Spongy Donuts started as a morphing of my original IT side business I started in 1998. That business focused on custom computer building, technical support, and digital design mainly (and many wedding audio CDs around the 2000s). In 2024, Spongy Donuts celebrates sixteen years as its own entity. Being a self-proclaimed geek and an IT teacher with a Master’s in Instructional Technology and current A+, Network+, and CCNT: Networking certifications, I had friends and family constantly asking me to help set up websites for them. As I was setting up sites, I had to explain that they must also register a domain name and find a webhost for their new site. Geeks often believe everyone has the innate ability to tinker with technology; however, in my experience, most people don’t enjoy poring through lines of code to find a missing semicolon. Moreover, people want their technology, be it a website or a

What is a shared server exactly? In order to keep costs down, many webhosting companies utilize shared server technology.  What this means is that many different sites are housed on one server with the underlying concept being small websites won’t need to harness the full power of a dedicated server.  Dedicated servers cost a minimum of a couple of hundred dollars per month.  The obvious advantage of dedicated servers is that they can handle a lot of traffic; however, most people don’t require the horsepower of this setup. Unless you’re striving to be Amazon, and attract thousands of purchasing customers per day, you usually don’t need a dedicated server. Some less scrupulous companies will sell small businesses dedicated servers leading them to believe that this is their only alternative.  It’s not true. Most small businesses are utilizing the Internet to create a web presence and help drive customers to their

What exactly is a CMS? A CMS is a Content Management System utilized by many major websites to do exactly as the name implies–manage content.  Here at Spongy Donuts, we’re experts at harnessing the power of open source CMS’s to make your website clean, lean, and efficient.  What is this “open source” you speak of? Open source means that the software/code is open:  open to see the code, open to modify the code, and almost always free in price. At Spongy Donuts, we’re open source fanatics because we believe that code, like knowledge, should be made freely available.  This is not anti-capitalistic in nature–just a different mindset to do business. Instead of charging for the code/software, the open source model charges for services like modifying code to tailor it to an individual’s desire, or in our case, creating custom websites for people based on what they need. In fact, we’re