About Us
Best Effort Hosting was founded on a simple principle: someone has to host your website, and it might as well be us.
We started out doing the bare minimum, and honestly, it went fine. Rather than chase five nines of uptime, glossy dashboards, or round-the-clock monitoring, we asked ourselves a harder question: what's the least we could do while still maintaining our profit margins?
Our mission
To provide shared hosting, email, and servers that work often enough that nobody looks too closely, at prices low enough that nobody complains too loudly.
Our values
- Honesty - we tell you up front that this is best effort, not best-in-class.
- Consistency - the level of effort is reliably the same, every single day.
- Low expectations - set correctly, from the very first page.
Our team
A small group of people who keep the servers on, mostly. Nobody has a job title that includes the word "rockstar".
Sam
CEO & Founder
Sets the company vision annually, usually at the Christmas party, usually forgotten by January.
Priya
Systems Engineer
Designed every redundant system we have: power, network, backups. Has not yet gotten round to a redundant Priya.
Dave
Systems Administrator
Unix since before it was epoch. Communicates mostly in terminal output and heavy sighs.
Kai
Network Engineer
Firmly and repeatedly insists it is never the network. Runs traceroute to prove it, then quietly closes the terminal when it isn't.
Noor
Security Engineer
Ideal end state: no server ever talks to the internet. Aware this conflicts with the business model. Still working on it.
The Support Team
Support Superstars
Spend every day swimming against an unwinnable current of tickets, answering roughly one in three on the first try.
Jordan
Marketing
Writes headlines that promise the bare minimum and somehow still oversells it slightly.
Alex
Finance & Billing
Processes every invoice on time, without fail. Processes refunds at a pace best described as glacial.
Morgan
People & HR
Technically responsible for hiring. Every role on our Careers page just says "Apply"; whether anyone reads them is covered in the SLA.
Robin
Legal Counsel
Wrote every disclaimer on this site personally, then had them reviewed by nobody.
Charlie
Junior Developer
Was briefly granted sudo access for eleven minutes in March. Has been chasing that high ever since.
Trevor
Physical Security
Recognises most people on sight, checks ID for everyone else, and can occasionally be found asleep on the mezzanine floor. Basically our ISO Almost-9001 certification, if it were a person.