Web Hosting Interview - Green Geeks, LLC November 2009

TREY GARDNER: Well thank you for this opportunity to talk with everyone here at HostSearch again. It is great to be here.

TREY GARDNER: Yes well I have been in the industry for over 10 years coming up to 11 + years. I started out with a web site design and development company working with web hosts and finding out which were the best hosts to work with from the design aspect.

Then I was hired by iPowerweb and I was involved in a number of their departments including marketing, business development, quality assurance, reseller development, control panel development and their sales department. I also worked closely with the billing department there with the referral program and I worked closely with the support department with our reseller program.

Looking back I really touched upon almost every aspect of the web site hosting business in the 5 years I was with iPowerWeb. In that time we also launched a new brand called Startlogic and we acquired another brand called Dot5Hosting. Overall it was a great experience and it allowed me to get involved in every aspect of the business.

Later I moved on to help companies like Lunarpages and start other web hosting companies including Hostpapa and eventually my own company Green Geeks.

TREY GARDNER: I decided to go into business for myself for two reasons.

First off is that although I had a large amount of influence in the decisions of upper management for all of these companies, ultimately I was not the final decision maker and I grew frustrated when bad decisions were repeatedly made.

After so many years in the industry I was confident that I had the experience to create a better company with exceptional support personnel, using superior quality servers and bandwidth and provide a better customer experience. I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish here and I attribute our success to the people in our organization and all of the experiences which have lead us here.

The second reason I wanted to start my own web hosting company was my family, especially my two kids. I had been reading for years about how our industry produced so much e-waste and consumed so much energy that we really were a contributor to global warming and were an industry on track to have a huge negative impact on the environment.

By nature I am an out doors kind of guy. I grew up at the beach in Santa Monica and I love all sorts of outdoor sports. I wanted to make sure that I did as much as I could to ensure that my children and every future generation to come had as wonderful an opportunity to enjoy the environment as I did.

I knew that because of all of the great relationships I had in the web hosting industry that I could persuade either directly or through competition that these other companies should go green. Since we have gained exposure many of the largest web site hosting brands, including iPowerWeb, my old employer has gone Green with carbon offsetting programs reducing the carbon foot prints of literally millions of web sites.

More is needed to be done however and I will not stop with our green mission until we have forced every web hosting company to go green or force them out of business. I think we can accomplish this goal and I welcome those web hosting companies who wish to join our green mission.

TREY GARDNER: Two things make Green Geeks a superior web site hosting company; our experience in the industry and the advances in servers and support capabilities allows us to be a better web site hosting company.

The past experiences of our upper management group which includes; myself, our quality assurance director, General manager, System administrators, Support director and our level 3 representatives combine for a greater understanding of our industry and how to support our clients.

In our round table discussions many times we bring to light successes and failures of decisions we have seen in the past in other web hosting companies we have worked for. We use these experiences to work out ways to do things better and to avoid repeating the problems we have seen in the past.

The second area that makes us better is the ability for us to communicate with the customer better and with each department better. Advances in the area of communication allow us to set up a support structure where we have several lines of support all working harmoniously together to better serve a customer.

We have front line communication support which handles the majority of all incoming calls, emails and chats. This line of support can help direct customers to areas where they can find answers to questions they have and to help them with quick fixes. If a customer has an issue which necessitates a more technical or server side fix the tier 1 team routes those customers to the tier 2 team or tier 3 team depending upon the issue and the technical capabilities needed to fix whatever issue the customer may have.

This tiered system allows us to route customers to the appropriate technical team member where they can get the best care and support. This in turn lessens the amount of work for all of our staff so that they can competently take care of issues and get through the workload fast providing a quicker response and resolution to the customer. Efficiency allows us to work better and provide better service.  

TREY GARDNER: Green Geeks is 300% green and we have been 300% green since our inception. We purchase wind energy certificates to off set our energy use so we pull from the grid 1x worth of energy and we put back into the grid 3x worth of energy having been produced by wind farms. All our office equipment, work stations and servers are 300% green.

TREY GARDNER: Our short term goals are to be the best web site hosting company in the industry and to help the web site hosting industry to go green.

Our long term goals are to be the best web site hosting company in the industry and to help the web site hosting industry to go green.

TREY GARDNER: It is hard to predict the web hosting industry. Some people think that there will be consolidation under large brands like Google, however Yahoo and Godaddy two of the largest brands in the industry have not been able to top competition and because web hosting is a secondary market for them most people prefer to host elsewhere.

I believe that there will continue to be growth and opportunity in the marketplace for large and small providers alike. This is why we opened the reseller service we provide so that we could support those smaller companies and developers to allow them to host their clients sites and make money from them.

TREY GARDNER: Thank you very much we are looking forward to continuing our success as well and look forward to serving our clients for many years to come. Good luck to everyone here at Hostsearch and God bless. Let's all become greener in our lives.