SingleHop Provides Services to Sphere Web Hosting

As partnerships prevail in the industry, this agreement shows the path to the future.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [September 9, 2008]

Chicago-based dedicated server hosting provider SingleHop announced recently that it is now providing infrastructure and managed services to Sumter, S.C.-based Sphere Web Hosting.

We call SingleHop to learn more about how the company has positioned itself to become a provider of services to other webhosts.

Dan Ushman, vice president and co-founder of SingleHop, explains that the key ingredient is trust. If you're going to make a sale like this, you will sell your ability to provide services to a company that's already a customer. The sale won't come easy; it will take time.

"We had been working with them for seven or eight months," says Ushman. "They were looking for a long term partner. They wanted to focus on sales and not on managing hardware and software."

In the agreement, Sphere does the sales and the level 1 tech support, and SingleHop provides higher level tech support.

Automation
Key to the sale, Ushman believes, is the level of automation that SingleHop has implemented.

"We spent a year and a half developing our internal system, which we call 'manage.' It's an integrated server management and inventory system," Ushman says.

The system offers customers preset configurations of servers. If a customer wants something unusual, a technician can intervene to provide it, but the company has standardized on a basic set of hardware. For each configuration offered by the system, SingleHop has tested all possible configurations offered in the template.

The company standardized on quality, brand name products: Kingston RAM, Super Micro motherboards, and Seagate hard drives, for example. One benefit of this standardization is that parts from one server can be re-used in another, and it's easier to ensure that the correct spare parts are on hand.

In addition, the system gives managers such as Ushman detailed information on the performance of the business. "We're a more aware SingleHop," he says. "I can obtain reports in real time, or for a specific date range. Now we know how many servers we provision and how many we need to order."

The system has made SingleHop's processes more efficient. Here's one example. Ushman says that he noticed that it was taking longer to provision Linux servers than to provision Windows servers. It turned out, he says, that a CPanel update was slowing down the Linux installations. The solution was simple: store an updated version of CPanel on the local network.

"The business is a game of efficiencies," Ushman says.

Automation provides tangible benefits for customers like Sphere. The most siginificant benefit, Ushman says, is 24 hour availability. "They were used to waiting for sales to open in the morning in order to add a box."

SingleHop, Ushman says, also guarantees repairs in one hour instead of four.

But the bottom line for partners, he notes, is about capex. Instead of building out a new server rack and then filling it with customers, the company can buy infrastructure one server at a time, reducing risk. SingleHop, of course, benefits by obtaining a trustworthy and growing customer.

That's why this is the direction in which the webhosting industry is moving.

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