At Cascadia Branding Co. we are proud to be a web hosting service provider with a difference. We want to help you grow your online brand presence with websites and online marketing. Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing us for your next website design, brand development, and business growth project.
Simplicity
Our entire service has been designed for ease of use. All you have to do is choose a starting point and edit your content. You don’t have to install or manage any software! It’s quick, it’s straightforward; and if you get stuck, Support is just a click away.
Easy Setup
We have created starting point website templates tailored for your specific business requirements. Choose the Theme (that’s the layout design) that you like best, and the Setup that’s pre-configured for your business category. Once you complete the registration process, you will instantly have a fully functional website, complete with all the plugins, navigation menus, and “widgets” installed, set up, and configured for you. It really is that easy! Of course, you will want to change the placeholder content; but the placeholder content itself provides detailed instructions on how to edit the placeholder content and replace it with your own.
Photos Included
All of our website templates come bundled with your own copies of a selection of incredible stock photography images. These photos are licensed under the CC0 license, meaning they have been placed into the public domain by their creators, and you are free to use them on your website, royalty-free, with no attribution required. This makes it incredibly easy for you to start blogging and posting new content. From the content editor screen, just click “Add Media” at the top, to open the Media Library dialog interface. Different website templates come with different bundled photos, based on your business type. We hope you will enjoy browsing through these images and discovering how they complement your web pages and posts!
Curated Platform
We’ve lost count, at this point, but it’s safe to say we have reviewed at least 500 themes, and hundreds more plugins, in the process of creating this service. The options that we have selected for you are the best of the best. In a few places, the available options were not quite good enough, and we custom-coded our own solution. That’s how much we really care about offering you the ideal solution for your business.
Fully Managed Hosting
You are busy running your business. You don’t have time to learn how to be an Information Technology expert! With Cascadia Branding Co. all the technical work is done for you. There’s no need to install, configure, or update any software: not on your device, and not on your server. The software updates are done for you while you focus on the things that matter to your business. We also make automated weekly backups of all the data stored on the server, to keep your valuable data safe in the event of any mishaps.
Open Source
It’s not a secret: our platform is built on WordPress. The world’s most popular CMS is well-documented, widely supported, and well-understood. Consequently, if you ever decide you want to move your site to a different web host, that’s easy too! Just choose Tools > Export from the sidebar menu on your Dashboard, and specify All Content. (Note that this only moves the content! We have purchased licenses for professionally designed third-party themes; and we continue to pay ongoing subscriptions for professional licenses of third-party plugin software: so if you wanted to completely replicate this service on your own web server, you would have to independently establish your own relationship with those third parties.)
Use Your Own Domain Name
Want to use your own domain name? Yes, you can do that too! By default, new sites are created as subdomains in the format yoursite.cascadiabranding.co. In the near future, you will be able to register a domain name through our convenient online interface, and it will automatically point to your website. We’re still working out a way to simplify this process.
If you have already registered your domain name through another company, you will first submit a Support ticket so we can create a “listener” for your domain; then you will need to point the existing domain’s DNS “A” record to our server, to get your new site to show up under your existing domain name. Please contact Support with questions.
Green Hosting
Cascadia Branding Co. is pleased to offer green “eco-hosting” for your environmentally friendly business requirements! We purchased our first carbon offsets on November 7, 2016 and we look forward to purchasing many more as we help you pursue a truly sustainable growth for your local small business or startup.
Website Security
We take security very seriously.
SSL encryption
New accounts. Upon setup, your new account is automatically provided with a subdomain-level SSL certificate, to TLS encrypt your communication with the server, using a strong 256-bit cipher. This prevents network snoops from “sniffing” your password or authorization tokens, and helps keep your website safe.
Domain accounts. Get a free website security certificate when you set up your custom domain name with Cascadia Branding Co.! We have now implemented a new system that provides a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your domain name. Whether you are purchasing a new domain name through Cascadia Branding Co. or pointing an existing domain from another registrar, we will set up a secure encrypted connection for your Cascadia Branding Co. website at no additional charge. In other words, when people visit yoursite.com over HTTPS, their browser will indicate that the connection is secure. This service is standard for all domain accounts.
Anti-virus / anti-malware
Our system is configured with standard rule-based protections. But we don’t just rely on blocking the bad guys from coming in the front door. Our site also runs regular automated security scans to double-check, and make sure they haven’t tried to sneak in the back way. (If you are a security expert and you believe you have discovered a weakness in our system, please submit a Support ticket to notify us as soon as possible. However, this is for experts only: please note that brazenly scanning our site for known vulnerabilities will get you banned!)
No Need for PCI compliance
We use payment processing by Stripe. This system uses OAuth tokens as stored identifiers. That means, we do not store credit card numbers on our system. Ever. Payment information is handled by a different company. If you set up an Online Store account, your company does not have to worry about PCI compliance, because your company does not directly process or store your customers’ payment information. What a relief!
Low Cost
Our low monthly payment plans allow you to build your business on a budget that works for you. Start small and scale up! This point is probably worthy of its very own page or post.
By way of comparison…
Just to make the point, let’s say you wanted a system that’s as good as ours, without going through us. You would need:
- Dedicated VPS server (costs money every month)
- Professional theme (costs money)
- Several professional plugin licenses (costs a lot of money)
And then you would still need to get it all set up!
If You Really, Really Wanted to Do All This Yourself
That setup includes software installation, activation, and configuration: everything from
- getting your CMS scripts to talk to your database, to
- fine-tuning the responsive CSS so your plugins and themes all work together, to
- setting up the navigation menus and widgets,
- and much more.
If you are a web developer, that’s probably not such a big deal. But for most of the world, the setup is a time-consuming pain in the rear. It always takes a lot longer than you think it will. You could hire someone else to do the setup for you, and that would take a couple months, and would probably cost you anywhere from around $2,000 at the low end to $10,000 or substantially more, depending on a lot of things. And that would be your cost up front, before your site even launched! That upfront cost would not cover ongoing maintenance such as software update management.
…Versus a Low Monthly Payment
By comparison, our low monthly payments allow you to enjoy a professionally designed website on a friendly installment plan, with built-in support ticketing, and a fully managed environment.
Really, when you think about it, there’s no comparison.