When it comes to reselling the number of top Web hosts could be counted on one hand. FastHosts is one such company. Having been a predominantly reseller oriented Web Host for the past ten years, they understands what it takes to support multiple tiers of customers effectively and efficiently. Their growth is a testament to their abilities to successfully develop meaningful partnerships and business relationships. We managed to get some one and one time with FastHosts' Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Holford.

When it comes to reselling the number of top Web hosts could be counted on one hand. FastHosts is one such company. Having been a predominantly reseller oriented Web Host for the past ten years,  they understands what it takes to support multiple tiers of customers effectively and efficiently. Their growth is a testament to their abilities to successfully develop meaningful partnerships and business relationships. We managed to get some one and one time with FastHosts' Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Holford.
Note: Since this was a very lengthy interview it has been divided. The following is the second part of the interview.

Will you also be supporting your resellers and partners with their ventures into social networking?

Steve Holford, Chief Marketing Officer FastHosts

"I think it's difficult cause a lot of the time the resellers don't want to necessarily be associated with us, in front of their customers, because obviously the cost of branding, they want to be seen as a hosting company or seen as a hosting provider without us being involved, which we fully support. If that's the way they want to go, we will help them every way we can. If they want us to be involved, then we are more than happy for their customers to start talking with us as well. That's the whole point of social networking, anybody can join. You don't even have to be one of our customers, you could be one of our competitors and you can join in the conversation. It's not about stopping conversations from happening it's about building awareness of the industry, reaching out to some of the smaller players.

"The HostingCons, the industry insider information, the analyst reports, as well as the knowledge you get form having hundreds of thousands of customers... that's vital knowledge for understanding their base as well, so by bringing some of this information out to the field, we can help those partners grow and help them deal with their end customers. One of the big challenges for us is to help our resellers deal with their end customers on a more direct basis. How do we help them help their customers more? That is something we are looking at and trying to work out how we can do that in a better way and social networking could very well be a good way of doing that.

"It might be that, and this is just brainstorming here and now, but it might be that we just have a white labeled Twitter or forum or blog or something like that that allows our resellers to say look go to this Twitter account or this Facebook account or this blog and ask your questions there and we will get some industry experts who we have teamed together and we have made a think tank or a brain pool together who can help answer this. It might just be the resellers and us but it would be a place that their end customers could access for example. All of these things have to be looked at, but these are the kind of things we talk to our resellers about in terms of how they want us to help them."

Out of all the technologies that are coming out or are recent which one do you think is the most relevant to what you do?

"Virtualization is absolutely key for us it is very, very important I think for every hosting company going forward. I don't think there is any hosting company that could be in business today, and wants to be in business tomorrow, who isn't looking at virtualization. The benefits in terms of data center applications, benefits of serving the customers in deploying services to their customers as well as disaster recovery plans you can put into place with virtualization its so many possibilities and it makes it so much more dynamic, so much more accessible. Virtualization is the big news and getting ourselves into virtualized services and into the cloud services not only allows us to serve our current customers but it also widens it up to more of the ISVs and allows us to bring in more customers and get them more services as well. Virtualization is massive and it's a case of getting it right, getting the right services into place and delivering those right services to customers at the right prices to allow them to take full advantage and for them to make money off of the back of it."

How would you define cloud hosting?

"Cloud hosting I see as utilizing the different servers you have in a data center to allow it to scale effectively - scale dynamically, on a demand basis, pre-planned or literally dynamic based on dependency. If your site gets on CNN and you suddenly need massive amounts of resources because of being advertised nationally on a news channel, you could scale it up instantly without any downtime for your service; without any deployment of new servers because it's only just utilizing the cloud of the data center. That is much more cost effective. Basically it is about dynamic scalability and dynamic utilization. We can utilize more of our platform, in a greater way, for our customers to suit their needs."

When you guys do end up offering cloud options will it go across all of your data centers or will it be localized?

"To be honest we are still looking at that and still working out how best to make it work. Ideally we would do it across all the data centers and make sure we are utilizing all of those resources around. But you got to be careful about lag time in terms of the different data centers where they are positioned, we obviously just have ones in the UK and the US, there is a good lag time between the two. And I think it would very much depend on the type of services we would offer. We offer some services that demand minimal lag time, so they'd only use cloud on their local data center, the data center in their national area. Whereas other services are less sensitive to lag and could utilize cloud across both and maybe we can develop a system that does both, I don't know. Smarter heads than mine to work that out. The key thing to me is to deliver the right service to our customers. It's nice to have cloud across every data center. It certainly makes it look very good for the bean counters from a finance point of view, who says, 'you're right this is much more efficient financially and this is great.' But if it doesn't work right for the end user than it's not the right solution. It's got to be about the end user experience and that's delivering the right service for our partners, but also they can deliver the right service for their customer. It's making sure that, that end customer has the right experience."

What question do you wish interviewers would ask you but never have and what is the answer to that question?

"Now that's one, I never had before. It would probably be how do we go about making sure we deliver the right services to our resellers, how we work best with them, so how do we understand our resellers and their needs best? So there are a lot of things we are looking at in terms of working closely with our reseller partners bringing them more into the fold, bringing them in as partners. Historically, FastHosts has treated resellers as customers in the UK. We want to treat them as partners. We want to be with them as much as Microsoft is with its partners, Google is with its partners, these are partners to us, so it is about understanding their needs and that is something we are constantly challenging ourselves to do better. And that is something our resellers are appreciating more and more as we do this better and better. We are able to deliver services they need and deliver the solutions they need to suit their end customers. We are very keen in getting a detailed understanding of their end customers' needs because our aim, primarily now, is to just build our resellers' business up. The more they build their businesses up, the more they are successful the more we are successful. It's a win-win and so we are spending a lot of time with our resellers talking to them, understanding their customers, understanding their business models, understanding their opportunities, their threats, their strengths and weaknesses, trying to build with them to make them better. We have a good knowledge of the industry we have good knowledge about how customers work, we want to bring this out to the resellers and help them benefit from that. Because our fastest growing market is our reseller channel the more we can get our resellers to sign up more users, make more money, than it is a successful business for FastHosts."

How do you go about getting that information?

"In a variety of different ways, obviously we have our normal tech support, customer service, support channels, we have account managers who are out there contacting our resellers on a day-to-day basis, we have email channels for them to submit information to us, we also have a lot of data on the services they use, so we can see the services they are using, how well they are being utilized, what services are they buying and selling and we can help build that into a nice portfolio so we can understand where we think they are in terms of their business structure. And by discussing that with them, talking to them about it, we can then talk about where you are going next, what are your challenges. You can talk to a web designer who is really fantastic about building web sites, really really good and builds really good web sites; has no idea how to market his services, so we would then put someone who knows a lot about marketing to talk to him and he would say, 'Oh well here is how you would market your business in different ways.' It's about talking to the resellers in different ways and helping them fill the gaps in their business knowledge to allow them to have a successful business. By doing this several times, you can start to see the regular patterns, and you can assemble packages and information which will give them a lot of tools out of the box. Then also when they start to see that they have more questions we have guys on the phone who will happily talk them through it and give them more information and give them more advice and more tips. We need to bring in social networking to help expand out of this to a wider audience because instead of doing this on a one to one basis or a one to a few basis, like focus groups and things like that, we want to push it out to more and more to our resellers and that is why we are looking at social networking."


Thank you Steve for taking the time to talk with us and good luck to FastHosts with their endeavors for this new decade.