Seve Eschweiler, general manager of Hivelocity talked to the WHIR about the company's ongoing growth
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Although it celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, Hivelocity Hosting (www.hivelocity.net) isn’t quite at the point of being a household name in the hosting community.
However, the Florida-based provider has been slowly growing over the past decade, delivering web hosting and dedicated server services to customers in over 100 countries worldwide.
After years of outsourcing its data center services, the company opened its first data center in April, renovating a former Bright House Networks and Road Runner data center in Tampa.
In addition to the new data center, Hivelocity has been busy with a couple of other major initiatives. A few months ago, the company added a new line of i5 Sandy Bridge dedicated servers, which replaced its previous Core2Quad processor.
In June, Hivelocity introduced its new MyVelocity control portal, which streamlines its customer service process.
In an email interview, Hivelocity general manager Steve Eschweiler discussed the company’s first data center, the MyVelocity customer portal, and its upcoming plans for the rest of 2011 and beyond.
WHIR: What does the new MyVelocity portal offer customers and end users?
Steve Eschweiler: Based on our experiences and conversations with many new customers coming from competitors over the years, we know every host’s portal is less than ideal. Whether it is missing some automation features or it’s just hard to navigate, the feedback we have received indicates no host has an ideal management interface for its customers. Our goal when starting this project was to make the MyVelocity control panel the closest thing to perfect the industry has to offer. We polled our customers, we polled our competition’s customers, we held focus groups and we invited anyone with an idea on what their perfect portal would include to share their recommendations. We then put our development team to work and said, “let’s give them everything they want and more.” MyVelocity will allow customers to perform remote reboots, remote OS reloads, setup monitoring services, enable Cloud VMs and much more. We want to empower our customers with every tool they need to make their online presence successful.
WHIR: How large is the data center space at the new Tampa facility?
SE: We have 12,000 square feet of raised floor with another 10,000 square feet of space available for growth. Currently, Hivelocity maintains just the one data center in Tampa, Florida. We will be turning up a second location in Atlanta in 2012 and have plans to add a 3rd facility on the west coast by 2013.
WHIR: How has Hivelocity managed the transition from outsourcing data center space to owning and operating its own data center?
SE: Having our own data center has really freed up our time and manpower. Since we have grown so fast we were constantly setting up new space, waiting on new power and basically wasting time to accommodate our growth. Now that we have our own data center and years of growth is already wired and ready, we spend our time on big picture items. Over the next year we will be implementing many, many new features that will greatly improve our services and the Hivelocity experience.
WHIR: What do you hope to achieve with the new Sandy Bridge servers, and how will it help improve Hivelocity’s overall customer performance?
SE: The Sandy Bridge chips are Intel’s latest and greatest and so far they have been very popular. The industry demands that we hosts stay on the cutting edge of technology and everyone always wants the newest procs. As virtualization and cloud become more and more prominent, the demand for procs designed with this most contemporary technology in mind, become increasingly required for customers to accomplish what they want to do. Customers today can get a server for $139 with more power than a $300 server from just a couple of years ago. As always, our goal with anything is to find ways to make our customers happy and our potential customers interested.
WHIR: What does Hivelocity hope to achieve in the remainder of 2011?
SE: Our first goal – launch MyVelocity and introduce it to our customers. MyVelocity is going to be awesome and really enhance our customers hosting experience. Our second biggest goal for this year is to continue integrating our cloud into MyVelocity and empower our customers to design, control and manipulate their dedicated servers and VMs however they want without ever having to involve one of our techs.
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