Help Me Sell Glowhost Dedicated Solution

[GlowHost-James]

Hey Guys,

There are some big differences between Kimsufi (OVH) and GlowHost.

First of all, the Kimsufi range are budget servers. Yes, they are powerful high specification servers, but the overall performance is is a lot lower than what GlowHost offers. This is because the hardware is used, re-used, used again and again. The hardware is far more likely to fail with OVH. GlowHost has it's servers built from scratch with new drives and hardware for each customer - this is one major difference.

While the price is attractive at OVH, you have of think of the implications. Many users are reporting slow network performance, downtime and other issues. You only have to spend a few minutes looking around Web Hosting Talk to find the reviews that shed light on this kind of issues. Here at GlowHost, we are housed in premium datacenters with premium carriers. We do not use budget bandwidth providers and our routes into different parts of the world are some of the fastest.

The other thing to note about OVH is the bandwidth limit. They advertise unlimited, however they only allow 5Tb of bandwidth at full port speed outside their own network before they limit the port speed to 10mbps. By today's standards, 5Tb is not a lot of bandwidth. On our own new range of servers, we offer 100Tb of bandwidth (yes, one hundred) at full 1Gbps.

Another major difference is the locations. The OVH flagship datacenter is in France. I believe they operate in Canada and Netherlands also. While the EU locations would be acceptable for traffic for the UK, Germany and surrounding regions, it would be very slow for pretty much the rest of the world. That just goes back to the statement about premium bandwidth providers. Europe does not have the same level of bandwidth that the US has to offer. One serious issue with Canada is their law regarding spam. Canada currently does not have any kind of law against spammers. While it is frownd upon, Canada attracts a large amount of fraudulent activities due to it's inferior laws. This would be something to consider. Would you really want to be on a block of IP's that has been blacklisted by all the major blacklists? It goes hand in hand with the price. Spammers will often look for low cost solutions to operate their schemes and scams.

One last thing to note is the level of support. I notice you mentioned that you had made a user error, the support did correct it and help you fix it - however, with the amount of servers they have right now, to support everyone fully they would need over 7000 system administrators. This is something that I doubt they have. It is highly unlikely they monitor the servers hardware. It would be interesting to know, if your server went down, a hard disk failed or it needed some love and care, how would they deal with it? My brief research around the various web hosting forums shows some shocking issues with OVH, ranging from several days to replace hardware to an accidental format of a hard disk due to them getting the server muddled up with another client.

At GlowHost, we have our own in house monitoring software that monitors various different things on your server. We are instantly alerted to the problem and often fix it before the customer is even aware of anything. The other thing to mention is we have a low server-to-administrator ratio, compared with the competition meaning we can react quicker to critical situations and work closely on a solution.

I hope you find this information useful and do let us know if you have any questions about anything.

[Matt]

You are welcome Andrew.

All I can say is that something is amiss with their pricing.

Often times you don't find out what that is until you are in production and end up finding out the hard way. They might be provisioning used hardware, I really cannot say without having had used them, but $40 is too cheap for a machine that costs a couple grand brand new, plus the ongoing electricity, bandwidth and staff to pay to monitor, and fix the machine when it completely breaks or has a software issue at the OS or kernel level.

[Matt]

So back to you Rick:

First of all, thanks for trying to stick with GlowHost. Much appreciated. Secondly, congrats on the new position at work. Linkedin just told me about it.

I will have to concur with James on this and suggest you do some more research about OVH. Findmyhosting.com has a lot of info on their forum about them, and what their customers have to say. I just did that and am not overly impressed, but not all bad for certain situations.

It sounds to me like there is definitely a place for OVH for certain types of sites, and they certainly beat us on price which are good points for OVH.

In my humblest of opinions, OVH probably a good solution for a simple offsite backup server or perhaps a development dedicated server before it goes into production mode. If the customer's main concern for their hosting is price alone, then they are also a good fit. But usually people shopping for a dedicated are not shopping on price alone, and if they are just looking for the "dedicated feel" they would get a cheap VPS for development purposes instead.

If the customer's site is mission critical, and they plan on selling things on the site where a slow network would be an issue for them, it might not be a good choice depending on the situation. As James mentioned, their DCs are are in Canada or France which means latency may already be an issue for US based customers. Secondly they cap data speed after a set number of gigs has been spent to 10Megs, which can mean certain traffic is completely dropped if they are doing more than 10 meg at a time which doesn't sound like a real good idea. In peak times you want to be inviting visitors, not dropping them. Imagine they ran a successful (and expensive) ad campaign. Most people would be pretty upset to find out half their visitors were dropped. 100 megs is pretty much the low end of the spectrum these days, and 1 Gig is becoming the main stream.

They definitely would not be my first choice for a customer who wants a truly managed dedicated server in production mode ready to tackle the Internet at large.

I also could not find if they do any monitoring. If the server goes offline for any reason at 4AM for example, does that mean they are working on it, or your customer is calling you to let you know the server is offline?

Most larger outfits with that many servers under their umbrella do not have the ability to do that kind of thing. Think GoDaddy for example.

To touch on the 7000 employee requirement James mentioned, in order to compete with GlowHost's team, their server to employee ratio would mean that (based on the number of active servers they advertise) they would have to have around 7000 server admins to manage their network, compared to the ratio that GlowHost offers which is <20:1.

I am pretty sure they are no where near that, so when a datacenter-wide outage occurs, it might be a long time to hear from anyone.

I wanted to show off some of the new servers we have which are not on the site yet, but can be built to order within 48 hours (2 business days) in London or Salt Lake City.


Intel Xeon E3-1230v2
8GB RAM
2 x 1TB Hard Drives
100TB of Transfer
1Gbit Dedicated Port
3 IP addresses
Private VLAN
Fully Managed
RAID available
cPanel/WHM included
$239/mo
w/ RAID1 + 3rd drive for backup only $50/mo extra

Single Xeon E3-1270v2
16 GB RAM
2 x 1TB Hard Drives
100TB of Transfer
1Gbit Dedicated Port
3 IP addresses
Private VLAN
Fully Managed
RAID available
cPanel/WHM included
$299/mo
w/ RAID1 + 3rd drive for backup only $50/mo extra

Dual Xeon E5-2620
32 GB RAM
2 x 1TB Hard Drives
100TB of Transfer
1Gbit Dedicated Port
3 IP addresses
Private VLAN
Fully Managed
RAID available
cPanel/WHM included
$399/mo
w/ RAID1 + 3rd drive for backup only $50/mo extra


Addons:
Add RAID + an extra 1TB drive for cPanel backups: $65.00/mo
Add RAID Only: $35.00/mo
Add 1TB Drive Only: $35.00/mo
Add 8 usable IPs for $10.00

We can add more RAM or change the drives to SSD or any number of custom configurations as well.

Thanks again Rick!

[rickpugh]

Hey Matt,

Thanks for all the help with this and thanks a lot for the congratulations. Besides the new job at PL I have a couple of other thing in the cooker too - this being one of them

In the end, you know I am a GlowHost Man... I've been with you since the beginning and plan on staying with you as long as you'll have me. Being a Glowhost Apostle, trying to spread the gospel of GlowHost to all those internet heathens out there, I'm trying to educate myself so that I can address client issues on the spot and not later. You and your team have provided me a lot of info about the subtle technical differences but in the end, more often than not, for most of our clients it comes down to financial decision. If I can justify the price, then fine. If I can't, then you lose the sale.

Most of our clients can't even begin to consume the differences you have described at the technical level as they wouldn't have engaged someone like me to help them to begin with. I feel perfectly comfortable having these discussions but I am looking for the "meat and potatoes" to call out as to why I feel they should go with you over OVH (or anyone else). What I have heard so far are a few key differences:

1. Your managed services for dedicated services are better.
2. Your hardware is "newer" or "less recycled" for lack of a better term
3. Your located in the U.S. versus Europe.

Did I miss anything? If not, that's fine - this gives me something to work with.

I think my question back to you is with regards to your pricing and sales tools. As a re-seller are there any tools you can give me to help with price if it comes to it? Incentives? Anything like that? Do you have any type of "60 Day Money Back Guarantee" or anything like that that we can use a tool to get them in the service? Can you provide any type of up time or reliability data for your dedicated servers?

Hope this helps... Also - if its easier I can PM me you my number and you can give me a call...

[Matt]

Rick-

1. Your managed services for dedicated services are better.
2. Your hardware is "newer" or "less recycled" for lack of a better term
3. Your located in the U.S. versus Europe.

I would say this would be a more accurate picture:

1. Your managed services for dedicated services are far superior.
2. Your hardware is brand new and custom built to order.
3. Servers are located in the U.S. versus Canada (for North American visitors) with location a London for visitors from Europe.

Also, transfer speeds are 100x higher with the servers mentioned above. We do not throttle using a 10 meg port, it is 1 gig.

Sales tools:

I have attached a whitepaper which may help you. Page 4 might be useful to you. It is at the bottom of this post.

As a re-seller are there any tools you can give me to help with price if it comes to it? Incentives? Anything like that?

Yeah, we can give you a special coupon if that is what you need to help you save a few dollars. The discounts all depend on how many servers and the level of support that you require.

Do you have any type of "60 Day Money Back Guarantee" or anything like that that we can use a tool to get them in the service?

We don't offer a money back guarantee on custom built hardware, unless we royally screw something up of course. But that doesn't really happen and the idea behind building a server for a customer is to do it right the first time. We obviously want them to renew for a very long time so that we can hope to pay off the cost of building the server, then to eventually turn a profit some day. If we offered the typical money back guarantee that you see with the rest of our product line, our network would be prone to abuse with spammers and other bad people signing up just to blast millions of emails, setup botnets, and etc, then ask for their money back when they were done abusing the network.

So the real answer is yes, if we do something stupid, we can refund you, since you are a long time and respected customer, but its not open to the general public.

Can you provide any type of up time or reliability data for your dedicated servers?

Yes we could but then it would probably be fake like every other "uptime" you see hosts offering out there. :)

You see, when hosts provide this is is usually their flagship server or a handful of carefully monitored servers that do nothing but sit there for uptime monitors to watch and keep track of stellar uptime. The reality is that each server needs a reboot from time to time, or a customer may intentionally want to bring their server offline for maintenance, upgrades or any number of other reasons. If a hosting company advertised all of their "real life" servers uptime, the numbers would be all over the place. Sort of like what you see here:

NetStatus Monitor

As you can see "Hermes" and "Tourism" are the winners at 1166 days and 1011 days respectfully. 3 years of 100% uptime is pretty nice and those would be the servers that some companies might select to advertise. Others on the list have only been up for a few hours because of a recent reboot.

The reality is a dedicated server that is doing nothing at all is going to be online 100% of the time or very close to it. What affects the uptime is how well the software running on the web site is built, how well it is maintained, and how well the server owner plans and implements their traffic strategy. Another large factor in uptime is of course the quality of management.

If you do not have good management, eventually the server will be compromised, AKA hacked AKA rooted.

Just getting a dedicated server isn't enough, there has to be a strong management back-end to deal with OS related issues unless you are going to be the sysadmin yourself, which most people don't want to do since it is a 24/7/365 job.

One last thing I'd like to comment on is this:

Experience tells me a $40 server is a very bad idea for a production dedicated server. If you are putting your name on the line as an expert in this area, you will be doing an injustice to yourself and your customer. It might not be discovered until later when everything is in production, but I can say with 100% certainty, its a pending disaster at worst and a major headache at very best.

To illustrate the cost differences among providers, lets look at how a comparable server compares at a well known provider like Rackspace:

Dedicated Server, Managed Hosting, & Web Hosting Configurations

You are looking at around $1000 or more per month, probably more, and people buy those servers all day long. Some people say that Rackspace is hugely overpriced, and GlowHost is hugely under-priced. :)

For single dedicated servers, I would be looking for something in the price range between $350-$500 for high-end customers and $200-$300 for entry level sites. And if they are looking to spend less, with similar performance and similar uptime, a cloud based virtual machne like GlowHost's Cloud VDS might also work. Those start at $75/mo but for something that is in production, I'd be looking at $125+ on those machines.

I removed your phone number from the first post as I was not sure if you wanted it to be in public, but if you's like a call, please PM me your number and we can continue over the phone if you like.

[Matt]

Hey Rick,

Please let me know if you still want that call.

About our cloud servers, attached is a whitepaper on those.

Also here is an infographic which might be useful:
How Small Business Can Prosper In The Cloud Graphic | GlowHost Blog