Today marks exactly one year since the launch of our first hosting services. Many people prophesied that we would not live to see the year. Not only have we lived up to it, but we are growing more and more intensely and we are not going to stop.
To mark this 1st anniversary of our services, we present a brief summary of our current status, reflect on our achievements and outline our 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 6000 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, take advantage of our Open Days.
All our services and systems run on Fujitsu servers and disk arrays. We now have 82 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.
Our network is connected 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 900 Mbps. (more about our technical background)
The project involves 13 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.
Domains
There are currently 31352 active domains – as of 13.9.2011 8:00 (exactly one year later):
- 24534 .CZ domains
- 4149 .EU domains
- 1521 .COM domains
- 574 .NET domains
- 196 .ORG domains
- 72 .BIZ domains
- 260 .INFO domains
- 46 .NAME domains
For.CZ domains we are the fastest growing registrar in the long term, already in April 2011 we were among the 9 largest and by the end of the year we want to jump another rung higher. Currently, almost 3% of Czech domains are with us.
For .EU domains we are currently 6. the largest Czech registrar. Globally, we’re at 122. position, we have 1,200 domains left in the TOP 100, which should be easily achieved this year.
Our accelerating growth is most evidenced by the fact that in the first 3 months of operation we had about 3 thousand domains, and only in the last 3 months we have an increase of over 11 thousand new domains. The average for the whole first year we have 2613 domains per month. We have added 4367 new domains in the last month!
Hosting services
- Web hosting – we currently have 9099 active NoLimit web hosts (plus other multiwebs and MiniWebs).
- VPS – we have 1160 active virtual server users, which is more than 2200 active VPS modules
- Dedicated servers – there are currently 33 of them
We assume that we are also the fastest growing web hosting company in the Czech Republic, but we cannot say that for sure, we do not know the numbers of our competitors. But we want to grow significantly (very significantly) more – for that we need to expand into other countries. The Czech Republic itself is very tight in this field.
With virtual servers we are doing better than we expected. Fujitsu is struggling to deliver more batches of virtualization hardware. We are not only the fastest growing virtual server company in the Czech Republic, but we also operate the most virtual servers in the Czech Republic. And all this in just 10 months since the launch of the VPS offer.
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.
Is it worth it? And when are we finally going to go bankrupt?
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” today without it.
What else we are planning in 2011
- In September we should launch the possibility of ordering services in EUR and payment to a Slovak bank account. This will make life easier for Slovak customers.
- We will also launch DNSSEC support for the .EU and generic domains we register.
- We offer bulk actions for domains and other services (e.g. bulk change of billing data, bulk change of DNS servers, etc.)
- We will introduce HTTPS support for web hosting. There will be several options from simple free certificates to individual certificates from trusted certification authorities.
- 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 will start working intensively 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.
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. To give you an idea, we’ll just add a small number – we have already processed over 63,000 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.
Evaluation of the first year of operation
Our assessment – satisfaction with 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!
Do you want to know and especially see the details? Come and see us! This is part of a unique event we are organising together with FUJITSU. These are Open Days, which we have scheduled for 26-28 October 2011 (it is the autumn holidays – Wednesday to Friday, with Friday being a public holiday).
You will see us “in the kitchen”, see all the details and learn everything about us. At the same time, we will introduce some news. The first two days will include expert lectures and seminars on topics related to domains, web hosting, servers (including VPS) and running (and building) a datacenter.
You will see historical computer technology, as well as the latest FUJITSU machines. There will be the INTEL processor development line and other delicacies you won’t see anywhere else.
Details about the event are here. We are looking forward to your visit and we hope that you will come in as large a number as possible.
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. Until 18.9.2011 you can buy webhosting with 33% discount using the annual discount coupon – DOD2011DAWEDOS. You can send the discount coupon to your friends and acquaintances and it is valid for the whole week we celebrate our first year.