Hosting your news media website with Hadoukn

hadouknWith the announcement earlier this year that MY.HSJ will be shutting down Sept. 15, we at JEA Digital Media wanted to take a look at some of the other website hosting options out there for staffs. This is one post, in a series, that will look at different hosting options for schools. Here is a Q and A with Hadoukn.

How did this whole idea of starting a web hosting resource come about? How did you all decide on your name? How long have you all been hosting sites?

Hadoukn was born out of my own frustration with not being able to find the web host I wanted. I wanted economy pricing without sacrificing performance, support, or uptime. There didn’t seem to be any reason it wasn’t possible given how cheap cloud computing has become, but nobody seemed to be selling anything close to what I needed.

The word Hadouken means something close to “aggressive” and it reflects our attitude of tackling problems head-on and adopting cutting-edge technologies. We decided to drop the “e,” partly because we thought it looked cleaner and partly so we didn’t have to compete with “hadouken” as a search term. We’re hoping one day search engines will catch on and stop flagging it as a typo.

We’re entering our third year of offering web hosting and having all kinds of fun doing it.

What services do you offer for schools looking to have a web presence?

Our main service is webhosting, backed by a phenomenal support model. All it takes is email communication to set up a website and CMS (such as WordPress) for your school. There’s no extra setup cost to get a WordPress site running, and we handle the technical stuff for you in a way that encourages learning and experimentation. For instance, if a student deleted an entire WordPress database and file system, we could restore it in seconds with no data loss.

What are the costs for those services? What all do schools get for those costs? How do you feel those costs compare to other options out there for staffs?

We’re proud to have slashed our baseline price to $5 a month. That price gets you a Linux-based hosting package good for 3 sites and databases, Multisite support, 100% uptime, and 5GB of storage space. That’s more than most WordPress installs will ever need.

Many web hosts claim to offer unlimited service, but in reality this is impossible since the server itself has limited resources. Eventually, your site could exceed the total size of the hard disks in the server and you would be out of luck. You would then be upsold or dropped as a customer at “unlimited” hosts when you approach those limits. At Hadoukn, it’s important to us to be upfront about the services we can actually provide.

What are the benefits for a school of hosting their site through you rather than on their own through space on their own school network or some other hosting company?

Hadoukn’s biggest benefits are performance, security, and support. We cache page requests in memory before they even hit the web server, which translates into page loads 20-200 times faster than the standard servers most hosts use.

We also use a permissions model that doesn’t require your files to be readable by any user besides your own. The bottom line is that your files will never be accessed without your knowledge and permission, a stark contrast from what is possible on other economy hosts.

But probably the best-loved feature of our hosting package is our phenomenal support. Not only do we provide complete access to all your access and error logs, as well as backups, but a real person is also available to you at all times. No tickets, no hotlines, just an email and phone number for someone who has the knowledge and desire to make your site a success. In many cases, our support involves problems that aren’t even related to the hosting platform, but we are still able to help solve them quickly and easily.

What kinds of things are you working on now that we may see rolled out in the future?

We’re always looking for more ways to give our customers more for less. Stay tuned for increased storage space and additional performance features, as well as a simple, lightweight management portal. We are also experimenting with a flexible billing option to pay only for the resources you use (such as bandwidth and storage) rather than a flat monthly rate. This would reduce the cost of hosting a low-bandwidth site to almost zero.

We also strive for open dialogue with our current and potential customers to find out what features they need the most. You can send questions or suggestions at any time to info@hadoukn.com and we will do everything we can to make your request a reality.

Aaron Manfull

Aaron is in his 26th year of advising student media. He is currently the Director of Student Media at Francis Howell North High School in St. Charles, Missouri. He is the Journalism Education Association Digital Media Chair and co-Director of Media Now. He is the 2023 JEA Teacher Inspiration Award Winner and is a former Dow Jones News Fund National Journalism Teacher of the Year. He is one of the authors of the textbook "Student Journalism and Media Literacy." You can find him on X and Instagram @manfull. He's a proud father. A transplanted Iowan. And an avid Hawkeye Fan.

Aaron Manfull has 862 posts and counting. See all posts by Aaron Manfull

One thought on “Hosting your news media website with Hadoukn

  • August 23, 2013 at 1:41 pm
    Permalink

    Hadn’t heard of Hadoukn, but this great information to know and share with others I know.

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