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posted on 11-03-2008 by bwb
Eleven2 Hosting, one of our favorite reseller companies, has giving us an exclusive coupon for their reseller packages. The coupon code "50Reseller" is good for 50% of any of their reseller packages, regardless of the payment term. This is a great deal so take advantage of it while you can.
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posted on 09-10-2008 by bwb
On September 10th, 2008, I had a chance to talk to Rodney Giles from Eleven2 Hosting to find out what makes this new and upcoming company tick.
Interview conducted by Chris Lloyd of Resellerguide.com
Chris: Ok, can you start by telling me your name and what your role is at Eleven2?
Rodney Giles: I am Rodney Giles, I am the CEO and founder of Eleven2. I basically ensure that everything is working perfectly each day, through managing our brilliant staff and mapping out the future and strategic vision of Eleven2.
Chris: Where are you located and how long have you been in business?
Rodney: We are located in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston and have been in business since February 2004.
Chris: I know you guys are in major growth mode. Can you give me some examples of where you started and where you are now?
Rodney: : Well we started with a single server back at EV1Servers and about 20 accounts. I was a web designer at the time, and could never find a good hosting company. I tried dozen's of them, and were never satisfied, so I started my own. I bought a server for $299 a month and was making about $100 a month, so I obviously had to figure out how to make the server pay for itself. I was a senior in high school at the time, and next thing I knew, we had 100 customers, then 1000, and now host close to 65,000 websites.
RG: That is awesome. I always like to hear stories about organic growth. Congratulations on that.
Rodney: Thank you, it has been allot of work, yet is still fun 4 years later. I love coming into the office and getting to work on great new ideas for our products or our customer service.
Chris: What would you say is the #1 contributing factor to that growth?
Rodney: The biggest factor has been what we called "World-Class Hosting, Done Right", which is our current tag line. It basically means we want to give our customers the best hosting, done the right way. We always try to step back and not look on what the others are doing, but look on what should be done to make the customer experience the best. The biggest factor for sure is our personal support, that is what we constantly get tons of praise about from our customers and what we know for a fact has fueled our growth through customer recommendations.
Chris: Can you let us know what types of hosting and reseller plans you offer today?
Rodney: Currently we offer 4 shared and 4 reseller hosting plans. We also have a few hundred VPS and dedicated customers. We have never publicly offered dedicated or VPS hosting, as all of those customers have been shared or reseller customers that needed something to upgrade to. We have always wanted to stay simple and make something the best, rather than venture off into allot of products. We have a new shared/reseller product refresh coming down the pipeline right now that we are very excited about, and once that is done, you will see Eleven2 hit dedicated and VPS hosting full force in a new creative way, unlike any other hosting company.
Chris: Can you talk a little about the advantages your products give web developers?
Rodney: I constantly work with our system administrators as well as our customers to ensure we have the best development platform available for all of our customers. We constantly work on our PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Apache setup to ensure they all have the most widely used modules and ensure they are tweaked to the max, to give our developers the easiest to use as well as the fastest development platform available. We are very open to new technologies and love to hear from our customers about what we need and show them that we research all new technologies and implement as soon as we can do so and keep a stable environment. Uptime always takes precedence over new technology.
Chris: This is a reseller site so let's talk a little reselling. It's a two part question. What are the biggest mistakes you see resellers make?
Rodney: The only problem I see, is the reseller will claim to offer some sort of support that they cannot fulfill, thus having the end user client contact us directly, which then we cannot support.
Chris: Second part is on the opposite side. What is the best piece of advice you could give to a potential reseller client?
Rodney: If they want to compete in the hosting industry as a whole, they have to-do something very off the wall not to noticed. If they are a web designer, we strong recommend requiring there customers to host with the reseller and not charge a normal rate such as $6 per month. Most design customers will have no problem paying $40 a month for hosting. Then the reseller can focus on making sure there customer is happy and giving them a quality product.
Chris: So pick a niche and be really good at it?
Rodney: Exactly!
Chris: Are there any new hosting technologies we should know about?
Rodney: "Cloud Hosting" definitely look interesting. I personally think it is a bit to early to put your entire infrastructure on 'the cloud'. However, it will make progress. One thing allot of people probably will not know about Eleven2 is we focus internally on allot of complex hosting setups for companies around the Houston area, we have quite a few dedicated customers with more than one server as well as quite a few colocation customers.
Chris: I like to wrap things up by giving you an opportunity to freestyle. take as much time and space as you want to say whatever you want about eleven2 and reseller hosting.
Rodney: Well I just wanted to conclude in saying that the biggest single thing that distinguishes ourselves from the other big name hosting companies is our personal customer service. While I am not personally available for every single technical support issue, if you need to get a hold of me almost anytime, or any of our staff, we are here available to take direct calls and you will be treated like a real human. You are not a number with Eleven2. We only hire the best staff we can find to ensure our customers are treated in the best possible way! I really enjoyed this interview today and would love to talk to you again soon! Thanks Chris!
Chris: it was great talking to you Rodney. thanks for your time and good luck with everything
Read more at the Eleven2 website.
Chris Lloyd
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posted on 08-15-2008 by bwb
Many resellers might find advantages of switching to a service that sells Windows server hosting over Linux. While Linux is a very popular hosting solution, Windows offers multiple advantages that would benefit a number of people. For this reason, it can be a very good product for sellers to resell.
For example, With Windows Reseller Hosting providers like ResellerChoice the Windows hosting is really an all in one solution to hosting. You don't have to hold multiple accounts in order to keep up with all the clients that you might have, those that are normally spread out over the various control panels that you have in Linux. This might make keeping track of clients so much easier and save you a lot of time. You can still host applications written in any of the languages out there. This means you can run a PHP and MySQL based site right next to your ASP.Net SQL site as well. It is all on the same server and in the same control panel so you don't need to keep switching back and forth.
You can also use ASP.Net and ASP, a more powerful tool in the developing applications for the web. That is certainly not the case when you use UNIX. With the Windows hosting platform that lets you use ASP.Net and ASP, you can use those more popular content management systems and they will run well. The ASP scripting works so much better with a Windows hosting platform.
When you use Windows Reseller Hosting, you will always have the latest technology available that you can add to your portfolio of services. You will be able to offer Exchange 2007, and there is also Windows Mobile and the ActiveSync that goes with that. There is also the Push Technology and the SharePoint that is also available. All of these additional services you can offer with your hosting platform and it makes for additional income and a more powerful way to market your professional services.
The SQL Server provided by Microsoft is a data management and analysis software that has worked so well and has been rather reliable for a great many complex business applications. It is one of the fasted growing database solutions that is being used, and it can give a competitive advantage when you offer this with your Windows hosting as a reseller.
Compared to the UNIX control panel, the control panel of a Windows based hosting program has a clustered solution that makes use of the Active Directory technology also provided by Microsoft. This means it already has Enterprise level solutions right from the start. You show that you can meet growing demands, as you need them right away.
With all of these reasons to use the Windows hosting platform, it gives solutions to what you can offer to customers when you sell them this solution to their hosting needs. When you partner up with a reseller that offers this platform, you're offering many opportunities to grow and help your clients to expand their needs and utilize the latest technology. Once you try this reselling program, you will find a higher quality of customer and be able to offer long term, lasting professional hosting services.
ResellerChoice (http://www.resellerchoice.com) A privately owned service provider located in New Jersey, USA and a leader in windows hosting solutions including windows reseller hosting, dedicated servers and VPS. They also provide outsourced Windows IT services and management.
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posted on 06-11-2008 by bwb
On June 5th, 2008, I sat down with Matt Russell, Chief Operating Officer of WebHostingBuzz, to find out a little about him and his company.
Interview conducted by Chris Lloyd of Resellerguide.com
Reseller Guide: Just to start off, what is your name and what do you do at WebHostingBuzz.
Matt Russell: Matt Russell, Chief Operating Officer. My job is to oversee the general day to day business activities and operations. Anything from working with our technical/engineering teams, to working with the CEO on marketing strategy
RG: How long have you been at WHB?
Matt: Since 2004.
RG: When was WebHostingBuzz started and can you give me some numbers or examples of your growth?
Matt: WHB was started in 2002. We're now at approximately 25,000 shared hosting clients. Recently, we have turned up our enterprise division and have had a lot of interest. We're migrating away from being 'just another hosting company' into a full service solutions company. We employ just under 100 people in our team now.
RG: What would you credit as the biggest impact for growth? SEO, PPC, banners, affiliate marketing, word of mouth?
Matt: A mix of SEO and word of mouth primarily. Plus we've formed several strategic partnerships with companies such as domain registrars, which have accelerated our growth.
RG: Do you do much PPC?
Matt: Very little.
RG: You mention an enterprise division. Can you give me an example of an ideal client in that market?
Matt: For example, just this week we started to build a university email system that needed a scalable solution that would support up to
1 million users.
RG: Do you see WHB going away from a shared hosting concentration to a higher level hosting client base or are you just adding to your
existing business?
Matt: WebHostingBuzz will remain a hosting brand and our grass roots in offering affordable hosting will always remain. We're diversifying to include the enterprise market and it's quite likely as a business, we'll setup an enterprise brand targeted purely at the enterprise customer.
RG: I know you have a successful affiliate program. Can you talk about how that's going and what kind of thoughts or opinions you have
about affiliate marketing in the shared hosting space?
Matt: Well, the affiliate market is very fickle and affiliates are consistently shopping around for the best deal. Our most successful approach has been to setup longer-term relationships with selected affiliates who send us good quality leads. Almost every other hosting company has an affiliate program but we've found it isn't necessarily the highest payout which gets the best affiliate. We do not pay out the highest, but I would definitely say we run one of the fairer programs with higher conversion ratios.
RG: What is it about WHB's site, landing pages or offers that help drive those higher conversion rates?
Matt: Primarily I think it is honesty in our affiliate program. I'm not going to name names, but you wouldn't want to know how many of our competitors openly invalidate a good sale. Our site helps too though. Our writing style is down to earth and even though the current design is 6 months old, we still very much like it.
RG: Where are your data centers located?
Matt: We use 3. We have some legacy servers at SoftLayer and colocate at FortressITX and DedicatedNow.
RG: What kind of packages do you offer resellers?
Matt: Some of the most competitive around. Our SEO for reseller hosting / reseller web hosting is very effective and we sell more reseller plans than any other plan. We offer the standard Cpanel/WHM based package, WHMAutoPilot free, personal nameservers and we're just about to announce the inclusion of at least one free SSL certificate with all reseller plans through a partnership we have formed with Comodo.
RG: Are reseller clients on separate servers than shared hosting clients or are they mixed together?
Matt: All reseller clients are on their own reseller servers.
RG: How do you determine how many reseller/shared clients to put per server?
Matt: Experience. I've used Cpanel since 2000 and the average technician in our team has 5 years hosting experience. We use 8 CPU Xeons for our reseller servers whilst competitors still continue to use single or dual processor servers. Honestly, our hardware specifications, our ability to tune and run our servers well puts us leagues ahead of most other companies. Some information I'm willing to share is that we use a heavily modified FreeBSD 6.2 base and run our own custom external spam filters. I'm pretty sure most other companies continue to use Centos...
RG: If a reseller client grows too large are you able to move them to a VPS or dedicated server?
Matt: Absolutely. Our VPS packages have been a little slow in rolling out but we have a couple of full VPS servers of beta testers and this will launch before the end of the month. We've offered dedicated servers for some time and regularly get reseller clients upgrading via our managed upgrade path.
RG: Are you going to HostingCon in July?
Matt: Yes, this will be the third year running for us. We also attend WebHostingDay in Germany, the second biggest hosting trade show. We enjoy travelling and meeting with clients, industry peers and suppliers.
RG: To close things up I'm going to give you an opportunity to freestyle about WebHostingBuzz.
No limits or restrictions.
Matt: To close, I wake up every day looking forward to the working day ahead. I genuinely love the work I do and this is not unique within WHB. Our employees come into work when they are off shift; we'll regularly see them putting in extra time over the weekend and I think this shows the WHB ethos; we love being good at what we do. We work together as a team and every single one of us in this team has the same drive to keep pushing WHB to new limits. In terms of domains hosted, we're already in the top 10 North American based hosts and we fully expect to keep climbing up the ladder.
RG: Matt, it was a real pleasure. Thank you for providing us with a little window into you and your company.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
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posted on 03-04-2008 by bwb
On the 21st of December UK2 bought the large US based hosting company MidPhase and their many other hosting brands such as An Hosting. UK2 is one of the largest hosts in the United Kingdom and you can read the press release on
their blog. The terms were not released but I'm guessing it was a good deal for both sides. The UK2
group is now a large umbrella of a lot of hosting brands similar to Endurance (iPower, FatCow, etc).
This is a very interesting time in the hosting industry as this is another big sale this year after the iPower "merger" into Endurance International. Still plenty of room for the smaller companies, especially those that have found their own niche. Today we have a short interview with Nicola who is the marketing director at UK2. We tried to get more info on the deal but they were pretty tight lipped :), a lot of this interview focuses on what a successful big company is doing, so hopefully smaller hosts can learn from that. Plus if you need a server based out of the UK they are a pretty good deal.
Hi Nicola and welcome to Reseller Hosting Guide! Our first question is how many employees does UK2 have?
Thanks for having me today! We currently have over 50 employees at UK2 and our other brands have a lot more!
You have an internal affiliate program as well as deals with a lot of the affiliate networks in the UK, have you found that affiliate marketing is a cost effective way to attract clients?
It has been very successful but we also don't focus on any one marketing method. We use word of mouth, incentives, PPC, direct advertising, and anything that can help people find us. We have had great results from word of mouth from our current clients and that has helped to make us the fastest growing company in the United Kingdom this year.
What does UK2 do to encourage word of mouth marketing among their own clients?
We regularly email all our customers with any new products and offers and we have recently launched a Viral Marketing campaign at WeBendOverBackwards.Net
which stands for everything UK2 Customer Support is about. We will go out of our way to help to the point that we will bend over backwards to help.
Our of your client base can you break down by percentage the biggest demographics, i.e. small business, personal, etc?
Sure, 60% of our clients are small business and 40% consumer type sites. The UK market is huge for online shopping and business and I believe a recent case study showed that we have the highest ratio of online shoppers in the world relative to our population.
Does UK2 have plans to offer reseller hosting plans or another brand that will?
Yes we offer reseller hosting through Resell.biz and Autica.
How do you think the United Kingdom hosting market is different from the USA, or not at all?
The UK and USA hosting market differ massively, the US marketing is a lot more developed than the UK in the sense that a lot of sites are on their 2nd or 3rd revision. In the UK people are on their 1st round and we are in a great position to help them take their sites to a new level.
And lastly, for our reseller readers, do you offer dedicated servers based in the UK? Are they fully managed?
Yep and you can check out our dedicated servers here. They start at £49 a month and full management services are only £29 a month. For the details on the management services and guarantees go here. We offer Linux and Windows and a whole lot of other choices. We own part of the largest data center group in Europe
Big thanks to Nicola for sharing some information on UK2 for the hosting community!
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