Eating your own dog food

‘Eating your own dog food’ or more colloquially ‘dogfooding’ is a phrase used to describe a company that uses its products.  The source of the phrase is disputed – but most commonly attributed to Lorne Greene of Alpo dog food.  He pointed out, in his commercials in the 1970s, that he fed Alpo to his dogs.  The phrase began use in IT circles when a manager at Microsoft in 1988, Paul Maritz, encouraged the use of more internal use of their products.

Long before we’d even heard the term, dogfooding was part of our ethos.  Our search for good and reasonably priced hosting was the reason we started the company in the first place. Building the product that we would choose ourselves.  This has remained the case for the last 19 years.  We still use the same software, hardware and setup for our websites as we do for those of our customers.  If there’s a way to improve the hosting of our websites – be that reliability, speed, security or features – we roll out the same updates for everyone.  By using it every day, optimising it and squashing bugs we remain both proud of, and confident in, our web hosting.

More benefits of dogfooding

As a company focused on privacy, we must protect our customers’ personal information.  Using our own software and systems not only helps us to do this more thoroughly but means we can share that same protection with you to use for your visitors and customers.  Of course, we also use the same environmentally friendly platform to do our bit for the Earth.

Eating your own dog food may sound rather vile.  We think it’s a great way for any company to show their confidence and trust in their products.

Image by Mat Coulton
Read more about the history of the phrase at Wikipedia.