Hosting 365

6th March – hosting365, an Outsourced IT Services and Internet Hosting provider, has announced a €2 million investment in new infrastructure, which has led to the creation of 20 jobs.

The investment has seen the company incorporate blade server and virtualisation technology into its existing facilities in order to offer a range of new services. hosting365 signed deals with HP to provide the blade server technology and with VMware for the virtualisation software.

It has enabled the company to offer its customers on-demand IT services, such as Hardware as a Service and Software as a Service, allowing clients to pay for IT as and when they use it. The new technology positions hosting365 to match the shifting needs of companies looking to reduce future investments in IT infrastructure and power consumption costs.

The company milestone has led to the creation of twenty jobs, all of which have been filled. The new recruits include Senior UNIX, Networking and Microsoft engineers, as well as technical infrastructure staff. hosting365 also plans to hire an additional 14 staff in its Dublin and Polish offices by the end of the year as it continues to expand.

Commenting on the announcement, Stephen McCarron, Managing Director, hosting365, said “This is a strategic investment which has enabled us to offer on-demand IT services. We are now in a position to offer organisations computing assets as and when they need them. IT is not a core competency for most organisations, so it makes little sense from them to make huge investments when they can take advantage of our staff’s technical expertise and cut down on capital expenditure,”

“Companies are starting to realise that they are overspending on IT and their existing investments are often underutilised. The outsourced managed services model is a cost effective solution as they can take advantage of our economies of scale. hosting365 combines the best of both worlds by offering world class data centre facilities and the IT expertise of our diverse engineering, technician and support teams,” McCarron added.

“By combining the VMware layer with the high availability, high performance components of the HP infrastructure, Irish companies can, for the first time, avail of the benefits of a multi million euro infrastructure for a cost less then a traditional dedicated server,” added Sales Director, Paul Lynch. “This approach to how managed hosting is delivered will change not only how it is viewed in Ireland, but also globally”.
hosting365’s existing clients include the Irish Stock Exchange, the Irish Government Department for Social & Family Affairs, Certified Public Accountants of Ireland, O2, daft.ie and entertainment.ie.

Ends

For further information please contact:

Piaras Kelly / Joe Carmody
Edelman
01 6789333
086 8131691 / 086 8058764
piaras.kelly@edelman.com /joe.carmody@edelman.com

30th January – register365 has announced a price drop on .ie domains in response to the IE Domain Registry’s announcement to reduce its charges by 5.8%. register365 has dropped its price on .ie domains from €25.95 to €21.95.

Commenting on the price drop, Stephen McCarron, Managing Director, register365, said “We welcome the IEDR price drop as they have been investing in their own system automation, and releasing this to resellers through an API. We have been using this API since day one and it saves us a huge amount of manual labour. Previously every domain registration needed to be handled and submitted manually. We have a policy of passing savings on to our customers, and we are the price leader in Ireland for domains and hosting.”

ENDS

For further information please contact:

Piaras Kelly
Edelman
01 6789333
086 8131691
piaras.kelly@edelman.com

About register365

register365 (a division of hosting365) is Ireland’s largest and leading hosting services provider. register365 owns and operates its own 25,000 square feet, state of the art data centre in Park West, Dublin, Ireland. The company holds 35% of the Irish market and has over 75,000 customers.

We’ve (rather quietly) pushed our beta of Register365.com online - please feel free to mail us any feedback. We are working on it continuously, but it does demo our all-new management back-end systems, as well as 24/7 livechat features and all new pricing and hosting plans.

The site is now open for business and working fully…

or … HaaS : Hardware as a Service.

I got an enquiry today as the whether we do on-demand computing. Of course we do! In fact, that’s the basis of our business model!

We can provide you with custom-spec servers, network infrastructure, and IP connectivity … for a specified period and within a very fast timeframe. Need a high-availability platform for your application, that means you don’t have to worry about uptime, backups, security, viruses, maintenance, software, licensing or future upgrades? Yep, you’ve got it;
That’s ‘on-demand computing’.

No capital costs. No left-over hardware when the project/test/requirement is finished. No human resource expenditure. And it’s FAST.

Just interesting that people don’t realise this is what dedicated server hosting is all about. Maybe I need to change the text of our web site !

Please head over and vote for us here !

What the single biggest irritation when dealing with telco’s, ISP’s, utility companies and so on?

Support.

What’s the most expensive and hardest thing for a company that grows to tens of thousands of customers to do?

Provide truly great support to all our customers.

Let me take this opportunity to introduce you to our new Customer Care team, pictured below.

So, what do you think?

Okay, so that’s not REALLY our new Customer Care team … but I think it’s important we can poke fun at ourselves from time to time.

The truth of the matter is that strategically we’ve decided satisfied customers isn’t good enough. Our focus isn’t quick + cheap, lots of new signups - it’s retention. We want to go above and beyond, we want to delight customers. We don’t do a lot of advertising, our leads come from referrals. (Note: I’m publicly on record saying 2006 wasn’t the year we achieved customer-wide satisfaction, so we have no delusions of adequacy here, rather business -re-focus.)

Granted it sounds like marketing waffle; and every company say they provide excellent support. But that’s bull-shitake and we all know that. So we strategically decided to invest -heavily- in making sure we can deliver on that promise. BUILD OUR BRAND ON THAT PROMISE.

So this short post is really to announce a new team has been created - 8 people, all from a web software background, to answer email support tickets. That is alongside the Infrastructure Team in the NOC who provide Premium Support, and the Customer Experience Team that provide dedicated phone support.

I’ll get some photos of the REAL team members up soon!

We don’t normally post things like this on our blog, and to be honest, I don’t really like reading internal notices on blogs that I read, as a ‘jobs’ post isn’t really ‘insightful, useful, informal - information’, but nevertheless, I’m hoping that some of our readers may be interested in getting even more involved with hosting365 by joining the team !!

We’re growing at a fantastic rate, with our own Data Centre and Offices here in Parkwest; another DC we manage in Dublin City Centre, space in a few more DC’s around Europe, and now offices and staff in Poland as well (R&D and Operations - R&D is VERY cool )

So to continue meeting our growth-needs, we require staff - good staff! Very simply, the roles (links to jobs.ie - the portal we use for recruitment - and which I highly recommend) we are looking for fulfill right now are:
- Unix Engineer - if you have good experience as a Unix Sys Admin you should have some fun in here … at least half of all our systems and customer boxes run some form on Unix, and we have some fairly cool plans for building out next-gen infrastructure with Unix at the core.

- Network Engineer - minimum requirements are CCNA and you really need CCNP or good relevant experience as well. Our network is core to the business, all systems require stable network connectivity and we have a highly redundant, growing, Cisco-powered network in here that you will be assisting on maintaining.

- Technical Support - this is a mixed role between the ‘Network Operations Centre’ where you will get experience of building and deploying servers, and the ‘Customer Experience Team’ where you will get experience dealing with technical support queries and working with our Engineering Team to resolve them. This role is ideal for a tech graduate or someone with good technical experience who wants to broaden their knowlegde and get a good foundation for their career. Typically, Tech Support people move into the Engineering Team after time, and on-going training is provided.

- ASP Coder (no link, sorry) - we have a requirement for a .NET 2.0 ASP programmer to fulfill a joint role between Engineering and R&D. We support a number of customers with ASP skills and also have a number of internal systems requiring ASP knowledge. And on the ‘cool’ side, we are doing a lot of Microsoft development at the moment, and need ASP skills at the front-end of it now.

If you are interested (or know anyone interested … send the link!!) in any of these roles, send me your CV (ed@hosting365.com) or apply online on jobs.ie.

Fergus Burns is organising a Geek Dinner next Wednesday evening at 8pm in the Market Bar. More details on the Web2ireland blog.

It’s a pre-SaaS event dinner … for anyone interested, Enterprise Ireland are running a Software-as-a-Service Event the next day in Dublin City Centre, kicking off at 8.00am - more info here - attendance is free.

Why are we interested in this? Well … SaaS is predicted to grow massively over the next few years as more and more software companies take advantage of the Internet as a delivery platform for applications. And of course ‘We Power the Internet’. Not universally true … but we do power businesses on the Internet.

We call ourselves an ‘Internet Infrastructure Provider’ which means we are the mechanism that powers SaaS applications - without hosting companies like us, software development companies would have to provide their own Internet connectivity - which I can tell you is expensive, especially if you want it to be resilient and redundant - which is hugely important for SaaS if sellers of this model want prospects to seriously consider it as a viable replacement for locally installed software.