email addresses and when I do the “chat” function they will not give an email address but “suggest” I put the information they need on my Google Cloud and give them access. No….this is NOT a good customer service business.