Interview: United Hosting
Interview with Matt Wallis, CEO of United Hosting – http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk
Matt, thank you for taking the time to participate in this online interview for the Voisd Webmaster Blog.
[Mike] United Hosting is just one part of United Communications, a much larger quality internet based service founded in 1998. How did United Hosting start and was it based on a natural business progression from one of your earlier projects?
[Matt] Our Company started life as Datatechnics UK Limited, providing local small/medium businesses with IT support and maintenance contracts. We installed IT requirements to many local businesses in the Hertfordshire area which would include such things as networks, internet connectivity and of course web hosting and email services. By 2000 our hosting services had outgrown our IT support contracts and we renamed to a more appropriate - United Communications Limited, with UnitedHosting being our trading name for hosted services. In the same year we allowed all our IT support contracts to expire, shifting our companies focus to 100% web hosting.
[Mike] I understand that Simon Wallis has worked with you since the beginning of United Hosting and is also Co founder and Co Director of United Communications. Is Simon a relation, friend (with coincidental surname) or is he simply your alter ego? How does he fit in with the responsibilities and general running of the business?
[Matt] Simon is a business partner, co-founder of United Communications, and indeed my brother! Having business partners can often open up trust issues, but having a business partner within the family leaves no trust issues at all, it works very nicely!
[Mike] Unlike the majority of other areas within the online industries, web hosting can easily be viewed as being one of the most time consuming and stressful businesses to run; primarily as you are expected to provide quality service and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Would you agree that quality support is a primary concern for any hosting company and perhaps something that is lacking in the current flooded and over saturated hosting market place?
[Matt] Support is absolutely key to a successful host. Its also one of the hardest aspects of a hosting business to get right! You can throw money at a lot of things to ensure they perform as expected – such as quality servers and connectivity to ensure uptime and performance, but providing quality support takes a lot more than just money, its extremely time consuming. As a start-up it was extremely hard, and we actually did not provide a 24/7 coverage. It’s only when our company grew to include a couple of other faces within the team that we could start to offer a genuine 24/7 support service to our customers.
Unfortunately many hosts claim 24/7 support while realistically not providing it. This is where UnitedHosting picks up the slack. We employed staff in the UK, USA and Australia to ensure we can maintain constant support coverage without anyone having to work a “graveyard” shift. Anytime of day our customers are given a prompt and polite response by a real technician who is able to solve problems and answer questions, and not just hit a canned response button until the daytime shift starts.
By pleasing our existing clients with true 24/7 from technicians who can actually help at any time of night or day, we gain glowing recommendations from them. These recommendations are the fuel behind our companies growth. We don’t currently spend a single penny on advertising or marketing, with recommendations, reviews, hosting awards, and word of mouth contributing 100% to our new signups and day-by-day growth.
[Mike] Talking about support, United Hosting offers email, online live support and telephone support but also has connections with United Forums, a forum consisting of over 4000 registered members which not only covers webmaster related issues but also provides pre-sales questions and customer support. Was this a conscious decision to build more of an online oriented community or more an opportunity to provide your potential and current customers with an additional more relaxed and informative method of support?
[Matt] Our forum was setup because a wealth of information within our helpdesk tickets was being shared between clients and us, without becoming public for other clients to benefit from. A forum would allow for discussion, tutorials and known bug fixes to be shared amongst all UnitedHosting customers. UnitedForums now has over 50,000 posts. This can only be a good thing for everyone – It reduces support calls for us, but also introduces more in-depth information than anything a support team could ever provide. We cannot claim to be experts in every scripts or piece of software which runs on our hosting environment, but with a forum there is nearly always an answer or relevant piece of discussion to help! The community aspect is purely a bonus, and we also have excellent google rankings and referrals, meaning our forums are helping non-UnitedHosting customers and driving new business to our main hosting site.
[Mike] Being recognised as a quality UK host and having achieved various hosting awards (the most recent being in February 2007), UnitedHosting also offers servers not only housed in London (UK) but also Texas (USA). Is this aimed at UK clients who expect the majority of their traffic to be generated from the USA (hence potentially improving download speeds) or (combined with the ability to purchase hosting in dollars) more an opportunity to attract none UK clients?
[Matt] We don’t want to miss out on any segment of a global market, so maintaining two world-class locations is key to our business and also to our client’s success. Some customers couldn’t care less about location, while others use it to their strategic advantage. A general rule of thumb is that our UK and European clients choose our UK based solutions, while “the rest of the world” would choose our USA location. This decision is due to speed and connectivity but also due to search engine optimisation advantages – with many search engines giving advantages if the site is hosted in a location relevant to its target audience. We have many clients hosting two versions of their website in both our UK and USA locations. Giving them the best possible chance of a world-wide audience finding them, and the site being served at lightning speeds for everyone!
[Mike] There are various generic hosting control panels (the most recognised being cPanel) however United Hosting has opted for a solution by lesser know control panel provider Ensim (which can be seen and even tested in the United Hosting demo). Obviously the control panel for a hosting business is an essential feature - what were your main considerations when choosing this software and what do you feel your control panel offers that others do not?
[Matt] SECURITY. When looking at the various control panels on the market it’s scary to see just how insecure certain aspects of other panel’ hosting environments are for shared web hosts. Ensim is by far the most secure and plugs those holes we had concerns about. Ensim uses a true chroot jail environment, locking each website into its own filesystem with its own instance of php, perl and other applications. This means that each site is completely isolated and any actions, such as insecure scripts being exploited, can only affect that single website. Other panels do not match this level of security, which is why it’s not uncommon for exploited servers and websites on a shared web host to affect an entire server of clients – this is something that’s never happened at UnitedHosting, due to a strict security policy enforced by expert administrators, and of course our choice of control panel - Ensim.
[Mike] Finally what can we expect to see from United Hosting in the future? Are there any specific areas you would like to improve upon so as to add further value for your clients or any additional features or services you are looking to offer to maintain your position within the web hosting market?
[Matt] We’ve just announce our new hardware based spam filtering system, MailFoundry, which is now live for all our clients. This represented a huge investment by UnitedHosting following our own research in 2006. Our research told us that a hosting customer’s biggest concern was SPAM. We decided to take this as an opportunity to implement the absolute best filtering available and it’s been such a huge success. Customers now receive practically no spam, with less than a 1 in 1 million chance of legitimate email being quarantined - a big problem with other more traditional methods of filtering. We decided to spend the money on a fairly expensive system, but one that works, and provides superior results to anything we’ve tried in the past. Our customers now have the most spam-free inboxes in the industry. Many providers charge extra for this enterprise level of spam filtering, however UnitedHosting always includes these service upgrades at no extra cost and includes a full set of features for all its hosting and reseller accounts without hidden charges.
Our next big announcement is due next week, and involves a new backup system we’ve been working to implement. This new system backs up all servers and customers data to a remote off-site secure location twice per day. Traditionally backups are performed to secondary hard drives or another server in the same data centre, but we wanted the ultimate piece of mind in case of absolute worst case scenarios. In today’s world there is no telling what could happen and by maintaining a recent and complete set of all our customers data, off-site away from our live sites, we can be up and running again in the event of a major disaster in under an hour. Continuous Data Protection is definitely going to be the next big thing for other hosts to implement, and we wanted to lead the way for our customers and those joining us every day. Again we provide these backups at no additional cost to our clients. The next stage will be providing all our customers with control panel access to these archived backups – they will be able to restore individual files or entire sites from any point in time over the past 2 weeks – amazing stuff.
Also look out for our new website coming in the next week or two, bringing a fresh new look to UnitedHosting.
[Mike] Matt, many thanks for your time and allowing an insight and running of United Hosting. United Hostings new look website and forum is now up and running!
