AIT Adapts Dedicated Hosting Strategy

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AIT Adapts Dedicated Hosting Strategy
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Rawlson O’Neil King, theWHIR.com
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June 10, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
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REVIEW) — With the prices of dedicated servers drastically decreasing
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in price, dipping recently as low as the $50 range, many smaller
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businesses are upgrading their hosting packages to dedicated offerings
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in order to take advantage of enhanced functionality and added control.
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AIT, Inc. (ait.com),
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a fast growing US-based hosting firm, says it has been a beneficiary of
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the dedicated server migration trend. Early in the year, the provider
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began strategically positioning its products to accommodate the
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transition of small businesses to dedicated servers.
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AIT’s new dedicated package structure
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revolved around a tiered system of plans structured to appeal to
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specific market segments. The base dedicated server was introduced at
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$49 and is suited for the developer or Web professional in search of
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dedicated and reliable ping, power, and pipe. Another feature plan was
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AIT’s Ensim Pro (ensim.com) based
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hosting package for small businesses and hosting resellers who want
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automation and easy management of common hosting tasks. And there is
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the I-MHIP Enterprise, a fully managed plan for hosting resellers and
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Internet service providers that offers point and click administrative
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control of a server, plus many free features that users can resell to
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customers.
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Each of the plans comes equipped with a minimum of 80 gigabytes of storage and a 1000-gigabyte transfer allocation.
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When the plans were first introduced
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early this year, AIT expected that the tools would simply augment its
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existing solutions. But they quickly became the centerpiece of the
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service provider’s offerings.
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“When we first introduced the product, we
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expected to sell 30 dedicated machines a month,” says Alex Lekas, vice
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president of corporate communications at AIT. “Instead, we unexpectedly
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found ourselves selling 300 machines per month.”
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Lekas attributes the success of AIT’s
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dedicated hosting packages to the “a la carte” sales model that the
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provider has implemented: “With our services, you pay for what you
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want, rather than what we give you. It is awfully nice to go into the
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next quarter and know precisely what you will be paying for hosting in
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order to control overhead.”
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AIT CEO Clarence Briggs compares his
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company’s sales model to the kind of strategy that is pervasive in the
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automobile industry. “Everybody else has defined dedicated hosting by
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price, but someone looking for a dedicated solution is like the person
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looking for a truck,” he says. “Do they want lightweight or heavy-duty?
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Or a utility or luxury vehicle? Is performance measured by economy or
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by power? Our approach is to offer the customer a value-based
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proposition.
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“Businesses,” says Briggs, “particularly
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those in the SME space, need the flexibility to tailor a plan that
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suits them instead of the other way around.”
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With the success of its new dedicated
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hosting strategy, AIT has introduced a string of products and services
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designed to address the major technical issues that dedicated hosting
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customers face. Over the course of the year, AIT has introduced an
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antispam service, a port monitoring tool for improved resource
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management, a server firewall for improved security, varying service
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level agreements that ensure continuity of Internet operations, and
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updated software suites.
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“Dedicated hosting is about value for the
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customer,” says Briggs. “While lower prices have made the dedicated
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market more attractive, price alone is not the decision point;
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customers want to know what they’re getting for their money.”
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That includes variables like disk space and data transfer rates, service level agreements, and automation, among other factors.
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