Adult Friendly Hosting Balances Quality Service with Excellent Support
Hosting companies tend to have a particular selling point; one thing, be it service, support or pricing, that they consider most important and focus on doing best. But doing one thing well, says Tom Mercing, owner of Adult Friendly Hosting, doesn’t have to come at the cost of the others.
"There are a lot of companies that will offer you a quality connection, and a quality server," says Mercing. "But the support might not be there." Mercing says his company focuses on support as the number-one feature of its hosting service, but is careful not to discount quality of service or competitive pricing.
Adult Friendly Hosting started in 1995, when Mercing was looking for a hosting solution for his own adult pay sites. "I couldn't find anyone to host me," he says. "So I and a partner of mine started the hosting business to host ourselves, and it really grew from there."
Mercing says he retired from the pay site business two years ago to focus all his attention on the hosting operation. Adult Friendly Hosting now provides a range of managed virtual and dedicated hosting accounts, and has a customer base of approximately 2,000.
That background in the pay site business, says Mercing, has been a valuable asset in dealing with customers. "Because I used to be in that business," he says, "I have a good idea of what they want, especially if they're just starting out. We help them with password protection, bandwidth theft, billing, legalities and a lot of basic needs they encounter right off the bat."
Adult Friendly Hosting operates out of a secure, guarded data center facility, maintaining five solid connections to the Internet from AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Verio, Cogent and Williams Communications.
And the company offers the same high-end hardware for all its dedicated hosting plans. Adult Friendly Hosting’s servers are all "white boxes" using 1.7 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 processors and 7,200 RPM hard drives, running Red Hat Linux version 7.2 and Ensim control panel software.
"Just about every server we sell is custom configured for that particular client," says Mercing. "Our philosophy is to give every customer more than they expect they're buying."
Of course, it is in the customer support that Adult Friendly Hosting most vigorously gives customers more than they expect. Mercing says his company has techs answering its phones and solving customer issues 24 hours a day.
Mercing says customers hosting with larger companies often don’t receive the kind of one-on-one support offered by Adult Friendly Hosting. "I've had several customers," he says, "who had hosted with other companies that wouldn't even provide a phone number. One transferred from a company that would only deal with him through ICQ."
According to Mercing, that phone contact is an important part of building the customer relationship. "I answer the phones myself, too," he says. "So I'm one of the techs as well if I'm answering the phone."
Adult Friendly Hosting offers a range of virtual hosting packages, starting at $14.95 per month and going as high as $299.95 per month. The company’s dedicated packages start at $249 and go as high as $699 per month, which includes an un-metered 10 megabit connection.
The company doesn’t ask that its customers sign contracts, partly because of the unique feature that it gives away every sixth month of hosting for free. "Every sixth month that they host with us," says Mercing, "they don't pay. It's as simple as that."
Adult Friendly Hosting was tailored to place customer service before any other aspect of the business. But, says Mercing, it has been careful not to let the other aspects of the business suffer as a result. "I think we've got a perfect balance of quality and customer support."
