Waitsfield Telecom and Green Mountain Access are ending the practice of hosting websites and are also ending the practice of providing subscribers with email addresses.
Kurt Gruendling, vice president of marketing and business development at Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom, said the reason for the change was simple.
“Web hosting is really a scale business. We only host a very small number of websites. Years ago, we outsourced the hosting piece as it takes a lot of resources to keep all of the servers and software up to date,” Gruendling said.
In a relatively short period of time, he added, both outsourced hosting providers exited the business, forcing the local company to move all of the sites again.
“So, we made the decision to exit that business knowing it only impacts a very small number of our customers and allows us to focus our resources on our core competency of connectivity and expanding our fiber network,” he said.
“With all of the big web hosting providers it’s really hard to compete and our customers will get a better platform with more features by moving to a provider that solely focuses on web hosting,” he added.
In terms of email, he said that almost all new customers have their own email accounts through one of the big companies like Google, etc.
“Email is expensive to provide and requires extensive customer support. We made the decision to cap our email services and continue to support our current email customers. Most service providers no longer offer email due to the cost and support requirements,” he pointed out.
