Aplus.net Advances to Managed Hosting Services

Alex Yevelev, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Aplus.net, discusses the progression into Managed Hosting Services and the driving forces behind the company’s success in the Web hosting industry.

What is included in your Managed Hosting Services offer – and ideally, what customers will be most interested in using it?

Shared and dedicated hosting customers alike will benefit from the availability of Managed Hosting Services. Introducing this service was the logical next step in Aplus.net’s product development. Many of our customers are growing their online presence and typically seek a Web host that offers different packages to fit their varying needs.

With Aplus.net Managed Hosting Services, customers will find solutions starting at as little as $29.95/month,and all packages are customizable. Many managed hosting providers offer only fully managed services which can be pricey and causes customers to pay for options they may not need. Aplus.net’s Managed Hosting Services was designed to focus on customers’ specific needs. A customer survey we conducted at the end of 2008 revealed that a majority of shared and dedicated customers are interested in the concept of managed services. Developing a solution to meet the needs of our customer base and potential new customers was a clear and distinct goal with this product.

What are the key benefits of Managed Hosting Services for typical business owners?

Managed Hosting Services simply takes over some of the hosting functions an IT department typically performs. Our decision to expand into managed hosting was also driven by the fact that we receive a lot of requests from customers to work on their servers. The main benefit for any IT department is they can unload time-consuming functions and processes to us.

Today, we already manage hundreds of servers at a time on behalf of small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide. With significant time savings like this, customers will be able to focus their IT departments on the basic needs of their company versus troubleshooting servers, OS patching and other routine tasks. That’s especially critical in this current economic environment. They will also have the ability to choose between support packages designed to meet their varying needs. At the time of our product launch, Managed Hosting Services offers two plans and the flexibility to order several a la carte items to customize each service plan.

Going forward, we’ll expand that to an additional plan or plans, depending on customer response. With this product, it was important to ensure our packages reflect the needs of our customers: the ability to be very flexible, to give them only those services they really need on a regular basis, and to pay only for those services that help them watch their bottom line.

Does your prior work experience at Rackspace come into play in terms of marketing Aplus.net’s product line?

Working for Rackspace was a great experience. Yet there’s a big difference between their market focus and ours. Rackspace caters more to medium to large enterprise businesses, with an emphasis on managed services and related managed solutions like SaaS.

Aplus.net is best known as a one-stop shop for small businesses and enterprise services like domain registration, Web design, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, eCommerce and online marketing. Our goal is to be customer-centric, making sure we are providing 24/7/365 live service and the highest possible uptime for any customer regardless of whether someone pays $5.95 per month or $500 per month. My experience at Rackspace helped me to validate that managed hosting is the way to go today for Aplus.net as part of its natural development.