About HELIO

Our Internet Roots are Old
HELIO began in 1998 as a design house for exotic coin dealers around the United States. This niche market allowed us to work with customers on a more detailed level than our competitors. We formed relationships in this community that allowed for very rapid diverse growth. At this time we were known as Designed Internet Solutions. Through the early years we developed high end, high capacity ecommerce application for the largest numismatic dealers in the country.

As with all industries we became a commodity in the numismatic industry and shifted focus on small business websites in the San Diego / Orange County and the greater Los Angeles areas. The company in 1995 gained traction in creating websites for Architects / Engineering Firms and the Construction Industry. This stable customer base drew us into building web applications for local city and government as well as a large grouping of government subcontractors.

A Changing World
After 2003 world events required applications that we were developing to be hosted in a more secure environment and this led to an increased focus on hosting and hosting security. To address this need, we formed a sister company by the name of di dedicated. This offered a higher level of dedicated server hosting to our customer base. By this time in our evolution we had rounded out our product offering and became a competitive force in scalable website development.

With such a profound watch on our customers web applications we saw an increase in application attacks starting around 2005. It became impractical for a customers to buy a website application and just expect it to run without major security maintenance. This started out as an annoyance and over time required all our attention to protect customer applications. This next evolutionary step was obvious; we needed a CMS (Content Management System) framework that we could maintain as a whole. We needed to be pushing out updates to website that were 5 minutes to 5 years old. This was the first HELIO product, the HELIOcms.

Customers Need Features and Plug-ins
With our CMS in place and it supportings a broad range of languages (PHP, ASP, .NET) it became very easy to program small code additions that would allow new features to be turned on in the CMS. These small programs we call plugins, add features in minutes. We made a determination early in this direction to keep cost down for these plug-ins, and we just include them in the service we offer. This strategy turned into a community in a short time. When a customer paid for a plug-in to be created we offered it to all hosting customer to take advantage of.

We also have enhanced features that we offer for small fees, for example we have created "mini sites" i.e. one page customizable sites that can have thier own domain name instead of your regular domain. A complete attendence system for tracking events, business, school and church attendence, web text, and many more options to enhance your websites.

Our plug-ins and features will contine to grow and change as your needs do and we will keep you posted as new things evovlve.

HELIO is Born
In May of 2009 DIS Business Owner Jeffrey Biggs attended a conference on Green Datacenters and it became clear that one of the largest polluters in the world, even more than the airline industry, was Datacenters. Datacenters were blamed by default because when weather events take down the power grid they burn diesel by the truckload (literally) to stay online. Not to mention that your average Datacenter is consuming 1 to 2 megawatts of of power at any one moment in time.

HELIO turned on it's first solar powered server on July 4'th 2009 (ya, we were working on the holiday) We currently offer the HELIO hosting as an option to our customers.

There you have it, a decade plus of experience touching on every part of the website process. We hope you will join HELIO. We have a lot to offer.