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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Learning • Self-Help • Know us

General Questions

No, sorry.  We only provide data connectivity to servers and server hardware.

Yes, we can! Fill out our quote form.  We also have secure remote monitoring tools so we can monitor your entire network and its performance and instructions from our own office.

Yes, we can!  There is a long process of verifying you are the owner of your domain name, but so long as you have purchase records as well as proof of ownership of your company (and your domain matches) we can recover your domain under most circumstances.

Yes, we can!  We will first attempt to trademark your company name.  Once we do we will aggressively go after the SEO thieves for trademark violations.

No, sorry we do not.  We only support Linux operating systems.  if you are sending us a server to place on our network, we will ensure the server has connectivity but everything else, well — you’re on your own.

Any and all. We have serviced charities, catalogs, eCommerce, and just small websites to get a name or brand out there and on the web. Even if you think your model wouldn’t work online, you should give us a call because there is a great chance you’re missing out.

Yes we do! See this page for more information and rates.

Products/Services

We try to make it as easy and painless as possible, even leaving us.  However, this does depend solely on the provider you’re coming from and sometimes there are legal issues with the move.

For instance:  Some providers that charge a monthly fee to upkeep your website has it written in their terms of service that they own all of your content as well as the design and code of your website.  This is called “Software As A Service” or SAAS.  Usually development costs about $2,000-$10,000, and if someone is only charging $250/mo, you have to ask yourself how it is they make a profit and pay their employees.   SAAS is how they do it – they lock you into using just their services.

We offer 2 financing options in-house:

  1. 50/50 – when we start your project you must pay a 50% deposit and the rest is due when the project is completed.  This option has no additional cost.
  2. Milestone Payments – you pay the financing fee up-front and when a milestone is completed, you pay proportionate to the cost of that milestone.  There is a 10% financing fee associated with this option.

We’re also partnered with First Citizens Bank of Princeton, NC to help provide a viriety of personal and small business loans for a new website.

Depending on project size and budget it could take two weeks or two years.

Small budget websites are developed on best-effort priorities. Higher budget websites are developed as a high priority. However, project size also plays a huge role on completion time.

Most smaller websites with budgets of $600 or less could take upwards of four months, while a smaller website with a budget of $900 might take a few weeks. Large, complex websites and storefronts could take long periods of time as they require a lot more specialized coding on the backend that we must get right.

Yes.  We’ll be happy to manage your social media pages for you to include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Local Business.

Yes.  We can manage advertising campaigns for most of the popular advertising platforms to include Google, Google Partners, and Facebook.  In fact, with us managing your campaigns we can fine tune your campaigns to target exactly who is most likely to buy your products and services as well as ensure that the campaigns only run during times that they would be available.

Goldsboro is a small city surrounding Seymore Johnson Airforce Base in Wayne County, North Carolina.   Goldsboro is known to be the home of Pepsi-Cola company as well as Case Farms (that’s where KFC gets their chicken) and is right next to Mt Olive, the home of the Mt Olive Pickle company.

Goldsboro is an industrious little city with paper mills, and high-tech manufacturing in industrial transformers (for power companies), gaskets for automobiles, and car parts for AC Delco.

Yes we can.  If you are banned from Google already, we can often help with that as well, however not in call cases.  This depends largely on the Webmaster Guidelines offense severity and how many times you’ve already recieved warnings and bans of the offense.

Regardless, give us a call and explain your situation in detail and we can let you know whether or not we can help.

Yes!  A responsive website ensures that your website and it’s content can be easily read on both PC’s, tablets, and phones.   Responsive means that the website dynamically responds to the viewport or size of the screen.  This is extremely important because many search engines now remove search weight from your website if your website’s text isn’t easy to read on mobile devices.

Company Questions

We started as a sole proprietorship of Michael Wells, of Goldsboro.  Then incorporated to a Limited Liability Company in 2009 in which the first action was to establish the LLC DBA, Goldsboro Web Development.  Officially, the company was established in 2009, but we have been a company operating under Michael Wells since 2005.

Our company has two managers, Michael Wells, the registered agent and Managing Director, and Kimberly Wells, the Financial Director.

As of this moment, no.  We may be looking to hire an Operations Director and Marketing Director in the future, but for the moment, they would have to work strictly on a profit share from the company which can be erratic.  Some months there is a great payout but others there is none.

Short answer, Yes! Our company grows at about 18% per fiscal year, and the standard evaluation process for a new developer is about 4 months.  So the Managing Director is always looking for new applications for the next hire.

No and no.  We have never had the need for investors; our income from services provides the cash flow for general operations and ensures our company is solvent with little or no debt.

Our company is not public, and we do not plan on making that leap — ever.  Our customers love us because we are small and can give most customers some very valuable one-on-one attention.  Big, publicly traded corporations can’t do that.

Yes.  Our owners are devout supporters and defenders of the United States Constitution.

Our company is one of the few where firearms are allowed on site, which is well within state laws.  Our owners are US Army Veterans as well and encourage all employees to learn how to use a firearm and to buy and carry them.

There are about 9 firearms on our premises at any given time, and to-date, no one has been hurt by a firearm, nor have we been burglarized, robbed, or assaulted.

There sure is. When a company becomes popular people, especially competitors will do whatever they can to stop it. We will not discourage you from doing your research but we will offer one piece of advice before you do: always verify a source before you buy into a narrative and keep in mind that “Michael Wells” is a very common name.

If a website accuses someone of being a criminal be sure to check arrest records. We ask this because no matter what you hear, both of our owners have a squeaky clean criminal record – in fact, both owners have maintained Top Secret clearances with the US Government.

You can read more about the owners on the about us page.

Security Questions

A DDOS is short for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The attack type is specifically meant to interrupt customers or users of a system by starving the victim system of resources (either bandwidth, memory, or CPU) to prevent others from accessing that system. This was first thought of by the way in which a US Corporation complied with a subpoena in 1987 by sending thousands of boxes of files to a Federal Court causing the investigators to have to sift through the mountains of paperwork for over three years.

Some can, some cannot. In many cases, a DDOS can be stopped or mitigated. However, in some, they cannot.

A DDOS attack can target the software on a server on a specific port and in this case, it can be stopped fairly easily. Some DDOS attacks attempt to flood a network with connection tracking, and even in that case, it can still be detected and stopped. But there are a few that cannot be stopped, the most popular is a “DNS Amplification” DDOS. Essentially this is valid network traffic being sent to a victim’s system in an effort to consume the available bandwidth to deny others access to the victim’s system with DNS replies from compromised systems. The only way to stop these is for your network to be “bigger” than the DDOS. So if the DDOS is a 20Gbit DDOS, the network must be 20Gbit+ to defeat it.

Yes, we can. We use CloudFlare as our primary, first line of defense. However, there are methods in which people get around that by finding IP leaks on a website and when they do, they can circumvent CloudFlare quite easily.

CloudFlare works as a website-to-client intermediary (or reverse-proxy) that serves cached files based on the request meaning under normal circumstances your website can’t be hacked because the client only ever sees a cached snapshot of your website.

However, if an attacker finds the IP of the server you’re hosted on, they can begin attacking the server itself which is why we currently run 500gbps DDOS protection and have the best firewalls in the industry. We can stop a wide range of attacks including brute force attacks.

Yes. We offer 24/7 ticket support.

When your username is correct but the mail server stops responding, you’re logged in on too many devices per account. This happens if you’re reading your email on several different computers and phones. Currently, the limit is set to 5 for security purposes but we can increase this per account but at reduced security. If your account is compromised and a spammer uses your account to send spam, you are responsible for that account and could be billed $100 for each piece of spam sent (which could exceed millions of spam).

This happens when you fail more than five login attempts in five minutes. This is to prevent brute-force attacks. The firewall rule will automatically be removed after one hour. If you need a password reset, please email support.

Security issues should always concern you.  And yes, we were DDOSed with a DNS Amplification attack and the best network in North Carolina was unable to withstand it.

We adapted, however.   We are now using Data Scrubbing technology from Chicago, DC, and Texas to ensure that all of the packets our servers get today are legitimate packets.  Today it would take a DDOS attack bigger than the attack that took down Sony to take our company down.  This kind of DDOS attack requires a lot of resources and access to a very expensive, black-hat botnet.

No.  Our company has never been hacked in any way, shape or form.  We have had customers who were hacked and the cause of the hack was from brute force login attacks where those customers had very weak dictionary passwords that were previously compromised on other websites.

Our customers are responsible for the security of their own accounts.  We can only suggest password strengths but it is up to each, individual customer to ensure that they change their password often and ensure it is strong enough to withstand a distributed brute force attack.

Content Questions

Once you have made the final payment on your project, yes. We do not retain any copyrights to any content or images on your website. However, if you are given a test website to view for proof reasons, the content you see is the property of Goldsboro Web Development until you have made the final payment on the project.

We are not a $30/mo company who holds your data and content ransom for the perpetual payment cycle. Once you’re satisfied with your website and have made your final payment, you can move your website to any provider you chose.

Yes. We’ll register domains for your website. If you chose the free option for your domain name, we’ll cover your domain bill so long as you host your website with our company. If you move, you’ll be obligated to purchase the domain before we’ll release it.

So long as you own the copyrights to the source website, we will. Otherwise, if the website is copywritten or is not open to the public domain, we will not.

If you request professional stock photographs or if you request custom photography, yes. Under most conditions, GPL images work great. We’ll always try to find GPL images to use before resorting to the costly alternatives unless you specify otherwise.

So long as you own the copyrights to that music or video or have expressed or written permission from the author, yes.

No. We do not allow file sharing on our servers unless you specifically rent a server for that purpose.

Misc Questions

We maintain our own website, hosting, and network. While we use several data centers, we have multiple gre tunnels and vlans running and linking our servers together for the best-clustered performance.

Yes. We use open source software and frameworks (WordPress, WooCommerce, and Unyson) to build frameworks to rapidly deploy websites including our own.

Most likely not. Our office hours are from 8am until 6pm, Monday through Friday. If you need immediate help please use our online chat system or ticket system.

Our phone system works on a round-robin basis — all calls are patched through Skype and Skype will ring the first available employee. After hours, it will simply go to voice mail. We do this to keep our service on a personal level so you never have to punch buttons or yell commands to an automated phone system.

Yes, visit us during normal business hours at 113 W Edwards St, Princeton, NC 27569

Yes, it’s the law.

Get a quote or contact us to get started with Goldsboro Web Development today!