{a complete solution: custom website, hosting & unlimited support}
Where your content, brand and services come together with great technology and client-centric web support services.
We have been managing and building WordPress websites for over 10 years. Some of us having decades of award-winning website development experience.
We have taken this experience and all the best-practices we have learned and rolled it all up in a quick-to-deploy, compliant, high-performance, and secure solution. In short you get:
It’s Your Content
It’s Your Strategy
It’s Your Mission
It’s Our Code
It’s Our Experience
It’s Our Security
It’s Our Hosting
It’s Our Performance Services
It’s Unlimited Support
Combined it’s Genius Stack™
Tina Fox of Fox Paradigm is a busy consultant, coach and speaker. She turned to FatLab and the Genius Stack service to develop a site that encompass all her efforts in a single place, strengthening her personal brand.
FatLab built this website as part of our comprehensive Genius Stack service and continues to host and maintain the site for this international organization.
A Genius Stack website, for a Reston, VA-based personal fitness company. FatLab built the site and will continue to take care of it under our managed services offerings.
This is a complete package providing professional services with a code base that is yours to take anywhere in the future and easy for any developer to work on. We also provide high performance managed hosting and full security services. All you have to do is come up with the content (we can even help you with the site structure) and buy your domain (we’ll help you set your domain up so your website loads).
We generally hate commercial themes, such as those found at ThemeForest. They are built to be sold in mass and therefore they seem to do a lot of things “kind of well” instead of a few things very well.
For $0-$100 dollars you can buy one of these and load them up, but that’s often when the ease-of-use ends. You now have to sort through hundreds of configurations and tutorials to get your site up and running. They are typically built to do as much as they can and with that comes a major decrease in performance.
We have never seen one of these perform very well in regard to load times (Google cares about load time!). In an effort to do so much, these can be “heavy,” complicated and really hard to customize beyond what the author originally intended. Also, support is typically restricted to forums.
Genius Stack was built to be a light streamlined solution, to do a few things really well and not focus on the masses. Our clients are those that appreciate simplicity, ease of use and are not trying to do anything too crazy. They just want a professionally built site that performs well with responsive and helpful web support just a phone call away.
Those are pretty cool, we can’t lie! In fact, we have recommended some potential clients to such services. For those on a budget and willing to put in the DIY time to learn the platform, these can be very powerful services. However, they are proprietary, which means you can’t take them anywhere as you never own the code. You are subject to their ever-changing environments and services.
Good support can be hard to find sometimes. Give’em a break, they have millions of customers whereas we currently have under 100 allowing us to provide our clients with dedicated and timely support.
With over 20 years web development experience and in particular over a decade of custom WordPress development, we have learned which plugins, services and technologies aid or hurt a website. We’ve seen it all!
We’ve seen websites that cost tens of thousands of dollars to even six figures. We’ve seen marvels of computer science genius and we have seen clients struggle with amateur hour spaghetti code and/or content management systems so stuffed with plugins that they take nearly a minute to load a page. We’ve seen clients spend valuable time trying to learn new systems, spending hours on support lines only to have to hire a developer (people like us) in the end.
This product is based around the consulting side of our business. We often work with organizations to streamline performance so that bounce rates drop, and search engine positioning is improved. We work with clients to build sites that allow them the flexibility to add unlimited number of pages yet maintain brand integrity. And in the last year we have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of work focused on ADA/WCAG and GDPR compliance.
With all this knowledge and experience we put together a best in-class WordPress based solution. We won’t tie you into proprietary systems, all the plugins we use are industry standard and aid (not hurt) performance or ease of use. The result of this effort is a high-performance, compliant website that is ready to rank well in the search engines, while allowing you to maintain content easily without fear of breaking the site.
To top it all off, we are first and foremost a website support company so we are here to help with anything that might come up.
We have built, hosted, supported and managed websites and applications for organizations like IBM, Hewlett Packard, Philips Medical, Orbitz, U.S. Federal Agencies, royal families, foreign governments, U.S. Congressmen, candidates for Federal and state office, global pharmaceuticals and so many others.
We have launched an uncountable number of websites for startups, consultancies, coaches and have worked for and/or partnered with some of the country’s largest and most recognized communications firms.
FatLab Web Support’s starting price for websites (not including design) is typically $10k-15k and our monthly hosting starts at $225/month and just about all our work is 100% custom. This service was designed to bring the quality and professionalism that comes from working with a firm like ours to a productized service that could be sold for much less without sacrificing quality of product or service.
We have been part of teams that have won awards including webby, Platinum PR Award, Gold Icon Award, PRSA Compass Award, International Academy of the Visual Arts’ Communicator Award and Political Consultants Pollie Award.
Don’t get us wrong, this is not a race to the bottom! This service is designed for those that are unable to hire an agency for tens of thousands of dollars yet don’t want to risk not getting a high level of quality by hiring a freelancer or small studio to build them a custom website.
This service is for those that don’t have the time or interest required to build their site in a DIY services like Squarespace or Wix or who don’t want to buy a commercial theme on a site like ThemeForest and try to “develop” their own WordPress website.
This service is for those that want access to high-end professional designers and developers, a turnkey solution and one that does not lock them in.
Your website will be hosted on servers dedicated to FatLab, LLC (i.e. this is not a cheap shared hosting plan). We maintain servers in several geographic regions (New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Seattle), and can scale resources as needed. We’ll pick the best environment for your website and audience. With new “high frequency” servers and the latest server software, your site will perform incredibly well and experience incredible uptime.
Your site and the servers that it runs on will be monitored by multiple teams 24/7. If your site were to go down or experience a decrease in performance, a member of our team will receive an alert and look into the issue right away. In the last 10 years we have boasted incredible uptime and typically have issues resolved before our clients even notice.
This is different than other hosting services that often only monitor their network and if your site goes down, they will not know until they receive notice from you. We monitor your site from over 200 global locations in 15-minute increments.
We take daily backups of both the files and database that run your website and hold multiple copies in multiple locations for 30 days. This helps protect against catastrophe (manmade or natural) and if you ever need it, we can typically restore from backup within a matter of minutes.
Each and every site is protected by a real-time firewall that inspects all incoming traffic for DDoS attacks, SQL injection, XXS injection, malware, bad reputation bots, bad reputation IP address and more.
No firewall is perfect in that it can only guard against known threats. That is why we will scan your website every single day for malware and signs of hacking. If a threat is found, we will take care of the cleanup process and restore your site at no additional costs.
Enabling an SSL certificate on your website means your site runs over HTTPS (when you see that little lock in your browser). This encrypts all information sent between your site and the servers and protects against man in the middle attacks. Most importantly this protects your site visitors as they send and receive to and from your website. Google even gives a higher search ranking for those sites that utilize SSL. We provide SSL certificates and take care of all the logistics for you at no additional cost at both the server and firewall levels.
We provide many services to aid in the performance of your website. These include but are not limited to a CDN, automatic image compression and full-page caching.
The number one performance killer on most websites are un-optimized images. Your site will be built to optimize all images as you upload them. We do this by creating optimized image sizes on the fly and by optimizing each and every image so that its size is reduced without losing quality.
If you are ever looking for a place to try some new content out within your website before releasing it to the public, we can provide a staging site at no additional cost. When you are ready, we’ll deploy your updates to your live site.
We take credit cards. This is a “productized service”, and we feel it’s important that we know each other so we’ll take your credit card over the phone and not make you fill out a faceless form. We will enter your information directly into our processor (currently Authorize.net) and not store your credit card information anywhere else.
You can cancel any time you like. We simply ask that you send an email or open a support ticket with the request. If you have been with us for less than 12 months you may pay the difference between the paid for monthly fees and the $3000 product fee for a copy of your files and database. If you have been with us for 12 months or longer, you can cancel any time and we will provide a copy of your site files and database at no additional charge.
You sure can. Most major hosts will have no trouble hosting your site since it is built on popular, standard, and open-source technologies. Finding a developer or firm to take it over should be no trouble either. The only requirement is that you meet the financial part of the service.
You do. We will never make any claim to your content or data. As long as you have met the financial minimums of the service, we will release your files and data upon request. If you leave, we will remove all files and data from our servers.
They do and you can. Set up your account, choose what software you would like to install, hit a button… That’s it. Now you have to learn how to use that software, choose a theme, customize that theme, dare to use FTP to alter files, install additional software that could crash the site, keep that software updated, evaluate if their provided security is good enough, turn on backups, call overseas support that reads from transcripts and then finally hope that all the decisions you made are right and your site is well optimized for SEO and performance. There is a reason you can get that service as low as $5/month.
We are offering you all enterprise level services. Every aspect of our service is what we would recommend to the largest organizations with the biggest budgets. However, if you are interested in learning, already have the skills and/or want to save a buck then those services might actually be better for you. We are not saying they’re “bad” we are just saying our solution is for those that don’t want to deal with all that.
We’ve packaged some of the same services a freelancer will provide in an all-inclusive service. With our service you know exactly what you are getting.
Using the same service providers we have partnered with to provide this service the costs would be as follows:
Hosting: $30/month
Website Monitoring: $25/mo
Web Application Firewall w/ Malware Scanning and Cleanup: $25/mo
30 Days of Redundant Backups: $10/month (seriously, this is not included in the $30/month plan)
Using the enterprise level service providers we have partnered with; the individual services would total about $90/month. Of course, there are hosting plans out there for as little as $1/month and if you are not worried about security and up/down time, then you could potentially reduce these costs by 99%! However, we are not done yet. These are just the technology providers. You still have to get your website designed, built, maintained and deal with any security issues that might arise:
Web site design and development services: $0 (DIY with free themes and plugins) – $15,000+ (agency/studio services)
On-Call Support: $5-225/hr
Single time malware or hack cleanup: $100-$350
Now notice we have said nothing about your time. Your time is priceless, unless of course you bill by the hour and if you bill by the hour, you will get where we are going with this. So, unless you value your time at $0/hour then you must also account for the time it will take to set this all up, monitor it and maintain it.
We will send you an MS Word document or Google Doc that outlines all the content you will need to provide. You can simply fill this out and send it to us and we’ll do all the hard work. Or, if you prefer, we can get your website setup and you can login and enter content directly. We provide full documentation on how to manage content within your site.
This is a service not a cold product. We’ll talk to you on the phone and/or do a video conference and get all the details of your business. As cheesy as it sounds we like to know our clients (not ”customers”).
We’ll take payment info from you after you agree to our terms and conditions. After that we’ll talk about what domain you would like your site to run on. If you don’t already own a domain, we can consult with you on how to buy one (we never own your domain).
We’ll then work with you to get your domain pointed at our firewall service. We are happy to do this for you as part of our service so no need to read up on DNS. After that, your site is online. We’ll load up with content if you provide that.
One important note. Your site will match your branding color palette so we will need as high of a quality file as possible of your logo. We’ll set up the branding, initially but we can always change that later.
In the very unlikely event we close our doors we will give you plenty of notice and provide you all your files and data at no charge. However, this is no fly-by-night operation. FatLab, LLC has been in business for 10 years and under our FatLab Web Support business we currently manage around 100 websites, host about 60 websites and have partnerships with some major communications agencies. We should be around for a while.
The concept of this service is that we have put together a site structure that meets about 90% of the websites we build for our clients. You can highlight products, services, people and create unlimited pages. However, the service is restricted to the features we have provided. Meaning, until we offer an e-commerce solution, we can’t setup a store for you. Custom templates, designs and modifications to the provided template (which is very flexible) are not possible.
As a user of this service, you will be provided editorial (not full administrative) access to the website. This will give you the ability to control all content and features of the site, but you will not be able to load in new plugins, themes or other enhancements. Remember, we built this, so you didn’t have to pay for a custom solution. Direct file and database access is not provided under this service.
If you decide that the service is too restrictive, and you need to customize your site outside what is allowed and/or would like full administrative access you can move your site to a new host, developer, or firm (we recommend FatLab Web Support) to help you do that. This will be a great base to start from and you should not have to start over if you go down this path. Be sure to see our terms and conditions as this relates too pricing.
All limitations are designed to keep the integrity of what we consider a best-in-class / best practice website where we can easily ensure your site meets our high standards for display, security, and performance. We get it though, one day you may decide this is not enough. You are never locked in and we can help you make the transition from this defined service to a new more custom service.
No. You are the expert of your business, we’ll never pretend to know your business as well as you do so we strictly focus on the technical side of things. However, we have excellent partners that are graphic designers and writers that can assist with those needs! (Those costs are separate from the Genius Stack fee.)
C’mon we’re a bunch of nerd coders, you don’t want us to edit your content – believe me. With that said, we make no judgments on content. Unless you are doing something illegal, we really don’t care what is on your website. In fact, you can assume we have never read it.
Your website will be built using WordPress, the world’s most popular CMS. WordPress currently runs over 30% of all the world’s websites. We may use best-in-class plugins to enhance the site and the theme is custom built by us and is a child theme of the popular open-source starter theme Understrap. If you want to get really nerdy please see “What are the technical specs of the site?”
Nope. Squarespace and services like them provide incredibly powerful tools to build relatively sophisticated websites, however, it is up to you what the site looks like, how it is laid out and you have very little control over various performance factors. For some this is great solution, for others… well let’s just say we have seen people spend entire weekends or even weeks that they could’ve spent on their businesses learning these platforms, designing, redesigning and starting over and over just to end up with a less than professional result. It’s not like the Super Bowl commercials where a complete newbie builds an amazing website with musical montage lasting only seconds. However, with that said, we do recommend such services to some people and believe they have their place, so please check them out.
We utilize a 3rd party service with over 200 global geographically diverse monitoring centers (we typically use only US based nodes unless your business is specifically internationally based or targeted). Every 15 minutes your site will be checked by one of these nodes, if a problem is found then a second node somewhere else in the world will verify the issue. If the issue is verified, then and alert is sent to our team for investigation.
Content Delivery Network (CDN):
A CDN keeps copies of your static files (images, pdfs, style sheets, etc.) on servers all over the world. When someone visits your site, they will be served assets from the server geographically closest to them. This greatly speeds up the delivery of your website making both your clients, customers, and Google happy.
We utilize Stackpath’s, an industry leader in website security and Web Application Firewall (WAF) services. Each site hosted with use has all traffic routed through their global network where it is scanned for threats.
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