Haris Pylarinos, Ibiscus Internet Services
We talked with Haris Pylarinos, an owner of a fast-growing hosting provider in Greece.
- HOSTSEARCH: Hi Mr. Pylarinos, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk with you today.HARIS PYLARINOS: Hello, my pleasure.
- HOSTSEARCH: Can you please tell us about your background and how did you become running ibiscus?HARIS PYLARINOS: I started my career as a network engineer and the hosting industry quickly drew my attention since it is rapidly evolving and always takes advantage of the latest technologies. After working as a system administrator in a company that provided web hosting solutions and realized that sometimes quality is sacrificed for the sake of extra revenue I decided to form ibiscus with a main goal of maintaining the highest possible quality of service and by always utilizing the latest technologies in the industry of web hosting. This spirit is shared within the staff and is a key factor in the hiring process.
- HOSTSEARCH: Can you please tell us more about the company?HARIS PYLARINOS: Our offices are located in Athens, capital city of Greece. As a company we offer a wide range of services, all related to web hosting. Services range from shared web hosting and reseller accounts to virtual and full featured dedicated servers. Regarding support, we have several engineers, all specialized in their respective fields providing fast and professional troubleshooting when the need arises. We maintain an average of 1 hour ticket response and downtime is something that we deal with instantly since we have an excellent monitoring solution and always a member of the staff standby.
- HOSTSEARCH: What is your main market? Is your location giving you a disadvantage to acquire US customers?HARIS PYLARINOS: We are targeting globally. We have both international and domestic customers and we try to make them comfortable with our product pricing and language depending on their location. If you visit our website you will notice that we give the ability to the customer to choose his currency, with the option to choose between US Dollars, Euros and UK Pounds. Apart from that we provide a translated version of the website for the Greek visitors. The fact that our offices are located at Greece surely holds some US customers from purchasing but we are doing our best to assure those customers that the services we provide are equally reliable and sometimes better than other companies located in UK or USA.
- HOSTSEARCH: It's interesting that you're in Greece. What are the key factors for consumers to select the web hosting services? Any differences from other parts in Europe?HARIS PYLARINOS: Unfortunately the Greek market is still quite limited in the area of web hosting and online promotion does not offer big in return. The main approach in the Greek market is through web designers and advertising companies. The key factor in Greece is reputation and word of mouth. The plan details and limits are something totally secondary. There are still a lot of companies offering 50MB web hosting space with pricing equivalent to unlimited plans offered by most international hosting companies and still maintain a big customer base. Our key strategy is to provide in Greece what is provided globally and set it as a standard also in the Greek market.
- HOSTSEARCH: We know that ibiscus offers variety of products and services. What is your core product? What are you concentrating in?HARIS PYLARINOS: Although we do offer a wide range of products and some supplementary services, we mainly concentrate in virtual private servers and virtualization in dedicated server plans. We believe virtualization is the new trend in web hosting and has still a lot more to offer in the near future. This does not mean that we pay less attention to our other services regarding development and support but I must admit that an approximate 60% of our R&D is constantly working in the virtualization area.
- HOSTSEARCH: Does the current economic situation affect you?HARIS PYLARINOS: To be honest we have observed a small drop in sales this period, although we are still highly profitable as a business and backed up by funds that will surely help us pass even the worst possible scenarios.
- HOSTSEARCH: How do you see the company in the next 3 years?HARIS PYLARINOS: Our goals in the following years is the expansion to datacenters in other key locations worldwide, to add SaaS in our product list and enrich our shared, reseller and VPS plans with ASP .NET and MSSQL technologies.
- HOSTSEARCH: We look forward to see the expansion in the coming years and we look forward to talk with you again. Thank you very much for an opportunity to talk with you today!HARIS PYLARINOS: Thank you, my best regards to you and the rest of the HostSearch team.
