Brian Creek Photography: Hosting With Real Human Support

The Solution: Brian Creek sells award-winning landscape and wildlife prints and runs private, bespoke photography safaris in Yellowstone, all through a WordPress site he built himself with no developer budget and a lot of custom code. He chose A2 Hosting (now hosting.com) years ago because the company was based in Ann Arbor, where he lived at the time. He stayed through the transition to hosting.com because he can pick up the phone and reach human technical staff who set up backups, staging, and back-end configuration for someone who freely admits he doesn't know what he's doing.

Website: briancreek.photography

Industry: Fine art nature photography, prints, and private photography tours

Headquarters: Gardiner, Montana

Background

Brian Creek learned photography on 4x5 press cameras in the darkroom of his family's small-town Indiana newspapers, where his father was photographer, editor, and reporter. He bought his first pro 35mm camera in the 1980s, shot slides for years, dismissed digital as a fad, and then, in his words, "oops."

Yellowstone got into him at 17, on a ten-day backpacking trip in 1977 with a group of Methodist kids from northern Indiana. The night before they set out, he walked to the shore of Yellowstone Lake under a perfectly clear sky and saw the Milky Way reflected in still water. He describes feeling lifted a couple of inches off the ground. He kept coming back for decades, through 20 years in northern Michigan, and in 2011 moved to the area full-time.

Today he photographs the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and beyond. His aerial of Grand Prismatic Spring placed third in the aerials category of the World Nature Photography Awards. He sells prints online and runs only private, one-on-one or small-group photography safaris in the park, tailored to each guest: half days, full days, or multi-day, from teaching a beginner to use a tripod to showing a visiting German pro the good spots. He recently ran his first online print giveaway to build his mailing list.

Challenge & Requirements:

A Custom Site With No Budget for a Developer

Brian couldn't find a theme that looked the way he wanted and couldn't afford to pay someone to build it. So, he started with an Imagely theme for photographers and customized it heavily himself: around 1,700 lines of additional CSS and nine or ten code snippets, with ChatGPT doing most of the coding. It works, but it's the product of someone learning as he goes.

Hosts That Felt Like a Supermarket

He'd used GoDaddy and Bluehost and describes them as "the Kroger of hosting": they probably have what you need, but don't expect anything special, and you'll have to find it yourself.

Needing Real People on the Other End

Brian isn't a pro on the back end. He needs to be able to ask a technical question, day or night, and have someone who knows the answer set things up for him without making him feel foolish.

He was looking for:

Human, reachable support, including by phone

Technical staff willing to configure the back end on his behalf

Solid uptime and reliable email

The Solution:

Brian picked A2 Hosting originally because he’d lived in Ann Arbor and saw the company was based there. What kept him, through the transition to hosting.com, was the support, and today he runs his site on a cPanel Shared Hosting plan.

What hosting.com provides for Brian Creek Photography:

Human support he can reach by phone, day or night, for questions or when something isn't working

Technicians who configure the back end for him, enabling features his account didn't have turned on and setting things up he couldn't have done himself

Daily Softaculous backups, set up by the support team so his heavily customized site is protected

A staging site, created under the name he asked for so he could work on changes safely, with support helping him switch back when he was done

Reliable uptime and email servers, which he calls out specifically after years with other hosts

Brian is honest about what he doesn't know. He built his site on an Imagely theme with around 1,700 lines of custom CSS and nine or ten code snippets, most of the coding done by ChatGPT, and he says he couldn't have made it without hosting.com's help alongside Imagely's. When he calls and says he's trying to do something, the technicians tell him what's possible, do it, and never make him feel foolish for asking. He contrasts that directly with GoDaddy and Bluehost, which he describes as the Kroger of hosting: probably stocked with what you need, but you'll have to find it yourself.

He also notes, fairly, that it takes a little longer to reach someone than it once did, and that some of the people he emails are working from the other side of the world. He puts that down to a customer base that's grown a lot, and says the quality on the other end hasn't changed. Some of his help pages still say A2. The experience, he says, feels the same, which is exactly what he wants.