A letter from our CEO
Even though it was only 2001, it seems like eons ago, back when I was a hosting customer instead of running a web hosting provider. Like many out there even today, I was bouncing around from web host to web host, trying different price points and learning my way around the web through the school of hard knocks. Those hard knocks included hosts going bankrupt without a trace, hosts with horrendous downtime problems, hosts with zero communication skills, and finally, hosts who meant well, but just weren't up to the task of running a web hosting business. It soon became clear to me that the only way we could get things done properly for our business was to do it ourselves.
Needless to say, this was a daunting task that seemed almost insurmountable at the time. Never one to be deterred by things that seem difficult, I proceeded to go about my goal of self-hosting for my company. Armed with a small amount of money and and enough time to devote, I set about voraciously learning every aspect of the technical side of the web hosting business. From Apache to Zlib, I attacked every subject I could find. You know what the result was? You guessed it. I still didn't have a CLUE! Did I let that stop me? Of course not! It was back to trial and error again, this time, with nobody to blame but myself. Some time and a bunch of money down a bottomless hole later, I emerged much more experienced and able to provide hosting to myself.
Looking back now, what I knew at this point was nowhere near what I'd want from someone providing hosting to others. Yes, folks, you read that correctly: looking back now, I wouldn't host with the me from 2001. In May of 2002, we began offering our services to the public. Our goals were simple: to provide web hosting with superior technical skill, while giving clients the communication and support they needed to operate. We wanted to operate in as open a manner as we possibly could. The idea was that instead of hiding from problems like we saw from so many others, we were going to be open and up front with people about them. If a server had a problem, we would announce it to YOU rather than waiting until you come to us asking why your site wasn't working properly. I wouldn't ever claim to be the first to think of such a thing, however, providers doing such things proactively, in those days, were rare to say the least.
Was our effort successful? Yes, wildly. We ballooned in size to over 1000 customers within a year of starting. We continued to grow (still do, in fact) at a breakneck pace. Our company has a churn rate (this is fancy web host lingo for customers cancelling service) that is a fraction of what other hosts claim publicly. I was suddenly able to bring in new employees that were technically superior to any that I knew from other companies. I was also able to keep the staff small, by providing a software infrastructure that allowed my employees to do their work much more efficiently. This way, I could eliminate the usually clueless 'level 1 support person' from our support system. That means that when you open a support issue with us, you get expert help instead of clueless buck passing.
Since then, we've continued to grow and expanded from exclusively shared hosting, to reseller hosting, dedicated servers, and complicated cluster setups. We've done it all and seen all of the problems that arise in any of these environments. We've created hosting systems for companies that wanted to start small, but be able to grow on short notice. We've built systems to withstand the heavy traffic of national advertising. Even while doing that, we still have the time to cater to businesses that don't need anything more than a standard shared web hosting account.
Today, the same challenges face any company trying to make it on the internet that I faced years ago, when I started. That's why we created this consultation service: to give others the benefit of our mistakes and lessons that we learned starting out. If we can't offer you what you need from our wide range of products, we can recommend someone reliable that will. There is never any pressure to use our service, nor are there any 'hard sells'. We'll advise you in an up front and honest manner. That's the only way we know how.
Sincerely,
CEO Hosting Ideas, LLC
