AIT Adapts Dedicated Hosting Strategy

• By theWHIR.com , June 10, 2004

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AIT Adapts Dedicated Hosting Strategy

Rawlson O'Neil King, theWHIR.com

June 10, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY

REVIEW) -- With the prices of dedicated servers drastically decreasing

in price, dipping recently as low as the $50 range, many smaller

businesses are upgrading their hosting packages to dedicated offerings

in order to take advantage of enhanced functionality and added control.

AIT, Inc. (ait.com),

a fast growing US-based hosting firm, says it has been a beneficiary of

the dedicated server migration trend. Early in the year, the provider

began strategically positioning its products to accommodate the

transition of small businesses to dedicated servers.

AIT's new dedicated package structure

revolved around a tiered system of plans structured to appeal to

specific market segments. The base dedicated server was introduced at

$49 and is suited for the developer or Web professional in search of

dedicated and reliable ping, power, and pipe. Another feature plan was

AIT's Ensim Pro (ensim.com) based

hosting package for small businesses and hosting resellers who want

automation and easy management of common hosting tasks. And there is

the I-MHIP Enterprise, a fully managed plan for hosting resellers and

Internet service providers that offers point and click administrative

control of a server, plus many free features that users can resell to

customers.

Each of the plans comes equipped with a minimum of 80 gigabytes of storage and a 1000-gigabyte transfer allocation.

When the plans were first introduced

early this year, AIT expected that the tools would simply augment its

existing solutions. But they quickly became the centerpiece of the

service provider's offerings.

"When we first introduced the product, we

expected to sell 30 dedicated machines a month," says Alex Lekas, vice

president of corporate communications at AIT. "Instead, we unexpectedly

found ourselves selling 300 machines per month."

Lekas attributes the success of AIT's

dedicated hosting packages to the "a la carte" sales model that the

provider has implemented: "With our services, you pay for what you

want, rather than what we give you. It is awfully nice to go into the

next quarter and know precisely what you will be paying for hosting in

order to control overhead."

AIT CEO Clarence Briggs compares his

company's sales model to the kind of strategy that is pervasive in the

automobile industry. "Everybody else has defined dedicated hosting by

price, but someone looking for a dedicated solution is like the person

looking for a truck," he says. "Do they want lightweight or heavy-duty?

Or a utility or luxury vehicle? Is performance measured by economy or

by power? Our approach is to offer the customer a value-based

proposition.

"Businesses," says Briggs, "particularly

those in the SME space, need the flexibility to tailor a plan that

suits them instead of the other way around."

With the success of its new dedicated

hosting strategy, AIT has introduced a string of products and services

designed to address the major technical issues that dedicated hosting

customers face. Over the course of the year, AIT has introduced an

antispam service, a port monitoring tool for improved resource

management, a server firewall for improved security, varying service

level agreements that ensure continuity of Internet operations, and

updated software suites.

"Dedicated hosting is about value for the

customer," says Briggs. "While lower prices have made the dedicated

market more attractive, price alone is not the decision point;

customers want to know what they're getting for their money."

That includes variables like disk space and data transfer rates, service level agreements, and automation, among other factors.

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