Interviewed on 11 Jan 10
Andrew Willis , Commercial Director
Offering a full range of ISP related services, we are flexible enough to support a wide variety of client types and sizes. We are particularly proud that many of our clients are experienced technical professionals who recognise and value the combination of a high level of support, which we can offer. Because of this we gain much of our new business from their personal recommendations and pride ourselves on the level of customer service and efficiency that we can offer. Because we have no requirement to heavily promote ourselves, those who use us often claim that with what we can offer, we are one of the best kept secrets in the hosting industry.
We have also made substantial investments in our data centres over the past few years to ensure they can continue to offer excellent performance whilst maintaining our excellent uptime record.
What unique selling points do you offer?
We can offer a very flexible service to suit individual customer needs. Although we have now grown into a larger organisation with specialist departments, our directors and founders still occasionally work at all levels of the business (including front line support) to ensure they keep in touch with our customers and can transfer any new requirements to our overall longer term strategies.
Describe the services you offer?
We offer a wide range of services from Virtual Hosting and Dedicated Servers to co-location and rack space.
Describe your target market?
We can support a wide range of business types thus we do not have a narrow target market. Our clients can range from a small home user requiring a single email account to a large corporate company requiring a private suite of rackspace and many Gigabits of connectivity.
How is your company planning for the future?
We are taking the experience we have gained building and running our own facilities over the last 14 years and using this to design and build new data centres that will ensure we can continue to offer the performance and reliability that our clients require.
For example we have invested in green technology for our datacentre cooling. We installed our first ‘free cooling’ systems in 2007 so were one of the earlier adopters of this technology and the experience over the last two years has been invaluable in designing the new data centres which are currently in development.
This ensures that as our clients grow, we can ensure that our facilities and also the services they need from us will continue to meet or exceed their needs.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
In addition to the large portfolio of standard products offered, we can also provide a wide range of additional options such as offsite back up, replication/failover, consultancy, secure certificates, PCI scanning and much more. We can also supply labour for remote hands or if required performing server admin of specific technologies.
Overall we aim to offer a comprehensive, flexible service at competitive prices.
Our policy is to give ‘best advice’ even if this means that ‘best advice’ will not result in new or additional business.
We also value our staff, all of whom have been hand picked to work for us, with most having been with us for 5 years or above. Although we now have many thousands of customers as we have an extremely low staff turnover many of our customers are still well known to us. This helps to save a lot of time in understanding customer requirements when they contact us which they inform us is really valuable to them.
How do you support your customers?
We have a wide range of support contact options from online chat, ticket system, email, phone/skype. For example adding a direct Skype gateway into our main phone systems enables our overseas customers to talk to us without incurring large call costs.
We also pride ourselves on our speed and quality of response. We are also pro-active as possible in our support levels particularly on colo/rackspace i.e. it is not uncommon for us to alert a client to a potential issue with their server before they are aware of it!
