November 3, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Managed services can save SMBs and enterprises the cost of managing their online applications. That much has been made clear by the managed hosting market. But some customers may be spending more than they need to, buying managed services as a blanket service including many levels of management that specific customers may not actually need.
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Considering this a problem, and one that could be solved, Zak Boca and Dan Ushman, founders of Web hosting provider midPhase (midphase.com), launched SingleHop (singlehop.com), a transparent managed services provider that offers managed services a la carte.
Boca and Ushman have had considerable success with midPhase since launching the company in 2003, hosting 75,000 Web sites across a network of more than 1,000 servers and achieving an 85 percent growth rate in the past 12 months. They say they drew upon the expertise and resources of midPhase to form SingleHop.
"We tried to roll these options out to existing midPhase customers," says Boca. "Then we were able to receive feedback from them and take it to the idea of our transparent managed service. Now, the customer knows exactly what they're paying for what, which we felt wasn't being done effectively in the marketplace."
SingleHop's managed services include a breakdown of specific products supported at each service level. They include bundled offerings that cover your standard services such as SMTP, IMAP, DNS, Apache, firewalls, backups, monitoring and security upgrades, with several more options planned for the coming months.
Along with these individual managed services, customers can customize the level of support to their needs and expertise, rather than working with fixed-fee trouble tickets or vague tiers of support service.
"There's a lack of flexibility in predefined management packages," says Boca. "With SingleHop, we're offering individual managed services - current updates, monitoring software and so on. When you sign up with SingleHop, you're given the option of selecting these individual services."
Operating from its central Midwest hub location, the company has capacity for more than 2,000 servers in one data center and a network capacity of 5Gbps at the Equinix Data Center in Chicago, with a network powered entirely by Cisco.
"We were in a fortunate position to have access to a large customer base of dedicated servers," says Boca. "We were able to test various management options and find out what work out best for the customers."
And while some of its competitors offer tailored managed offerings on an annual fee basis, Bocca says SingleHop is the first to offer them on a monthly basis.
"Many companies who have technical experience on staff don't really need to have the full managed level," says Boca. "And those are the kinds of businesses who can really benefit from our services. They can come in and pay $25 a month for current updates, as opposed to signing up for an entire management plan that may cost you $150 to $200 plus per month."
