Today it’s just a year and a half since we launched our first hosting services. Despite initial fears and wishes (from competitors), we lived to see this anniversary. As a nice gift from our clients – we celebrated 60,000 active domains under our management yesterday, most of them hosted by us.
We will celebrate this small “anniversary” with a small summary of the current status.
Current status
How to write it simply? We are growing and evolving. The WEDOS datacentre works reliably, as do the services we provide.
All our services and systems run on Fujitsu servers and disk arrays. We now have 143 servers in operation, an increase of 59 units in the last 6 months, plus additional servers in stock and more as routers. FUJITSU as a hardware supplier is a great cooperation and we do not regret choosing Fujitsu.
The project involves 15 employees – technicians, programmers, customer support staff, management and accountants. Here we have grown by 2 new employees in the last six months.
We were the first in the industry to successfully pass ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification, which we successfully defended a few days ago.
We have a new guard in our server room (according to the Facebook poll his name is Bohouš WEDOS):
This is howwe have a cold aisle that brings great savings in cooling our servers:
Summary of services
Currently, we have a total of 60038 active domains – as of 13.3.2012 8:00 (exactly one and a half years later). In the last six months we have added 28686 domains. This clearly shows the dynamics of our growth.
Currently, almost 5% of Czech domains are in our country. We are the 8th largest registrar of .cz domains and the 4th largest Czech registrar of .eu domains (where we are globally ranked 63rd).
The good thing about the development is that most of the domains are hosted by us and at the same time, our growth is constantly dynamic (despite all the promotions and domain subsidies from competitors). For domains, we have launched bulk actions where you can do all operations with multiple domains with one click. At the same time, last week we launched a change of domain holder without an officially verified signature.
We are clearly the fastest growing web hosting company in the Czech Republic. We are preparing for expansion into other countries, so far we are actively operating on the Slovak market, where we have had quite a lot of success. During the winter we added a special version of powerful web hosting NoLimit Extra for demanding customers which we now have at an introductory price.
We are getting better and better with virtual servers. This is primarily due to the high quality of the service provided. Unlike many other companies, we have fast 15k speed drives everywhere and in RAID10. It’s an expensive solution (tens of percent more expensive than a conventional solution), but it’s extremely powerful and the fastest possible (after SSDs). Another great advantage is that RAM is guaranteed and there is always an excess of RAM on the server. RAM is never shared with any customer. The high quality and stability of the service has been reflected in the great interest in our services abroad. We don’t have a single letter translated on our website, but we have customers from dozens of countries around the world and currently sell almost 25% of all VPS abroad. As a special promotion, we have prepared for our clients the possibility of purchasing a VPS with a Windows Server 2008 R2 license for free.
We have quite a few dedicated servers, but we are now discussing new options in our offer.
Finally, a small graph of our growth in the hosting industry in the Czech Republic speaks for itself. This is a chart for the last 3 months.
The chart probably speaks clearly and concisely about who is in charge in the Czech Republic 🙂 .
Additional chart source added: https://labs.nic.cz/page/978/statistiky-hostingu/
(additions 13.12.2011 – 13.3.2011)
What we are working on now
- We are working on launching SSL ( HTTPS support) for web hosting, which we want to launch now in March.
- We are intensively testing a new service (we’ll give it away – high-capacity backup), as well as extending our existing services with free backup space.
- We hope that we will be able to get IDN domain registration up and running. It only hangs on a problem in the mailserver software we use.
- 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.
- Loyalty program for our existing clients and related discount program.
- … and a few other things and news that we can’t (or don’t want to) publish yet….
Evaluation of the period so far
How would we rate ourselves? I guess you have to write that. Thank you in advance for all your opinions.
From our point of view, we are satisfied, but we are not resting on our laurels. We recognize the sharp elbows of the competition, when on the one hand there are denunciations to various authorities and on the other hand there are strong DDoS attacks against us, when the strongest one had an intensity of almost 3 Gbps for several hours, which is so much that it would overwhelm most other companies, because their network infrastructure is built for 1Gbps. We survived without hesitation.
Sweet “birthday” reward
For all honest readers of this article and those interested in web hosting, we bring a sweet reward at the end. Today, on March 13, 2012 you can buy web hosting and VPS with 33% discount using the annual discount coupon – WEDOSNAR18M. The discount coupon is valid for the purchase of new services and the discount is valid for the first payment period. You can send the coupon to your friends and acquaintances.