We hear a lot about selling hosting as a customer experience... as a solution to a problem customers have. No Host knows this approach better than Host Color. Host Color has been in the business of selling solutions for longer than almost anyone. When other hosts we marketing web space, bandwidth, and the like, Host Color talked with their customers and asked them, "how can we help you." We managed to get a chance to talk to Host Color's Managing Director Alexander Avramov about Host Color's past, present, and possible future.

We hear a lot about selling hosting as a customer experience... as a solution to a problem customers have. No Host knows this approach better than Host Color. Host Color has been in the business of selling solutions for longer than almost anyone. When other hosts we marketing web space, bandwidth, and the like, Host Color talked with their customers and asked them, "how can we help you." We managed to get a chance to talk to Host Color's Managing Director Alexander Avramov about Host Color's past, present, and possible future.

Host Color has been servicing the web hosting industry since 2000, nearly 10 years. How did Host Color first begin?

Alexander Avramov, Managing Director Host Color

It is a good story. We got spammed by a guy who now owns a fairly good shared hosting provider. The owners of the company started with a small boutique web design studio. They needed web hosting and signed up with a hosting provider, which was quite popular at that time, but it wasn't good enough. So we needed to switch to any other company and when we received the "spam" we decided to see who sent it. The spam wasn't an automated message. It was sent by a real person as a proposition. So we contacted the sender because we were curious about what they offer. He gave us a decent Reseller account (it was actually a number of shared hosting accounts, without a reseller management interface). In 2001, however we began receiving a lot of requests for web hosting, so we bought the first dedicated server.

There was a company called RackShack at this time. We bought a $99 Pentium machine from them. RackShack, changed name to EV1 Servers and after a merger is now "The Planet". However we ran away from them in 2003 and start building our own infrastructure. The reason was the RackShack's support was horrible. It wasn't possible to deal with them at all. They were not the good old days, but it is funny that a smile comes to my face when I turn around and look. We were quite naive 10 years ago.

Where did the idea for the name "Host Color" come from?

We discussed a concept which would present the web host as a company focused to serve different people, which belong to different societies and different business cultures. Within the first years we got not just U.S. customers, but many site owners from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Argentina and many other countries. I believe that for some time we were even the #1 web host in Sri Lanka and probably in Peru :) It was funny. For quite a while in 2004 we had around 5000 customers and 100 of them from Sri Lanka and 50 from Peru. So we became Host Color, a company that serves people from different cultures and nations. I know it is not a regular tech story, but it is true.

Honestly, we were proud that we hosted many customers from countries that were very far from what people used to call "developed world" 10 years ago. Now is a little bit different. We have a very strong portfolio of customers in U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia. But we still have many of our customers from old days with us. Some however switched to local companies, which didn't existed 10 years ago. We are still international, but 75% of our customers are either Americans or Europeans.

In 2003, Host Color moved to the U.S. while maintaining a presence in Europe under the moniker Host Color Europe. What was the reason behind the move and how much work was involved in moving the company?

The European market wasn't liberalized at the beginning of this decade. It was impossible to do business in the E.U. the way you do it in U.S. There were too many regulations, a lot of bureaucracy, and you weren't able to sell in more than one national market. It was a pain to open an online merchant account in a foreign country. Their Euro, the single European currency still wasn't introduced. Today the E.U. market is more liberalized and it is globalizing very fast. But 8 years ago, it wasn't able for a new, small web company to grow as an international business. So we incorporated in Delaware.

When it came to selling your solutions did you have to make any changes to cater to the U.S. market?

Sure. We made the web site to look simple and to make sure the customer will reach the sign up page by one click. The life and the technologies were much more simple 8 years ago and if I have to be honest I should say that compared to today's website, the old Host Color was probably better. You can see that today we are very different from other web hosts. We do not speak about numbers and gigabytes. We speak about customization of hosting environment and quality. But 8 years ago our services were pretty standardized. Today we are trying to customize even Shared hosting services.

When it comes to Web Hosting is there any differences between the European and U.S. markets aside from location needs?

You cannot do business if you do not provide support in the local language. Italians and French want to be served in their own language.  The same is in any other country. And the customer support operators have to spend hours on the phone.

When it comes to Shared Hosting, there is no outbreak of overselling web hosting providers in Europe. You can see the web hosts in Spain, Italy, France and any other EU country still offer a reasonable amount of resources in reasonable prices. There is however "unlimited space" in Europe. Otherwise the costs of doing business including the data center's costs and those that companies pay for power and cooling are higher, which makes the EU based web hosts less competitive on the global market. We operate facilities in Amsterdam and we pay more for everything there. But the profit margins are also higher than in U.S. There are many other differences, but I don't believe that they are significant and we don't have to pay too much attention to them.

It is quite exciting now to watch how the EU companies are moving to the Clouds and utilizing the new model of computing in web hosting business. My impression is that the European companies are focused to deploy in-house clouds and to compete with major clouds, much more that the Americans do. Everybody is paying too much attention on major clouds in The States.

Blog, CMS, and Social web hosting plans; where did the idea for making plans dedicated to these pursuits come from?

In the real life people need web hosting for different purposes. I know that most web hosts prefer to offer "Universal web hosting plan", but there is no "universal" in this business. There are different people who need to create and maintain websites which serve different fields of business activity. Managing a blog based on WordPress, b2Evolution or Text Pattern is very different from dealing with website based on Joomla, Drupal, MODx or any other CMS. The plan "Social Web" was launched after the boom of social networking websites, because we have been approached from many people who asked us "How to make a social network?" We decided to create a web hosting service, designed specifically for social networking websites.

As far as Social web hosting, do you have any plans for making tie- ins with social networks such as FaceBook and Twitter?

Well, honestly it is more about the perception, not about the technology. We want to make it easy for anyone to operate in a specific online environment. That's why we have service plans like these. Once anyone becomes a customer of the Social Web they get suggestions on which social tools and applications to use.

What about Host Color are you most proud of?

Our message is "We do web hosting about people, not about websites". We do not see web hosting business as a financial scheme. Host Color is looking for profit as any other company does, but you cannot find the things which make us happy among the numbers in the financial reports. We are happy that our first customer is still with us and still likes our services. As I said it is really about people.

Which hosting solution is your most popular? Why do you believe that is?

In Shared Hosting "Content" (the CMS hosting plan) and "Multi Site" compete with each other. We have more customers of "Content" because it is more inexpensive. In VPS Hosting this is VPS Advance, the Virtuozzo Containers powered virtual server that features 512 MB RAM, 25 GB space, and 250 GB data transfer per month. In Dedicated Hosting most of our clients request custom solutions, so I cannot say now which the best sold item is.

Is there any feature or service you offer that you wish more customers would take advantage of?

Sure. We are very focused to sign up more VPS Hosting customers. They have higher revenue in Dedicated Hosting, but we just like virtualization and enjoy serving VPS Hosting customers. Host Color is currently working on deploying an in-house cloud. We are launching scalable and very powerful cloud VPS hosting services.

The redesign for the new control panel will be coming out sometime next month, is there anything about it that you can share with our readers How long as this version been in production?

It was very hard to decide where to go with this web hosting control panel. Most people prefer to use standardized services based on either cPanel or Plesk. If a web host wants to acquire someone else's business or to sell the business one of the first question is "What kind of customers - cPanel or Plesk?" So we were very close to the decision to begin migrating our own customers to any of those control panels. But then we decided that we must continue developing our own control panel. Our customers like it and used to using it. So we are adding new features and making many of the operations there simpler. I'll reveal that we have talks with some software development companies to join forces to release commercial version. Once it is released it will be another option for many new or smaller web hosts. But we will not be moving to software business. This is something that our prospective partner will deal with.

You have probably seen your share of inexperienced newbies have problems when they get their first Web Host plan. If you could give them advice before they dive in, what would it be?

Well, start with something simple. Don't spend too much time in learning html, coding, design or any other details. Just use any kind of CMS such as WordPress, b2Evolution (it is good for managing multiple blogs or websites) or TextPattern (great for academics or writers) and begin producing content. You'll learn the "small secrets" which give you control over the technology later.

You obviously have some customers that have been very successful with their online businesses while hosting with you. Do you have any stories you'd like to tell about their success and how Host Color was instrumental in that success?

You know... we have a lot of excellent web designers, very successful in the local (in the U.S.) or national (E.U.) business communities. But I don't think that we deserve to be praised about our customers' success. Our customers run successful businesses because they are very good at what they are doing. We only try, not to distract their attention from their business and to keep them optimistic about their success. One of our little secrets is to make them to feel good when they communicate with us.


Thank you Alex for chatting with us and we look forward to talking with you again.