I can take a mental trip down our network, picturing switches, network cables, racks, and our servers. Classical music seems to play in my head when I do that, illustrating the greatness of something when it’s working the way it should.
Let’s flash back to April 2003 for a minute. I had just started PhireFast and I didn’t know what I was doing or why the heck I chose the hosting industry as the one I wanted to be part of. All I know is there was no ‘we’ back then, it was just ‘I’, and I was hosting PhireFast and our three clients (which still host with us to-date) on a reseller package from a company that shall remain nameless in this posting. :-p
There were certain things about this provider that drove me crazy:
- The packages were very restrictive on resources
- It was expensive per gigabyte, which made the profit margin so narrow it was a joke
- Their servers would go down on a monthly basis
- Their support was slow
- Their staff spoke broken English which made it nearly impossible to troubleshoot situations
So, lesson learned. I decided when PhireFast hit some growth, we’d pull our business from this provider and become their newest competitor, and we would keep those key points (above) in mind while providing our hosting services to the world.
I had seen it done the wrong way, I developed my philosophy on how hosting should be done. From that, we developed the company around the following:
- We made sure our packages had extensive resources and were affordable, so our resellers could actually make profit
- We enlisted the data center with the best network and server hardware in the dedicated hosting industry and signed an equipment lease with them to ensure optimal uptime and quality of service to our clients
- We made sure to have Support Team Members working our HelpDESK around the clock, every day
- We made sure our Support Team Members were trained well and are fluent in English
As always, I hope by sharing my viewpoints in regards to quality has helped you understand why PhireFast does things the way we do – It all revolves around providing a superior service to you, the client.
Happy hosting. 