Customer Success Story
Casting Out Loud
Robert McFarlane, founder of castingoutloud.com, has always had a clear vision for his website: "My goal for castingoutloud.com is to develop an area where members can share fly fishing and fly tying information, stories, and experiences in a multimedia environment," he explains. "This environment is presented in text (forum), photography (gallery), and video (flash and Quick time) media."
Castingoutloud.com is a non-commercial, grass roots fly fishing community site. McFarlane had been with another web host for four years before signing on with HostPapa in April of last year. "[My web host] simply couldn't match the package offered by HostPapa," he says.
"After a couple of emails to the team at HostPapa, I decided this was the hosting service for me. I quickly secured the domain and hosting plan, and I set on my way creating the community," he says. "In the first couple of weeks, we had some adjusting to do with domain names, server setup, and so on. The team was very helpful in getting these areas worked out. I am happy to say since late April 2007, Casting Out Loud's website has been running problem-free without any issues around host server downtime, shortage of storage, and bandwidth. I'm so pleased with HostPapa's customer service team and that the company has delivered on all promises of the contract."
McFarlane, who has been a print designer for over 10 years, has only delved into back-end web work over the past year with this project. He uses Adobe Creative Suite 1 to produce content; his community is on the phpbb 3.0X platform using a mysql database; he's playing around with SeaMonkey a bit; and he says he's in his cPanel all the time.
So what is McFarlane's favourite thing about HostPapa? Make that favourite things. "The hosting package is great," he says. "HostPapa gives me all the space I need for server hungry files and the bandwidth to deliver—all with room to grow. Plus, the tools in the package are up-to-date and made setting up mysql and php services a breeze! But best of all, HostPapa is 100% green, which is a huge bonus, and especially important when you are spouting off about the environment as all fly anglers do."
McFarlane's future plans for castingoutloud.com are to, in a nutshell, "build, build, build." He'd like to get to the point where people can share fishing ideas on his site, download podcasts which they can save to their mobile devices, and listen to them at their leisure. Or, better yet, instead of bringing magazines or CDs on a fishing trip, users can bring a media player with content from Casting Out Loud.
"I'm glad to be with the number one hosting company in Canada based on Hosting-Review," McFarlane attests. "Thanks for all your help in establishing our community on the web."
— Robert McFarlane, Casting Out Loud
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