Web Hosting Interview - Apollo Hosting February 2004

TAMARA: I am the President and founder of Apollo Hosting, Inc. Currently I work with our CEO (my husband Martin Field) and our Director of Operations to develop strategies and business partnerships. I also work closely with our marketing director on advertising and marketing endeavors. But all of us at Apollo Hosting work as a team. Because of this many days you may find me working side-by-side with our team members on different projects.

TAMARA: Apollo Hosting began in November 1999. I started the company at my home in Virginia. Soon after that my husband Martin Field quit his full time Vice President position and joined on as CEO. With Martin's  management expertise the company grew steadily and without any real growing pains. We started out with just 2 employees and now we have around 30 employees. We also moved our management offices to the high tech city of Austin, Texas just 2 years ago. Soon after moving to Austin, we opened a new data center and began Infinity Host.

Our partnerships with our software suppliers have also grown steadily. We try to offer the best products in the industry as soon as these products become available. This means we keep our eye out for new products, form a partnership with that company, and maintain a close relationship with them. Some of the companies we partnerships with include Miva Corporation, Postini, Eboz, Urchin, PayQuake, PSoft, and Website Movers.

In an industry that grows as quickly as Web Hosting, we have maintained our standards from the onset of the company of offering fast, reliable service with superior products. We don¡'t play games with our customers like having hidden costs, or surprising them with inferior products or service. All of our offerings are clear on our website, and we offer reliable 24/7/365 tech support.

TAMARA: InfinityHost.com is a division of Apollo Hosting. The servers reside in our new datacenter in Austin, Texas.  Customers receive the same reliable customer support that Apollo Hosting customers have enjoyed over the years. And the Infinity Host servers/connections supply customer's with fast, reliable connections using powerful Dell computers, Cisco routers and multiple backbone connections. At Infinity Host we have introduced new hosting software as a result of our partnership with SW Soft. This incredible backend software product includes a new control panel and a Virtual Environment technology that is really the most exciting new breakthrough in hosting. With a virtual environment each hosting plan is guaranteed a certain amount of CPU/Bandwidth so that performance is never compromised by other users on the same server.  

TAMARA: We have customers from all over the world. And we try to accommodate them by hiring customer support representatives who are multi-lingual. Our control panel is in English, French, German, and Spanish. We also plan on creating a version of our website for Spanish speaking customers, but that is about 6-8 months out.

TAMARA: Without mentioning some of HostSearch.com's  competitors, we have consistently won awards for our reliable service, fast, reliable connections and equipment and for hosting plans packed with the best software. For example we were one of the first companies to offer 24/7/365 live chat where customers can talk directly with our technicians as well as our sales team (many companies just offer chat for sales questions if they offer it at all). We were also one of only a handful of companies offering Miva Merchant, a Get Traffic Toolbox, and award winning Postini server SPAM/Virus filtering on all hosting plans. We also offer things like Urchin, programming Power Toolbox, Silver Miva support (users can contact Miva directly), Site Studio, Tomcat/JSP, Coldfusion, and Chilisoft ASP. And our upgrade path is extensive. From the shared environment a customer can move up to VPS, Dedicated and Dedicated Reseller. Finally our uptime has been a source of pride for us. CNet has been monitoring our servers for the past couple of years, and we rank in the top 20 of hosting providers for uptime.

TAMARA: Our people are our main strength. Because we have a strong team we are able to work well together and this makes everything possible. For example offer  dependable 24/7/365 technical support. We also have a turn around time currently of just 10 minutes on the average Help Desk request. These things have only been made possible through great communication, coordination, & teamwork. We have numerous routes for a customer to give management feedback including a link in all our company correspondence with the customer as well as through forms on our website and in the customers control panel. We are fanatical about our support and even one bad comment sends up a big red flag. I guess that's why we don't get too many of those.

Because of our teamwork we also are able to offer new products more quickly. There are many hosting companies that simply offer hosting and sit back and relax. Then there are others that take months to offer a new hosting product. Our team is constantly on the lookout for new ways to enhance the customer's experience. Then we are able to offer these products or implement these new systems very quickly. And we offer them to our current customers as well as new customers. Our work environment is very exciting! Everyone contributes ideas. And then we work closely as a team to implement these new ideas.

TAMARA: We have multiple firewalls that are updated daily. We also offer the most highly regarded server-side SPAM/Virus filtering software to all our customers. Servers are monitored constantly and we even have one of the lowest rates of fraud in the industry due to our proprietary fraud screening software. Because of this we know who is using our servers and we are able to maintain a high level of security.  

TAMARA: We will continue to offer the newest and the best products and services to our customers while maintaining our high level of customer support. We will also continue to listen closely to what our customers are asking for. We just launched our dedicated server line, so now our customers have an upgrade path. And we are getting rave reviews for our VPS plans that allow unlimited domains in a Virtual Environment. These were things that our customers were asking for. They didn't want to leave Apollo Hosting because they appreciated our support and reliability, but they needed to upgrade.

TAMARA: In the hosting industry 5 years is a long time. I hope that we are able to maintain our customers approval because that is what is most important to us, keeping our customers happy.

TAMARA: Okay, I admit it is www.apollohosting.com. And it has been for the last 4 and half years. Sorry it's not anything more exciting than that. Apollo Hosting is my baby!

TAMARA: No problems, thanks to you too!