What is your name and position with Beachcomber?
My Name is Mark McGowan and I am the Director of Sales and Support at Beachcomber Creations Inc.

Please tell us the year established and brief history of Beachcomber?
Beachcomber was under beta with non-paying customers before opening the door as Beachcomber Creations in Feb 2001. Originally started as a design and hosting company, the business morphed into exclusively a hosting company and has since added Reseller Plans, SSL’s, Dedicated Servers, Domain Registrations and many other features and offerings over the years.

What do you offer your customers that are unique to your company?
Beachcomber is a reseller of data center services. We are not an owner of a datacenter and do not aspire to be. As a company, our aim is to offer services and support at fair prices to customers who want the value and stability of a direct data center server along with a more personal and responsive support.

Our partnership with a select few of some of the finest data centers in the world, size and buying power allow us to provide the value and support you want at the pricing you want to pay.

What is the most challenging aspect to offering Dedicated Hosting?
Support….Providing excellent support while maintaining aggressive pricing the market demands with feature rich server packages. Anyone and most everyone can sell you a fine server for an excellent price these days…But the support after that sale is equally critical and usually neglected after the server is up and the sites are moved. Beachcomber has recently added 24-7 live chat from site support to complement our superb 24-7 e-mail support. We work hard to gain server customers – we want to give them the best support possible so that they, and we in turn, continue to grow. Our support is so good, our 4 biggest customers have outsourced their support to us…That is THE ultimate compliment.

What is it that makes Beachcomber a competitive company in the Dedicated Hosting market?
What a market this has become....prices have dropped like a stone and can at times be counted in pennies per month. Beachcomber has and always will be a force for quality in the web site hosting market. We do not pack (plus-minus) thousands of customers on a server until the box is unstable …we restrict our servers to very low level utilization and if we see a load above 1..It is so unusual we investigate the server for exploits. Our profit doesn’t come from thousands of $1 sites, but from a few hundred sites on Dual Xeons and/or Opertons sold at a fair price. These servers are so stable we can count our turnover rate in yearly hosting customers in single digits…less than 10 per year. Once people experience the quality of what we offer, they remain with us…and when we do have a small issue or go down for 10 minutes for a reboot…our customers will ask us if there is something wrong at THEIR end…so sure are they that our server side is up. We believe in the volume of quality as our strategy, not the volume of sites.

What new features have Beachcomber added for its customers in the past year?
Over the past year we have upgraded all our Hosting and Reseller servers, added 256bit SSL’s, Fantastico and RVSkins, more than doubled our support staffing and added 24-7 live support chat on site. And we have a few things we are looking at before the close of 2005 too!

What would you say is Beachcomber #1 asset to its customer base?
Quality…the quality of the data centers we provide services from, the quality of the hardware and the quality of the sales and technical support. We do all we can to help customers grow their businesses (or just have fun with their blogs and/or Forums). We strive to be virtually transparent…so good and so dependable that you forget you ever need us at all…

Where do you see Beachcomber and the web hosting industry in three years?
If I knew that I would be the smartest man in the industry…but the trends look good. Prices are slowly rising on the dedicated server side and this is a healthy indication that we as a group no longer need to sell our souls (or futures) to attract and keep customers…the cream has floated to the top and support and quality will be the competitive battlegrounds of the next few years…and not so much greater bandwidth allowances or lower priced Celeron servers.

The hosting and reseller markets have and will continue to see some consolidation. Smaller companies are finding that it is becoming more and more difficult to provide the packages and support (24-7 and then some) that today’s customers increasingly demanding. Those entrepreneurs that have budgeted in support costs (not unlike advertising budgets and hardware costs) will continue to thrive and do well. The companies on a shoestring with marketing as their only goal or activity…they are a fast dying breed and again...this is a good thing for the industry. We are adding great value for our customers when we continue to provide support after the credit card clears and giving them a postive experience that encourages them to grow and innovate.

Lastly, why have the demands of the customers increased to be 24-7? It is because the business has rapidly become globalized. Customers are coming from all over the world and while the server may be fine in the US (If the data center has proper peering), the customer base at a hosting level wants control panels and some helpful support in their native languages…Smaller hosting companies from all over the world are seeing and capitalizing on this niche, focusing on local language support to their customers and have flourished… but those owners may need support at any time. The smart money is on building partnerships that help your company provide support internationally…Control panels with multi-language support, 24-7 support and other tools that allow you business to serve every available customer any time of day or night.

How many customers do you currently have?
Quite a few…and that has changed (for the better) even as I write this. It is also an area we do not discuss in specifics other than to say we have hosted hundreds of thousands of sites on our servers.

Do you own your own datacenter?
No, we are a marketing and technical support organization. We are excellent at what we do and do not want to delve into areas we cannot provide a quality advantage by managing it. We know our limitations and are committed to those areas where we have expertise and can therefore provide a better customer experience.. Our data center partners and providers are some of the best in the world and we are content to leave them to their area of expertise working with and for us.

Which datacenters do you utilize?
We currently utilize 4 very high quality NOCs (Fitx-DedicatedNow, GiGeNet, Softlayer and GNAX)

What kind of back up power do they provide?
The most current information is on their sites.

Do they have multiple backbone connections?
Yes, numerous

What connections do they have?
The most current information is on their sites.

Do you offer 24/7 support?
Yes we do, with Live chat and E-mail Technical support.

Do you have technicians present 24/7 or 9-5 M-F?
See above…24-7

What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
Our goal is 10-15 minute reply on reboots and 45 minutes on non-critical support. We have recently doubled our support staff to maintain that standard.

Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
Only for custom software installs or debugging.

Do you offer a money back guarantee?
We offer a 30 day money back guarantee for cause on all hosting, reseller and dedicated services plans. Cause is any demonstrated failure on our part to deliver services purchased. If you can provide us with a reason that we failed to provide the services you purchased from us we will be more than happy to give you a refund.

Thank you!
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