How long has insiderhosting.com been around?

[lucas]

and how many servers do you have now?

[Chris]

I know the seond one is 3.

Ferrari
Mercedes
Porche

I don't know how long they've been around for. I'm guessing 2 to 3 years.

[lucas]

i like their naming conventions :D

[Sara]

I know that Steven told me he was a reseller for Ventures Online last year, then everything just took off. I think a year, right S?

:)

[Steven]

History of Insiderhosting.com
Insiderhosting.com became a registered business of the State of California in October 2001. It was started by myself and I was the one who did everything initially with the marketing, advertising, support etc... I started off with a resellers account from a wonderfull company Venturesonline.com. It was there where I started to establish a name for insiderhosting due in a large part to VO's reliability. I then decided that I wanted to offer my own plans and have the ability to customize them should I opt to do so. One of the limitations on VO's plans were that you had to resell their packages, you could not tailor make your plans like you can with us (although that has just changed 2 days ago with them). I wanted to get involved in what I call a niche market, which was the multiple domains/reseller plan. Since Insiderhosting was getting more and more popular, it also made sense economically to get my own server. I contacted Venturesonline with the hopes of obtaining a dedicated server from them, but they were not accepting orders any longer for dedicated servers, since they were relocating to another datacenter away from Verio. We moved the main Insiderhosting.com domain to it's own dedicated server for a variety of reasons (we have since moved it to the ferrari server, after we saw ferrari's reliability). Around January, I started to do a lot of research on what company would best suit me and my my clients and I found one in a company called Webreseller.

It was at this time where our growth really began to take form. People really started to like our multiple domain plans, and shortly after that, we unveiled our reseller plans. As the days passed, word of mouth began to spread about us and our level of service. As soon as I purchased a dedicated server, I also needed to have a server administrator to look after the server, install certain modules, that I did not feel comfortable in doing. Managing a server is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. So I hired a systems/server administrator (vovik) is his username on these forums and he has helped me out more than anyone could imagine.

I then could not handle all the support issues myself, and I needed to hire a tech support person who could deal with the support tickets as that would allow me to shift my focus on customer aquisition, marketing, advertising, and things of this nature. I then hired Tal who you see posts regularly on this forum as well as answers various trouble tickets. We also have a tech support person from Canada whos name is Michael, but he is on vacation for the next 2 weeks. Victoria, who is our sales manager is the one who mostly answers the sales emails from 10-5pm unless I or sometimes Tal gets to them faster. She is instrumental in providing these new and exciting incentives to our clients. We have another feature in the works that I'm sure that you guys will love.

We now had 2 servers (ferrari and mercedes) and we needed another one. So we purchased another one which we named porsche and all new clients are going on that server. We noticed that our clients really liked the cpanel/WHM control panels so we slowly began to move them over from one of our other servers which didn't have a control panel for clients.

We now use 2 different upstream providers, Webreseller who has been great for us thus far. Their bandwidth for all you fact lovers is Yipes, Level3, Genuity, and UUnet. We also used another company which was located in Texas and they were in the Internap pop. We have since moved from this provider. We also use a dacenter here in CA which is He.net. All of our servers now have WHM/cpanel installed, but we may be adding another control panel at a later time.

These forums started as a result of customer requests for us to have forums online. It was and still is my feeling that forums can help you in great ways but can do the opposite as well. In order to have successfull forums, we needed to be able to drive traffic to them, and make sure that people would register and post. Also, when we introduced these forums, it was made abundantly clear that no support issues would be carried out via this forum, and everything has worked out really well.

We have a great bunch of clients in all of you.

Thats the story of Insiderhosting.com
-Steven

[Sara]

:D

And y'all are the best!

Thanks for sharing the story!! IH is almost a year old!!

[Victoria]

In less than 2 months we will be a year old!!!! :)

[Eric]

Thanks for the info on IH's history Steven!

I'm curious....how did you come up with the name "InsiderHosting?"

[Steven]

Great question Eric. When I came to the realization that I was going to start a hosting company, I wanted to find a name which people would think hey that's a good name, as well being able to brand it. I was doing a search on www.deleteddomains.com for expired hosting related names, then on television there was this whole insider trading fiasco with some company I forget the name, so I said Insiderhosting.com it is.
:)

Congrats to me on Post 100.

-Steven

[bgwen]

Thanks for posting the story behind Insider Hosting. I was curious as to the beginnings. The only insider trading story I can think of is the whole deal with Martha Stewart, but I'm sure that's not where IH's name came from. ;)

Steven: Do you like cars? I ask because all the severs thus far have been named after specific kinds of vehicles.

If another server is added down the road, my vote for a name would go to "Jaguar".

[Steven]

Originally posted by bgwen
Thanks for posting the story behind Insider Hosting. I was curious as to the beginnings. The only insider trading story I can think of is the whole deal with Martha Stewart, but I'm sure that's not where IH's name came from. ;)

Steven: Do you like cars? I ask because all the severs thus far have been named after specific kinds of vehicles.

If another server is added down the road, my vote for a name would go to "Jaguar".

I cannot for the life of me remember the insider trading story as it was on cnbc or something. I like cars, but it is hard to name a server (almost like naming a baby). I figured if I named them after cars it would be easy to remember which is which, rather than other names . Jaguar will most likely be the next one.

-Steven

[Chris]

The computers on my network are named after Greek or Roman Gods.

The trick is remembering which has which IP address.

[Eric]

Unfortunately there are soooo many insider trading fiascos each year :( so pinning down the exact one would be hard. I had a feeling it was inspired by insider trading though. It is a catchy name :)

I vote for Jaguar as well....maybe I'll be ready for reseller status then and I can be moved to Jaguar :D :D :D

Congrats on post 100 Steven :) I'm close to passing my highest post count on any forum... 50 posts at www.sitepointforums.com

[im2ez]

thanks 4 the history of insiderhosting.com steven... your explanation went a long way in helping me understand why i was finding webreseller and other names you mentioned when i investigated you before i became an insider.

some investigator... i found all the info, but didn't know what it meant...

your generousity with our education is greatly appreciated...

EZ///

[parrots]

I have got to say that I am so completely impressed.
I had asked Steven for a little info on the company and he sent me the link to this thread (I admit (gulp) he had already asked me to join the forums and originally I thought --- something else to join? OKay later. . . but now I realize why. ;-)

The great thing is that I never suspected by his e-messages that (a) Steven was the head honcho (this is a total compliment) and (b) now knowing that my account was handled by said hh I feel so much better for some reason. Now *this is service!*

I guess it's just a pleasant surprise to learn that true customer service still exists.

Thanks again Steven for what has thus far only been an enjoyable experience! ::M

[im2ez]

ditto...

give polly a cracker...

i've been here over a year... it's always been great, and it's only gotten better...

ez

[Simon]

OK, the dates on this thread really confused me. They jump from August 2002 to August 2003, almost exactly a year later.

The history probably needs to be updated as I think there's at least another two servers now (maybe more) and numerous mergers have taken place.

Thanks for the great work IH. :cool:

< Simon >

[Simon]

OK, I just read another post of Steven's (http://forums.insiderhosting.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1119) and apparently there are around 20 servers now. Wow! I was a little off hey? :cool:

< Simon >

[VxJasonxV]

Two he says, hehehe.
Ferrari, Delorian, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, uhhhh...that's about all I know actually, but I know that there's many many servers there :D. And they located all around the USA!

[Steven]

We have 24 servers now. You'll see a list when we are done with our support site :)

-Steven