Interviewed on 10 Oct 08
Reg Natarajan, President & CEO
What unique selling points do you offer?
We target advanced users. Most people start with only a dream. They want to be the next eBay or Amazon or Craigslist or some other similar online success story. Usually, they go out and get some shared hosting package for a few dollars a month, their dream never really goes anywhere, and they cancel in a few months and it's over. The tiny handful that actually get off the ground usually find they quickly outgrow shared hosting and they make the move to dedicated servers, where the choice is generally between two groups of companies. One group says, "Come on in, the water's fine. We have a great data center and we'll be your friend and guide you through the process for just $450 per month per server.". The other group says, "Look at this price! We'll charge you just $39 per month for a server. We won't show you our data center because it's actually located in the owner's basement, and don't look at the specs or you'll notice the server you're renting is from the 90s, but what a great price!". We let people go through that process until they realize that the expensive company is charging them a ton of money each month for support they don't use, and the cheap company is more expensive in the long run because of downtime, hassles and a lack of reliability. At that point, we hope they notice us.
You know what else is different? We don't skimp on hardware. It is such a disappointment to see some ad for a server with a low price and then finding when you click that it's a Celeron from five years ago that can't run anything modern. We don't play silly games like that. Our under-one-hundred-dollar servers are totally modern with new-generation Intel processors, 500gb SATA drives and 2 or more gigs of memory and our over-one-hundred-dollar servers have multiple SATA drives and 4 to 8 gigs of memory.
Describe the services you offer?
I think the newest buzzword in the industry is "hosted infrastructure" rather than just web hosting, but to answer your question, I would define web hosting as any effort to move public-facing Internet activities to a third-party that specializes in offering such services. It doesn't always have to be public-facing but that represents the vast majority of business in this segment.
Describe your target market?
Well, as I said earlier, we target advanced users, but I can be more specific, particularly regarding the segments we try to appeal to. Generally speaking, we do best with more serious users. The guy with a dream, no plan, and $5 a month burning a hole in his pocket, really has no options with us. On the other hand, the smaller business looking to really seriously go online, or the professional web developer who has a new product he has developed and wants to host, or the software company that finds itself becoming a server company and wants to offload some of its infrastructure and get back to its core business, these are perfect candidates for our servers. The guy who doesn't know anything about the net but thinks that he can go online without a plan, well, he should probably look elsewhere.
How is your company planning for the future?
As I mentioned, I'd like to be fully multilingual. I'd also like to see us with several data centers, preferably in disparate locations around the world. Our current facility is the best I know of in the industry, but the simple fact is that it is one facility and I'd like to give people the option of decentralizing, particularly for fault tolerance. I can definitely see us expanding into some complementary services like backups and domain registration. I also have some ideas about a really ground-breaking self-service system that would let users manage a bank of their eSecureData.com servers in various data centers all around the world from any web browser. All these things will come in time, though. The primary focus will remain to offer top flight servers reliably at lower prices than others in the industry. The rest is gravy.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
Because we leave them alone. This is a topic dear to my heart as I was a developer myself for many years before I started eSecureData. The biggest problem a developer has with most dedicated server companies is that they are full of rules about what you can do and not do, and they're always meddling with your server. You put your dream in the hands of a hosting company and you find they throw up roadblock after roadblock to your growth. When I started eSecureData, I was determined not to do that. I get it. I get that developers just want to be left alone. Give them root/administrator access to their server and step away. As long as they don't hack or spam, they tend not to hear from us until they need reboots. And developers need a lot of reboots. [laughs]
How do you support your customers?
This is in a bit of flux right now as we introduce new control panels, so I'd encourage your readers to check our support site for updates on this in the coming weeks. We do the usual reboots and reinstalls, of course, and we offer short-term KVM/IP at no charge which is a nice bonus. We jump on hardware fixes very quickly, too, of course. We technically offer infrastructure support, too, but as I said earlier, having built perhaps the best data center in the industry, we don't have a lot of infrastructure support to do.
