Interviewed on 8 Feb 10
Dominic Monkhouse, UK MD, PEER 1 Hosting
PEER 1 Hosting believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet, and the business growth potential it provides for its more than 10,000 customers. As a global online business hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting offers a reliable high performance internet network supporting scalable Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting through the ServerBeach brand, and Colocation solutions. Backed by its 100 percent uptime guarantee and 24x7x365 FirstCall Support™, PEER 1 Hosting ensures customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 Hosting has grown to include 17 state-of-the-art data centres and points-of-presence throughout North America and Europe. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada, with European operations headquartered in Southampton, UK. PEER 1 Hosting shares are traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. For more information visit: www.peer1.com or www.peer1Hosting.co.uk.
What unique selling points do you offer?
PEER 1 Hosting is a service business first, and a technology business second. Our unique selling points lie both within our service commitment and in our technology.
Customer service
Our customer service ethos:
• Your business is our business. It is in our interest to help you grow by providing reliable, scalable and tailored solutions. We work with you to make sure you get what you need when you need it so that you can focus on building and growing rather than worrying about the underlying hardware.
• Technical Account Managers at PEER 1 Hosting are an extension of your business; they will know your solution and business inside out and be able to make suggestions on how the infrastructure should grow in order to support your business aspirations.
• We live and breathe hosting; this is what we do and have done for over 10 years. Our business is keeping servers online and yours is to focus on growth. Let us worry about the infrastructure and you focus on making your business a success.
Our customer support:
• FirstCall Support™: PEER 1 Hosting FirstCall dedicates immediate, expert attention to callers 24x7x365 by answering questions and resolving issues on the first call into the company. This initiative is a testament to the fact that PEER 1 Hosting understands and manages its customers’ IT needs, allowing customers to focus on their core business.
• Service Level Agreement (100% SLA): PEER 1 Hosting is committed to providing services to its customers at a standard of excellence commensurate with the best practice in the industry. Network uptime and server availability are of the highest importance; we guarantee 100% up-time.
Our technology:
• SuperNetwork™: Our wholly-owned and operated SuperNetwork is a powerful network backbone built for customers like you who want maximum uptime and faster connections.
We have over 13,000 miles of fibre connectivity with a presence in leading carrier hotels for cost effective, Fast-Ethernet and Gigabit-Ethernet access. We have 17 data centres, 21 points-of-presence (PoPs), and over 1,000 peering relationships. Nobody else even comes close to our track record for solid uptime and performance. Not only can we deliver, but we do it better, faster, time and time again.
Our billing:
• 30 Days Money Back Guarantee: We offer a 30 Days Money Back Guarantee on all our Managed Hosting plans. If you are dissatisfied with your service for any reason or do not feel we have lived up to our commitment, cancel within the first 30 days of the activation of your account and we will give you a full refund on your Hosting and setup fees. No questions asked.
• Bandwidth Billing: We charge based on Total Transfer billing, which results in lower bandwidth charges. Managed Hosting customers generally experience sustained levels of traffic over their billing month as opposed to traffic with sudden peaks. That's why billing based on the commonly used 95th Percentile (or burstable billing) method is not ideal, as it would result in paying for bandwidth that isn't used during the month. Total Transfer billing ignores these natural peaks and valleys, and only measures your actual data to and from your IP address.
Describe the services you offer?
Managed Hosting
• What is Managed Hosting?
Simply, PEER 1 Managed Hosting is the management and support of servers from the Operating System level down. It is our responsibility to provide:
• 100% Network Availability
• 100% Infrastructure (DC related i.e. power, cooling etc) Availability
• 1hr Hardware Replacement
• Managed dedicated Hosting is a good fit for people with mission critical applications or websites which should an outage occur will lose revenue and/or reputation.
• How do we achieve the above?
• Employee passionate, highly trained techs who always do what’s right for the customer. If mistakes occur, our staff are trained to admit errors, take ownership to fix it.
• 80% of PEER 1 HOSTING staff are in customer facing roles meaning that we are focussed on being available for whenever you need us.
• FirstCall Support means we take ownership of your enquiry; you will only need to call us once. 86% of all calls received are dealt with there and then on the phone. For those that cannot be resolved there and then, we will own it and communicate with you so you do not have to call us back.
Dedicated Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting, delivered by our Dedicated Hosting arm ServerBeach, has been designed by Geeks for Geeks! For those that do not need the additional support levels, this is an ideal way to keep Hosting costs down. Coupled with the fact that there are no contracts at ServerBeach, you can simply turn servers on/off and add additional servers as and when you need to.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Owning our network allows us to offer better performance than most Hosting companies. “Rapid Edge” CDN allows customers to distribute static content to every corner of the globe through the same provider. The CDN not only helps increase the speed of the distribution to the end user, but also alleviates the load from your main server configuration, increasing efficiency, reliability and performance.
Co-location
• For customers with their own hardware, we offer secure, SAS 70 certified, co-location services powered by the PEER 1 HOSTING SuperNetwork and facilitated through a control panel to help customers manage their kit.
Describe your target market?
PEER 1 Hosting works with SMBs and fast-growing online businesses where the internet is critical to their revenue. These are typically web-design agencies or businesses with less than 250 employees that make their money on the internet, so reliable, scalable and secure web Hosting is crucial.
PEER 1 HOSTING operates on a ‘pay as you grow’ model allowing it to adapt quickly to the changing needs of its customers. It is able to accommodate spikes in web traffic as a result of a particular promotion, for example. It was able to bring online 50 additional servers in just 48 hours for one customer, and can easily provision additional servers for a matter of months before scaling back down as the customer’s needs change.
PEER 1 HOSTING, and its dedicated Hosting arm ServerBeach, also operates its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) and high performance 10GB SuperNetwork to ensure image and data-heavy sites deliver an excellent customer experience. Customers include high-profile web-based businesses such as YouTube and WordPress plus smaller start-ups including cloud Hosting provider ElasticHosts.
How is your company planning for the future?
Data Centre & Infrastructure Investment
PEER 1 HOSTING’s strategy is to work with best-of-breed technology providers to deliver outstanding , enterprise-class performance and reliability to our customers, no matter what size their business is. We recently brought a state-of-the-art data centre online in Toronto which includes a number of green features, plus co-location, managed and dedicated Hosting services all under one roof with connectivity to our SuperNetwork.
Cloudy future
We recognise the significance of cloud computing and delivery of on-demand bandwidth and compute to customers. We already offer SaasGrid, a software-as-a-service enabler and we provide the infrastructure and support to enable cloud service providers to develop and grow cloud services.
In the first half of 2010 we will also offer Storage-as-a-Service based on EMC Atmos to enable instant access to information across distributed geographies and efficiently deliver content and information services over the Web.
Measuring customer satisfaction
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) approach measures how likely a customer would be to recommend PEER 1 Hosting on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 indicating the customer definitely would. Our NPS is an integral part of the PEER 1 Hosting business model. Customers that don’t give the company a 9 or 10 receive immediate and personal contact to find out how service can be improved; this is how 7’s are turned into 10’s in a way they will respond to.
A measure of any PEER 1 Hosting customer initiative is whether or not it improved our NPS score. The score for the month is looked at in line with the customer service initiatives undertaken, and the feedback is used to plan the next initiative. The result has seen PEER 1’s NPS score rise to 36+ over the past year, when the industry average for IT support is 7.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
One of the great things about PEER 1 HOSTING is we ask, listen and respond to customer feedback. As a result of a recent survey, one of the most common customer concerns was reaching their limit of backup space and bandwidth, resulting in unplanned overage charges. Surprise bills are never popular, so in response to this feedback, PEER 1 Hosting cut overage fees by over 70% as well as proactively calling all customers that are progressing towards breaching their limit throughout the month, to ensure they are on the most cost-effective contract.
Our TAM (Technical Account Manager) programme is very unique and hugely beneficial. A TAM is in place so that customers have a specific PEER 1 service contact who knows your infrastructure inside out to act as an extension of your IT team. If you are planning to run a marketing campaign and want to be sure your infrastructure can cope, call your TAM on an 0800 number. He/she will be able to advise based on past trends and performance as to whether it will handle the additional load and make recommendations on how to increase capacity from a completely technical perspective.
We also offers a range of bundle deals which can help customers maximise value. A recent example is the ‘ValuePro Hosting Bundle’ which includes FirstCall Support, SAN backup, vulnerability scans, 100% network uptime SLA and access to the high performance SuperNetwork.
How do you support your customers?
We are a customer service business first and a technology business second. Since inception we have sought to build the ideal customer relationship business from the ground up with open and honest communication, and this shows in every aspect of our customer interactions.
Dominic, our UK MD, believes that good customer service is about good people who love their clients and love their job. To make sure every member of staff fits this bill, at the two week point Dominic offers new recruits £1000 to leave. It’s called the Foxtrot-Oscar bonus, awarded if your heart’s not in it, to leave the company with no hard feelings. The bonus reflects the way Dominic runs the PEER 1 HOSTING UK business – openly and honestly – and this can be felt throughout every stage of the customer experience.
Complete transparency
For many Hosting providers it is not company policy to notify customers when they have experienced downtime. For the customer it means they may never know if their provider is meeting their service level agreement or not. PEER 1 notifies customers immediately and typically has fixed the problem before the customer was even aware of it.
PEER 1 Hosting also offers details of service level credits paid out across the business over the past quarter to highlight where the company can improve and gain direct customer feedback. This demonstrates the transparency customers can expect from PEER 1 Hosting throughout their contract.
Flexible contracts
The PEER 1 HOSTING motto is don’t pay for what you don’t need; customers are not forced onto inflexible bundles or deals. PEER 1 HOSTING solution engineers analyse exactly what each customer needs and create a customised plan to suit, which typically saves customers between 30% and 80% on their previous contract.
Live chat service
Anyone visiting www.peer1Hosting.co.uk can access the live chat facility. This allows immediate interaction with PEER 1 Hosting staff who can provide technical assistance and act as a consultancy for those who want to learn more about the industry. The live chat has increased conversion rate of web visitors to customers by 300%.
Empowering employees
The PEER 1 Hosting culture is designed to bring out the best in people, but it’s not a handbook that sits in everyone’s desk drawer. The idea is that it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission, and when in doubt, do the right thing. Staff are empowered to award customer credits on the spot and are assigned a monthly budget to do so. Staff are also obligated to suggest two improvements to the business per month, and if any cost less than £100, are encouraged to make the improvement without permission and expense the cost. The result is empowered staff and customers that receive immediate attention.
CloudXcelerator programme
PEER 1 Hosting wants to see every customer’s business succeed. We launched our CloudXcelerator programme in June 2009 offering start-up cloud computing companies the support to develop, test and launch cloud applications on PEER 1’s infrastructure. Once these businesses are established, PEER 1 HOSTING offers free marketing and PR support to help promote them. ElasticHosts.com, a flexible cloud server business which is about to expand into the US market, and Apprenda, the developers of SaaS GRID a Software-As-A-Service platform which has just received £5million of venture capital funding towards its business are both examples of our Cloud Xcelerator programme success.
