Interviewed on 12 Aug 09
Cassius Adams, Founder/Senior Account Executive
Every business is unique. At SevenL, we compliment it by providing customers with the power and flexibility to choose the right dedicated hosting and level of managed services that will best fit their business. Customers can select from extensive service options including unmanaged to fully managed dedicated servers, colocation, virtual private servers, and other data center services.
SevenL Strongly Believes in Customer Satisfaction: We know that many businesses have had bad experiences with "fly-by-night" and competing hosting providers. Competition within the hosting industry is so fierce that many providers are willing to say almost anything to get a new customer. When it comes to a hosting provider, who can customers trust?
SevenL takes the fear out of hosting: We confidently stand behind our products and services 100% and have done so since 1999.
Our Commitment to Customers: To provide an affordable range of network services with our guarantee of their total satisfaction.
To find out more, visit us online at www.7Lnetworks.com
What unique selling points do you offer?
We have always believed that you can best answer the question of what our unique selling points are by asking our customers. In a recent independent survey of our customers, we were told that there were four primary reasons customers chose us over the competition and have continued to stay with us.
1. They found the openness and honesty of our company and employees to be “refreshing”
2. The affordability of our services over the years
3. Being able to work with SevenL staff that are real people and don't use pre-canned responses. Customers know they're dealing with a small team of people that actually care about the customers and the technology.
4. Our customers really appreciate the fact that we're a Linux/Unix based organization and that we support and give back to the Linux community. For example, you can find us on the following Linux websites as we have either financially or technologically assisted them: Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org), CentOS (www.centos.org), Arch Linux (www.archlinux.org), Linux Mint (www.linuxmint.com), Startcom Linux (www.startcom.org) and others.
Describe the services you offer?
We offer dedicated hosting solutions. Our customers rely on us for dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), colocation and data center services.
Describe your target market?
In a nutshell, our market is SMB (Small & Medium Business). In detail, we have two target markets which are in opposite sides of the technology spectrum. On one side, we target Linux IT professionals, enthusiasts and businesses that utilize open source software and like to have full control over their hosting environment. We basically give them SSH access and a password and they're good to go, customizing the server's software to their needs. They tend to be very knowledgeable people and are often the same people that are pushing new technologies and software/web applications forward. Then on the other side we target businesses that are online but aren't necessarily Internet or technical companies. They don't want to hire on an IT staff or perhaps don't have the resources to maintain their online presence but need a solution that will be stable and consistent. In those cases we fully manage their dedicated web server and Internet applications, freeing up their time to so they can focus on their core business.
How is your company planning for the future?
The future is nearly impossible to predict, especially within the Internet industry. We constantly review statistics, trends and make educated assumptions. Virtualization and cloud computing is an obvious transition in the market, so we have been acting accordingly. One thing we do like to remind everyone is that Linux has been running “cloud” functionality since it’s inception 17 years ago ;). That being said, there are some key pieces of the planning puzzle that we have already put together. Without revealing any confidential technologies or plans, we now have future expansion space adjacent to our current data center. When the time comes, we will be able to quickly expand beyond our current space. Internet capacity requirements are always expanding – that's easy enough to predict. So we currently utilize just 40% of our total fiber lines while the other 60% remain in reserve for the future. Current utilization of overall bandwidth capacity is just under 2% on average, so there's plenty of space in that direction for growth. Thinking “green”, our building receives fantastic sun exposure and our local climate will allow for easy cooling of the data center a large part of the year. Those two key components alone will help us reduce our carbon footprint and keep our costs low.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
SevenL offers customers the benefit of having access to our Relentless Customer Support™. Our support team is both knowledgeable and friendly. In addition, SevenL benefits from the suggestions and contributions our customers make to our business. In the hosting industry, it is a rare opportunity for them. This in turn enhances the experiences of all our clients.
How do you support your customers?
We built a customer portal, known by our customers simply as UCP (User Control Panel), back in 2007. It allows our customers to service themselves for many things such as billing, add and review services on their account, contact details, service monitoring and bandwidth statistics. Its most popular use is for interacting with support via trouble tickets. By keeping track of all historical tickets customers submit, we're able to perform trends analysis, helping us to improve our overall services.
