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What is your name and position with A Small Orange?
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My name is Douglas Hanna and I am the CEO of A Small Orange.
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Please tell us the year established and brief history of A Small Orange?
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A Small Orange was founded in 2003 by a Georgia Tech graduate named Tim Dorr. Tim ran and grew the business until March 2010 when he sold it to my business partner and I.
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What is it that makes A Small Orange a competitive company in the Web Hosting market?
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In addition to the standard things you come to expect from a web hosting like competitive pricing and the features you need, we really pride ourselves on customer service and we depend on our customer service to set us apart from the plethora of competitors out there. A lot of companies talk about customer service, but don’t actually deliver on it. We place customer service at the forefront of what we do and almost everything we do as a company is to improve the customer experience in one way or another.
Most people don’t really appreciate our customer service until they become a customer and have a question or an issue or something like that. When they email us, though, they notice a difference. Not only does the customer get a response quickly (usually within 10-15 minutes, often within 2-3 minutes), they also get a response from someone who speaks English exceptionally well, who knows about cPanel and Linux, and who has read and researched their question and its solution.
We aren’t perfect by any means, I feel pretty confident in saying that our customer service is much better than most.
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What is the most challenging aspect to offering Web Hosting?
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I don’t want to assume what sort of challenges other web hosting companies experience, but for us, the biggest challenge is having the time and energy and resources to build a company with a strong culture, team, and set of products and services while also trying to do the “day-to-day” things of running a business. In our business, the day-to-day stuff is really hard. It isn’t easy to keep a lot of servers online or to constantly push out new features and things like that. But those are things we have to do in order to keep our business going.
To make our business great, though, we have to set aside time to work on building and growing our company culture, ensuring that we have processes and procedures in place that will enable us to provide quality customer service to customers on a consistent basis, ensuring that our team continues to get stronger as we grow, and things like that.
Doing both the day-to-day and the long-term things at once (in an industry that is constantly changing and at a company that is growing really quickly) is a huge challenge.
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What new features have A Small Orange added for its customers in the past year?
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We recently launched our Cloud Hosting platform, which offers a fully redundant server setup with automatic failover, a lot of customizable options, pre-built systems, and more. The pricing and features are really great and it’s backed by the same type of support that our other hosting packages have.
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What would you say is A Small Orange #1 asset to its customer base?
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Our team, no doubt. We’re up to 25 people now and there are very, very few things that someone on our team doesn’t know about or is unable to fix. We don’t really have a tiered system of support like a lot of our competitors, so our customers get to deal with really strong people on a day-to-day basis.
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Where do you see A Small Orange and the web hosting industry in three years?
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In three years, I hope A Small Orange is a leading provider of high-quality web hosting. We are constantly trying to improve our customer service and our ideal goal is to become a “luxury” provider of web hosting. Luxury is kind of a bizarre concept for an IT service like web hosting, but that’s our goal. We want our customer service to be the best without question.
I think it’s hard to predict the web hosting industry’s direction within the next three years. We’ll definitely see more and more hosts virtualizing more and more things. I think software as a service will continue to grow in popularity and I think more and more customers will be using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. to power their websites.
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How many customers do you currently have?
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We currently have about 25,000 customers.
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Do you own your own datacenter?
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No. We co-locate and lease servers around the world.
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Where are they located?
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We have 10 datacenter locations around the world. Most of our servers are in Texas, but we also have a lot in Atlanta, Detroit, and Seattle. In addition to those locations, we have served in Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and other cities around the US. And internationally, we have servers in both Europe and Asia.
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What kind of backup power do you have?
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All of our datacenters have multiple power sources and have generators and battery backups ready to go in case of an interruption in power.
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Do you have multiple backbone connections?
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Yes. All of our datacenters have multiple backbone connections.
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Do you offer 24/7 support?
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Yes. We’re always available and have people working 24/7/365.
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What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
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We average about 15 minutes, but it’s sometimes as quick as 2-3 minutes.
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Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
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Standard support is included with all of our product offerings. If customers need us to go very far above and beyond (i. e. doing coding for them, etc.), we charge extra for that, but for what most customers need help with, we’re happy to help without charging anything extra.
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Do you offer a money back guarantee?
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Yes. We have a 45 day money back guarantee.
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Thank you for your time and insight into A Small Orange.
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