Today marks exactly 2 years since the launch of our first hosting services. Let’s try to summarize 2 years of our lives.
The 2nd birthday of WEDOS deserves a summary of the current status, a reflection on our achievements and an outline of future plans.
Current status
We have successfully built and operate our own datacenter in our building (former air-raid shelter) with quality facilities and infrastructure – double floor, air conditioning, stable fire extinguishing equipment with FM200 gas, backup power supply (UPS, diesel generator). The capacity of our server room is about 6.000 1U positions. We are located in the beautiful South Bohemian town of Hluboká nad Vltavou. If you want to take a look under the hood, follow our Facebook and Google+ profiles or come visit us (by appointment anytime).
All our services and systems run on Fujitsu servers and disk arrays. We now have 169 servers in operation plus other servers in stock and others as routers. FUJITSU as a hardware supplier is a great cooperation and we do not regret choosing Fujitsu. At the moment we are worried about one thing and that is that there are big personnel changes in FUJITSU company and so we do not know what we will and will not miss in the future months.
Our network has been connected for more than a year via 2 lines (one 10 Gbps, the other 1 Gbps), we are connected to the Internet via connectivity providers Kaora, Master Internet and SuperHosting. At peak times we achieve average outgoing data traffic of 1300 Mbps. In times of DDoS attacks, we can withstand attacks of more than 3 Gbps. Our internal network is fully redundant and has 2x 10 Gbps (including backup switches, routers). A second (and completely independent) 10 Gbps route to Prague should be launched in the next few weeks. More about our technical background.
The project involves 17 employees – technicians, programmers, customer support staff, management and accountants.
We were the first in the industry to successfully pass ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification, which we successfully defended this year. We are preparing ISO 27001 certification – information security, which may be another attraction for all customers.
Domains
At the moment there are 89.434 (today we will give you 90.000 🙂 )active domains – as of 13.9.2012 8:00 (exactly 2 years later):
- 62,111 (compared to 24,534 a year ago) .CZ domains
- 19,101 (compared to 4,149 a year ago) .EU domains
- 4,586 (compared to 1,521 a year ago) .COM domains
- 1,388 (compared to 574 a year ago) .NET domains
- 594 (compared to 196 a year ago) .ORG domains
- 315 (compared to 72 a year ago) .BIZ domains
- 1,100 (compared to 260 a year ago) .INFO domains
- 244 (compared to 46 a year ago) .NAME domains
Just for comparison’s sake, it was exactly a year ago: 31.352. Here you can clearly see our growth dynamics.
For.CZ domains, we have long been the fastest growing registrar. We are currently 7th largest, but we’d like to get to 6th in September. place and by next birthday we want to be “on the box”, which means to be in the top 3. Currently there are over 6.36% of Czech domains. In one year we have improved by more than 3.5% of Czech domains.
For .EU domains we are currently 4. largest Czech registrar, but after today’s event we will be the 2nd largest Czech registrar. Globally, we are at 39. but after today, we’ll jump to 36th. …the top spot.
Hosting services
- Webhosting – we currently have 23,716 (compared to 9,099 a year ago) active NoLimit web hosts (plus additional multiwebs and versions of Extra and MiniWebs).
- VPS – we have 2,506 active virtual server users (compared to 1,160 a year ago), which is more than 5, 500 active VPS modules
- Dedicated servers – there are currently 34 of them
- WEDOS Disk – 2,850 active users, which is a nice number in less than 3 months of service operation.
We have already confirmed (according to CZ.NIC statistics) that we are also the fastest growing web hosting company in the Czech Republic. But we want to grow significantly (very significantly) faster – we need to expand into other countries. The Czech Republic itself is very tight in this field.
We are still doing better than expected with virtual servers.
We have quite a few dedicated servers, but this is due to the fact that we are not currently dedicated to them and have put them on the back burner. Instead, we focus more on other services. That’s why we are short of server stock and we don’t promote this service. However, if a serious buyer inquires with us, we will provide the server.
WEDOS Disk is just getting off the ground and we are learning how to sell it :-).
Take a look at some nice charts:
Statistics of growth in hosting (hosted .cz domains) since 1.1.2012:
Statistics of growth in DNS servers (.cz domains with our DNS servers) since 1.1.2012:
From the graphs you can clearly see who rules in the Czech Republic 🙂 and you can see that almost 80% of all domains are hosted here.
A few statistics
For example, in 2 years of existence we have:
- received more than 141,484 orders
- accepted more than 120,000 payments through the bank
- received 513,397 emails
- 127,038 emails were handled (answered)
- replied to 66,290 chats
- dealt with 1,533 telephone calls
- 6,200,000 GB of data (we hope we are counting correctly 🙂 )
Loyalty share programme
In the summer, we launched the Loyalty Share Program, which was (and is) an extremely interesting event. The interest in our shares has exceeded all our expectations. We sold 30,000 shares in 52 minutes and have about 300 new shareholders.
We are working on the next promised steps. You have a lot to look forward to.
If you would like to become a shareholder and participate in our success, please keep an eye on our website. You’ll know more soon.
Is it worth it? And when are we finally going to go bankrupt?
In connection with the launch of the Loyalty Share Programme, we have published all our economic figures. We’re doing well.
For the rest, we will partially use the year-old commentary: We constantly encounter mistrust towards us, caused by suspiciously low prices for our services. According to these views, it is impossible to make any money, let alone ever get a return on the investment. Or our service must be legitimately bad.
We can afford low prices for services because we have been able to significantly reduce many costs, not at the expense of quality. We have simply managed to “talk” many suppliers into extreme discounts, we have chosen cost-effective technologies, we do not use any expensive outsourcing (with a few exceptions for things that we really cannot handle ourselves), etc. Everything is explained in detail in the article How is it possible that we have such low prices? .
In many ways, we have learned from history, we know what worked well and what didn’t in the earlier days when we were engaged in the same activities for 13 years, what turned out to be a good way and what we should definitely not go into.
We founded the company on a green field, we did not have to drag any skeletons in the closet with us, we could do everything from the beginning (again, informed by history and experience) completely according to our own ideas.
Of course, we had to invest a lot of money in the beginning of the project to buy a property, rebuild it, build a server room and all the necessary infrastructure. But without this, it would be pointless, we would be just another one of many “garage” companies and we would not be able to operate our services at a high quality level.
Next, we need to understand the business model we have chosen. We are not targeting a small number of large customers from whom we would like to receive large sums of money. In contrast, we run a service for the “masses” of smaller customers. Our goal is not to have thousands or tens of thousands of customers, but hundreds of thousands and millions. To do that, of course, we will soon have to expand into other countries. Thus, our current numbers of customers and active services is only a small fraction of what you want to achieve.
In this context, it should be noted that several customers from Poland, Austria, Germany, Russia and Ukraine have already found their way to us. Although we don’t have the appropriate language version, we already have several different customers in each of these countries (especially on VPS).
Our current income already fully covers all operating costs (salaries, energy, connectivity, etc.). The only thing that still needs to be invested in is hardware. But that’s what we went with. We know that the return on investment will be many years. You can’t do big “business” without that today.”
We believe we have clearly demonstrated that we can do hosting and have a bright future ahead of us.
What else we are planning in 2012
- We are preparing a second independent 10Gbps optical route to Prague.
- We are preparing news for WEDOS Disk.
- Administration and voting for shareholders and more interaction with shareholders, co-determination.
- We are preparing news in administration and improvements to existing services and minor adjustments to the offer.
- We are working on offering our services in English so that we can start expanding outside the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Further language versions will follow.
- … and a few other things and news that we can’t (or don’t want to) disclose yet.
Quotes from last year: “Why do new things take us so long? It might seem that we take too long to develop new things or deploy new technologies, to the point where we seem completely incapable. But we approach all things very thoroughly – we don’t settle for the first solution that comes to mind. We plan everything thoroughly, think through the connections and relationships with current and future projects and technologies, implement, test thoroughly, sometimes let something sit for a few days (morning wise evening). And only when we are sure that the developed product is perfect, we release it to the people. This makes our services not only functional, but above all reliable and of high quality.
Another reason why some things take us longer is the full automation we keep emphasizing. We make things so that we don’t even know about them – so that they order themselves, set up, invoice themselves, so that there is a simple “clickable” interface for customers, so that there are detailed intuitive instructions for everything, etc. We have succeeded very well with domains – we do not deal with almost anything, in fact, we do not even have any employee dedicated to dealing with domain issues – there is no need at all, the customer can click everything online. Just to give you an idea, we’ve already processed over 140,000 orders (domain registration, re-registration and renewal, web hosting and VPS setup) and thus a similarly high number of invoices, which is quite a good number, and the growth rate is still increasing. Can you imagine how we would do it by hand? 🙂 “.
More of our plans are in our todo list. We do our services for you – for our customers. From that perspective, we appreciate any feedback. We need to know what you expect and what you want from us. If you have any requirements, don’t be afraid to write to us. Thank you in advance.
Problems? There is still room for improvement
There is still room for improvement. We are currently working on a performance issue with the web interface for emails, but it should be resolved soon. Otherwise, we are “troubled” by (almost regular) strong DDoS attacks, which are getting stronger and stronger. We manage to eliminate them successfully (and without failures) thanks to the powerful and high-quality equipment we have.
Evaluation of 2 years of operation
Our assessment? Same as a year ago. Satisfied with the growth, but we must not rest on our laurels. We still have a lot of work to do.
Let us know how you rate us. Thank you in advance.
Want to know more about us? Come and see us!
We are not holding open days this year, but they will be in the spring. We will combine the event with a general meeting of our shareholders.
Now you can arrange a tour of our WEDOS Datacentre at any time. We are happy to accommodate.
On the occasion of our 2. birthday, we are doing special tours today (13.9.2012) from 14:00 to 16:00. Each visitor will receive a WEDOS T-shirt and a WEDOS mug.
Sweet birthday reward at the end of this article
For all honest readers of this article and those interested in web hosting, we bring a sweet reward at the end. Today, 13.9.2012 you can buy webhosting with a discount of up to 55% using the annual discount coupon – 2COST. You can send the discount coupon to your friends and acquaintances and it’s valid all day long as we celebrate our second year of existence.
We also offer a special 5% discount on the renewal of our services (except for domains). Take advantage of this unique offer.