Jamie Burnett built a volunteer-run safety community for Lake Martin, Alabama, into a 56,000-member hub with its own website after security problems at a previous host put years of water-level and temperature data at risk. Since moving to hosting.com, the site has gone from being hacked every three to four days to zero breaches in nearly two years, while Jamie says support has been “spot on” nearly every time she’s needed it.
Website: lakemartinboaters.com
Industry: Community safety and recreational information (volunteer-run, non-commercial)
Headquarters: Lake Martin, Alabama
Background:
What’s now known as Lake Martin Boaters started as a Facebook group, before Jamie Burnett realized that everything the community wrote and posted was getting buried on social media, making it difficult to search and reference later. So, she built a website instead: a permanent home for safety articles, historical water data, and a growing archive that wouldn’t disappear the way a Facebook post can.
Jamie’s background is in communications, marketing, photography, and social media, rather than web development, and she runs the site largely by herself, with a few Facebook moderators and a third-party contractor who helps maintain the technical graphs tracking water level and temperature. She started the project partly because she felt the area’s existing online presence was being shaped by people with their own agendas rather than the community’s best interests, and partly because she owns a home on the lake and wanted the area well represented.
Her effort eventually caught the attention of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s Marine Patrol, which asked her to become an authorized media contact. That lets the community get direct answers to boating safety questions that can be cited back to the agency, rather than relying on secondhand information.
The website has become something more than a Facebook group could offer: a searchable, standing archive of eight years of water-level and temperature data that, according to Jamie, isn’t tracked publicly anywhere else, including by Alabama Power, which operates the dam controlling the lake’s water levels.
Challenge & Requirements:
Recurring Security Breaches on a Previous Host
Before moving to hosting.com, the site ran on a different host whose billing system lacked two-factor authentication. Attackers repeatedly got into the account through the billing side rather than the site itself, hacking it roughly every three to four days and forcing Jamie to rebuild lost content and data more than once.
Irreplaceable Data at Risk
The community’s multi-year water-level and temperature records are valuable to boaters, fishermen, and families deciding whether conditions are safe for swimming, and Jamie says there is no equivalent source to fall back on if the data is lost. Every breach put that archive at risk.
No Real Support to Fall Back On
When problems came up with the previous host, Jamie says the answer was effectively, “you’d have to hire somebody.” She needed a host that could help when something broke, not just host the files.
Lake Martin Boaters was looking for:
Hosting with strong account-level security, not just protection at the file level
Support that could diagnose and help fix problems without requiring a developer on call
Reliability strong enough to keep years of irreplaceable community data online
The Solution:
On a recommendation from a Reddit thread, Jamie moved the site to A2 Hosting, which became hosting.com within about a week of her migration. She said she worried that “it’s all going to change again,” but the site has since run on hosting.com’s cPanel Shared Hosting without a single security breach.
Support has been the standout. Jamie says hosting.com’s AI agent, Orbi, answers nearly 99% of her questions directly. When she needs human help, she says she gets a response within an hour or two, including one instance where a specialist identified a plugin conflict and helped get the site working again.
The Impact:
From Breaches Every Few Days to Zero in Nearly Two Years
The account’s activity log still shows attempted credential use, but none have succeeded since the move. Jamie says the site has gone nearly two years without a single breach, compared with attacks every three to four days on the previous host.
Eight Years of Data, Preserved
The site continues to maintain its historical water-level and temperature archive, which Jamie says is not available from any other public source, including the utility that operates the dam. The archive remains a critical community resource.
Support That Solves Problems
Jamie says Orbi answers nearly all of her questions directly, while human specialists have been available within an hour or two when an issue needs more help.
A Community That Outgrew a Facebook Group
The community has grown from roughly 7,000 to 56,000 members, with the website giving them a searchable home and, Jamie says, legitimizing the work in a way the Facebook group alone never did.
"We’re going on two years now with zero breaches. It’s been phenomenal."
- Jamie Burnett, Lake Martin Boaters
