For more than twenty years, Traverse City Web Design has built websites for businesses across Michigan and beyond. We’ve launched small service sites, large eCommerce platforms, municipal projects, libraries, nonprofits, manufacturers — and we’ve hosted many of them ourselves along the way.
But here’s the truth: we’ve grown beyond our current server setup.
When you design and manage this many websites infrastructure becomes the foundation of what you do. Speed, uptime, backups, security are all very real engineering realities. As our client base expanded, we reached the point where “good enough” hosting wasn’t good enough anymore.
So we stepped back and asked a bigger question.
Not just “How do we scale?”
But “What does it mean to run servers responsibly?”
Data centers have become a lightning rod in the national conversation. People see massive facilities drawing power, consuming water, and expanding across the country. Some celebrate the innovation. Others question the environmental footprint. Many don’t know what to think.
Here’s the part that matters to us: as web designers and developers, we live on the front lines of that infrastructure.
Every website we build lives somewhere. Every email account, every WooCommerce checkout, every contact form — it all runs on physical hardware in a physical building pulling real energy from a real grid. We can’t pretend we’re not part of that system. We are.
Once you admit that, the responsible next step is asking how to stop adding to the problem. That’s why we’re launching Hosting North.
Hosting North
Hosting North is our managed website hosting company built specifically for small and mid-sized businesses that want performance, stability, and peace of mind without managing technical complexity themselves.
It’s WordPress-focused, fully managed, and designed to remove the daily stress of updates, backups, security patches, and monitoring. We handle core software updates, plugin updates, automated backups, uptime monitoring, SSL management, and proactive security hardening. If something breaks, we fix it. If something looks unstable, we investigate it before it becomes a crisis.
Our hosting plans scale with businesses — from essential coverage for small service websites to advanced oversight for high-traffic and eCommerce operations. Performance tuning, staging environments for safe testing, advanced caching, CDN integration, and technical audits are built into higher tiers. Instead of reacting after downtime, Hosting North emphasizes proactive management and early detection. The goal is simple: your website should quietly do its job while you focus on running your business.
We’re doing this intentionally.
We’ve moved to energy-efficient infrastructure and adopted a 300% renewable energy offset model — meaning for every unit of energy consumed, three units of renewable energy are added back to the grid. Our hosting plans are lean, performance-optimized, and responsibly managed.
Traverse City Web Design was built in Northern Michigan. Our clients are here. Our families are here. Our lakes are here. The forests, the shoreline, the quiet — they’re not abstract ideas. They’re daily realities.
We want Hosting North to be a legacy company. Not just a hosting brand, but an ethically aligned infrastructure partner for Northern Michigan businesses — one that helps organizations grow online without feeling like they’re feeding a faceless industrial machine.
This next chapter isn’t just about scaling up. It’s about aligning our infrastructure with our values and building something that will still make sense ten, twenty, thirty years from now.
Because if you’re going to build the future of the web, you should care where it’s powered.
