Interview with uplinkearth

Basic Company Information

Company Name: uplinkearth
Company URL: www.uplinkearth.com
Number of Employees: 17
Number of Years in Business: 6
Contact Name: John Purfield
Contact Title: Director of Business Development
Contact e-Mail Address: jpurfield@uplinkearth.com
Contact Phone Number: 800.745.3043 x 317

General Questions

Who is your targeted audience?

Small to medium sized businesses, especially web developers, that desire to leverage the power and versatility of the Windows hosting platform for their organization. Primarily those interested in hosting ASP/ASP.NET or Cold Fusion web applications with either a mySQL or MS SQL 2000 database backend.

Where do you see your company two years from now?

We will be providing our clients not only a single point to outsource all their web based needs, but through strategic partnerships will be a full featured resource portal for them for many of their day to day business needs.

What significant changes have you seen in the web hosting marketplace over the last 12 months?

There has been a consolidation in the marketplace as the weaker players are either absorbed by the larger players or fail due to poor management and marketing. There has also been continued strong growth as more and more small and medium businesses are looking to build or maintain a web presence without large capital outlays. Both of these changes have been beneficial to the well-managed and fast growing web hosts such as uplinkearth.

How did you come to choose your company name?

It was chosen to signify what the Internet truly represents, which is the ability to connect to the rest of the planet regardless of location or business size. As such the web host represents a connection or "uplink" to the rest of planet Earth for the businesses that utilize them.

What advice do you have for someone who is just starting a hosting company?

Know and understand the business you are entering. To be successful in the arena one must not only have the necessary capital and business experience but most importantly one has to realize that they have chosen to enter into the service business and not just the public storage industry. In today's competitive market one must not only offer good connectivity but also be willing and able to answer the many queries from their customers, customer service is the key. Uplinkearth has differentiated itself by its customer attentiveness. When one calls our offices looking for assistance someone answers and better yet answers knowledgably and takes care of that customer's issues or query. This is why uplinkearth has had such an amazing growth rate and such a low attrition rate. In conclusion, If one provides a cost effective product, good technical connectivity, brilliant customer/ technical support and makes sure to constantly stay abreast of the competition and technological changes they have a chance at making it in this ultra competitive arena.

Provide a brief outline of your marketing efforts so far.

In the next five years, where do you see the web hosting industry taking us?

The web hosting industry is still in its infancy. During the next five years we will see the well-structured web host providing many additional services for their business customers far beyond web hosting. As e-mail, chat, and wireless devices become more central a part of both intra and inter-business communication the web host will increasingly become a source of services for those companies. Additionally the web host will begin providing more traditional and diverse services through partnerships such as buying postage, ordering office supplies, software, hardware, banking and credit services, and print and other forms of marketing to compliment their online presence.

How do you walk the fine line between growing to meet the anticipated needs of new customers and growing too quickly?

It is a very delicate balance between building out too slowly causing poor performance and building out to quickly and thereby wasting capital on under utilized hardware, software, labor and bandwidth. In order to walk the fine line we must constantly monitor the rate of growth in new customer acquisition. Additionally we must monitor the increase in demand for resources by our existing customer base. Only then we can extrapolate a rate of growth and build out additional resources to be delivered "just in time" to meet the new demand.

You And The Competition

What are your company's three key success factors?

Customer Service is the number one key to success in this industry. Customer satisfaction is the key to reducing churn and turning customers into long time loyal clients. Providing a diverse array of powerful developer tools at an aggressive price are two other very important keys to success.

How has your company kept up with changing technology?

We evaluate new technologies both while they are still in the beta stage and after they are released to market so we can take advantage of new technologies quickly. New technologies such as Cold Fusion MX, ASP.NET and Windows 2003 .NET server are evaluated and made available to our clients as quickly as possible without disrupting current customers sites. As with any new technology it must be evaluated, tested, integrated and our sales and support staff trained in the new technology to aid our customers in leveraging the new technologies to their benefit.

How are your services and pricing levels better than those of your competitors?

Our pricing is extremely aggressive. We keep pricing low by keeping our overhead down as much as possible without compromising customer services. Our award winning technical support is extremely responsive and knowledgeable. The most prevalent feedback we get from our customers is how much better our technical support is that any other host they have been with. We make sure our customer support staff is knowledgeable, professional and courteous to every customers need. In addition to normal technical support we provide basic programming assistance, including looking into the customers web site code to suggest solutions to problems and increase performance.

Please indicate any other attributes and/or benefits your company has to offer that you feel would be good reasons for clients to choose you over your competitors.

Your Hosting Plans

What do your lower price point hosting solutions include and at what price?

Our lowest priced web hosting plan provide the ability to build a fully featured dynamic web site with ASP and/or Cold Fusion, unlimited MS Access database ODBC connections, 100 MBs of disk space, 5 POP/IMAP/WEB e-mail accounts, custom 404 error messages, daily backups and more for only $4.95 per month.

What do your higher price point hosting solutions include and at what price?

Our Quantum plan, designed for web hosting companies or resellers provides hosting of 10 full domains, 10 sub domains, unlimited POP/IMAP/WEB e-mail accounts, 20 ftp sub accounts, 1000 MBs of disk space, 20 GBs per month of bandwidth, ASP, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, PHP, and Perl support, 10 mySQL databases and more for only $34.95 per month.

Which services and features do you offer as part of your hosting agreement at no cost (i.e., free domain name registration, real-audio video server, Web statistics software, etc.)?

If you offer user control panels, for which platform(s)? Briefly describe their functionality.

Our custom user control panel provides the ability to manage each of your domains from one main control panel, create and delete DSNs, add and manage FrontPage extensions, submit and track support requests, add domains, sub domains, and ftp users, etc. It also includes a fully featured file manager for those unfamiliar with FTP that allow the user to upload, delete, rename and move files within their account. E-mail accounts can be managed from the web mail interface and of course FTP is fully supported.

Connectivity & Data Center Specs

How is your data center connected to the Internet, and what level of redundant connection does your organization have?

We currently have six divergent connections to the internet including full DS-3 and DS-1 connections each with both live and fail over (shadow) connections of each type are provided. We are currently in the process of adding additional connections to a secondary provider to further provide redundancy. All routers and switches have either hot or cold fail over backups as well power backup systems.

Describe your back-up and emergency power systems.

Daily differential and weekly full tape backups are made to our 2200 GB Auto tape loaders and rotated off site in a 12-week pattern. As additional servers are brought on line additional tape loaders are added to maintain a backup windows of no more than twelve hours. Power is supplied to our facility from two different power grids. Power is filtered and backed up by APC 3 -Phase power distribution units and a diesel generator.

What types of servers do you use for your primary virtual NT hosting and primary virtual Unix hosting clients?

The web servers are currently Dual Pentium 4 Xeon 2.4 GHz systems with 2 GBs of ECC DDR RAM and a 120 GB RAID 1 ARRAY, dual 10/100/1000 NICs running Windows 2000 Server. Mail Servers are currently Single Pentium 4 2.4 GHz systems with 1 GB of non-ECC DDR RAM and an 80 GB RAID 1 ARRAY, dual 10/100/1000 NICs running Windows 2000 Server. Database servers are currently Dual Pentium 4 Xeon 2.4 GHz systems with 4 GBs of ECC DDR RAM and both an 80 GB RAID 1 ARRAY and a 200 GB RAID 5 array, dual 10/100/1000 NICs running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. We do not provide Unix shared solutions at this time.

Support & Customer Service

List the types of support your organization offers (e-mail, telephone, chat, trouble tickets, etc...).

Technical support is available 24/7/365 via our secure online support ticket system. Additionally support is available at out toll free number 8:00 AM - 7:00 PM ET M-F and 10 AM - 6 PM Saturdays.