HostColor Interview

Can you please tell us how did you start at Host Color?

I work for Host Color for more than five years. The company has started as Shared Hosting provider back in 2000. It was incorporated in the U.S. in 2003. Since then we have been operating our own infrastructure and own data center based out of South Bend, Indiana (90 miles from Chicago). I started as a Customer Support operator. Now I'm a VP of Operations, which means I'm in charge of the technical support. I still lake Customer Support shift from time to time! It is a hard work, but I like my job and I also like helping our customers to develop their Shared accounts, virtual instances and dedicated servers.

How was HostColor at the earlier beginning?

The company started using dedicated servers from what was RackShak at the time. Today this company does not exists, it changed names and entered into mergers. We stayed there for less than an year because their technical support was nonexistent. We learned a lot from them about how not to provide dedicated hosting services. Now when it comes to dedicated servers, Host Color's Technical Support is very, very helpful to our customers. This is the only way to do Dedicated Hosting business. Customers must feel that the hosting provider stands by them and responds promptly to their requests.

How many employees does the company have?

We have staff and offices in the U.S. and in Europe where we have a separate entity - HostColorEurope.com. Thirty people work in both offices. Those are data center technicians, customer support operators, system administrators, data migration specialists, and management staff. What is interesting about Host Color is that we do hire only IT employees and do not maintain internal marketing department. Our senior management staff, including myself works to facilitate Sales. This is our model of doing web hosting business. We care about technology and spend more on the reliability of the IT Hosting infrastructure and services. When customers are happy with the service they get, they recommend us to their friends and business partners. It works for us. Host Color is growing its business and its customer base sustainably by 8% - 15% on annual basis without trying to buy or acquire customers from other small web hoisters. We see that many companies spend more money in marketing and in buying already established customer bases, then in developing their own web hosting business. We do not push for high profit margins, based on someone's spreadsheet calculations.

What does your customer portfolio look like?

We have a couple of thousands of Personal and Small Business customers who host around 11 000 Shared accounts with us. This is the largest part of our portfolio as we have started as Shared Hosting provider in 2000. In 2006 Host Color has entered the VPS hosting and dedicated server markets and has a couple of hundreds of VPS and Dedicated server customers. Host Color invests a lot of money into its network. The U.S. network of HostColor.com is fully redundant with 3 uplinks to Level3, Cogent and Internap (through a partner) and we are working to add 1 more global IP bandwidth carrier by the ned of 2012. Our network has a real 100% uptime, which is guaranteed by a Service Level Agreement. The European network of HostColorEurope.com has Cogent, B-IX European Internet Exchange and Spnet. We are adding Level3 in December 2012. In Europe we provide our customers with connectivity to major Internet Exchanges like AMS-IX, DE-SIX, PLIX, RONIX. We are now connecting our European infrastructure to LINX, France-IX and to a few other European peering points.

Do you run your own Datacenter?

Yes. We do own the whole infrastructure (cabinets, servers, networking equipment, etc.), except the facility, the building itself. We are not that big to own an IT facility and we also believe that having an ownership over a building is more a real estate business, then an IT. We are focused on building our own infrastructure and network and to be independent in managing our own data centers. This means that we can physically migrate the data centers and infrastructures we have in the U.S. and in Europe to any other IT facility property, if we decide that it will be better for our customer and for our business. This is a model which many large data center service providers have adopted within the last few years. We have a long term business relationships with the IT property owners who own the buildings where our data centers are, and we will keep it, however.

What kind of servers and networking systems are you using at HostColor?

We use Juniper J and M series routers and EX series switches. All the servers we use are Supermicro systems. Host Color has a long experience using and managing Supermicro based systems. We have an extended knowledge over Supermicro hardware and also use three hardware suppliers for each data center. We have been offered a very good deals to switch to other server brand, but when you have a long experience and knowledge on a certain technology and if it works good fro your customers, you do not change that, just to save money.

How did you start getting interested in hispanic market?

We do not target the Spanish language customers and do not make any special efforts to enter into the markets. There is a Spanish language version on our Account Management system, but this is all we have. The reason is that we can not compete the web hosting providers who have been rested in Span, Argentina, Mexico or in any South American country. We can not serve any customer in Spanish language better than the local hosts in Spain and in other Spanish language countries could. What we do is to provide a stable and qua lit service for everyone.

Do you see big differences between our market and the world english-speaker market?

I should be honest and to tell you that I don't have an answer to this question. We did not make a special survey and did not hire Customer Support operators just because they speak fluent Spanish. There are cultural differences between people in different countries, no doubt. A significant part of U.S. citizens have Latin American, Cuban or Spanish roots, we know that. Our approach is equal to everyone. We say Host Color does "Web hosting about people, not about websites", which mean to automate as much as possible, to make the web hosting service easy to manage and then to sit with the customer and to try to understand one's needs. If the customer wants to communicate with us in Spanish, we make it.

How was the business in the past 2011?

I would not be saying that business was great and all the standard things people usually say when they are asked such question. 2011 was a hard year in which we managed to keep growing. We got 5% growth and it was very hard to achieve it. We spend a lot of money and human effort to optimize every single detail. We have work to optimize our power and cooling costs, added to service more low voltage server systems, added more redundancy to our network. We also worked a lot with our current customers to help them to reduce costs and during the economic recession. As a result of this Host Color's business is 2012 is going better that 2011. But you do not say "business is good" and then stop. It is about keep developing and creating value.

What can we expect from Host Color for this new upcoming 2013?

We are creating a new management layer to manage our infrastructure. We will be offering more Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS) created through KVM virtualization and will improve the scalability of the hosting services. This is what people called Cloud, but it was there before the term was invented.

Any good memories/anecdotes to share regarding this past years in the web hosting industry?

I know one, which one of our founding members used to say. Back in 1999 he used to our for an Internet Service/Access Provider (ISP). A lady entered into his office, gave him one diskette (floppy disk) and told him "Put the internet here" :) She just probably meant to say she needed to have any settings or data she would use to setup an Internet connection… or she just didn't know what to say.

There are many jokes about Customer Support, system administrators that we share on daily basis, but I'm sure your reader know them. You know, it is very important to have a sense of humor. It is hard to survive without it. The business goes better when you make customers to feel happy and important.

Martin, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you. Any last word to share?
Thank you for you time. You guys at HostingDiario are one of the very few publishers who said they wanted to speak to us. Others think about affiliate URLs, you do speak to web hosts and produce content. I'm sure that if you keep going this way, in a few years HostingDiario will be an institution in the Spanish language web hosting media market. Which you all the best with you business guys. Have fun!

About
Martin Andreev is a VP of Operations of HostColor.com, a web hosting providerthat maintains a fully-redundant network with 100% SLA uptime guarantee and hosts thousands of small-business and personal websites in a state-of-the-art data center based out of South Bend, Indiana. The company provides website hosting services in Europe through its subsidiary Host Color Europe ( http://www.hostcoloreurope.com ).