Dusty Davidson doesn’t like to go negative in promoting his company. Still, sometimes your company exists in part because somebody else is dropping the ball. So, let’s get this out of the way…

“Nobody loves their [web] hosting company,” Davidson says. “A lot of them can feel like a necessary evil.” In particular: “GoDaddy.com can have the Super Bowl ads with girls in bikinis and all. But the personal service isn’t there. We want everything we do focused on giving people a great experience and superior product.”

Davidson, like anyone else in the hosting world, can’t help but be envious of the traction GoDaddy.com got from spending millions for those racy bust bonanzas a few years ago. We all know the brand now. GoDaddy.com is, especially for those of us who are tech knuckleheads, the knee-jerk, go-to source when we want to get our own personal or startup company website.

But serious website designers, Davidson says, need more from their host. To the rescue comes the Omaha tech startup company, Flywheel, which Davidson owns and operates with two partners.

All three of the young entrepreneurs come from backgrounds in web design and hosting. All three, Davidson says, had suffered impersonal, often clumsy and ill-fitted hosting experiences. They believed they could do better.  

“We provide a better overall hosting environment for design firms,” he says. “We’re incredibly fast and incredibly secure. Most of all: It starts with great support. We are right there with the designers at all times. We make the workflow of the designer easier.”

Flywheel began in 2012 as a startup in the Mastercraft Building in North Downtown. Now the 12-employee operation is graduating to its own space on the edge of the Old Market at 14^th and Harney.

They will eschew risqué ads, Davidson says, building instead through social media sources and, most of all, word-of-mouth within the design community.

“Designers talk to each other,” he says. “You provide a great experience, word gets out fast.”