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What is your name and position with GearHost?
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Mike Kauspedas – Support Manager
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Please tell us the year established and brief history of GearHost?
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GearHost Inc. has been providing rock solid web hosting solutions since 2000. Based in Denver, Colorado, and serving the world, GearHost is known for its top of the line cloud hosting technology and unfailing support.
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What do you offer your customers that are unique to your company?
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GearHost has taken the traditional hosting model, with its shared and dedicated hosting solutions, and brought it into the cloud. We have completely redesigned and built a new shared hosting environment from scratch, so that our customers can benefit from having the most technologically advanced hosting platform currently available working for them. With CloudSites, our shared hosting platform, we deliver 100% uptime, scalability and performance that outdated legacy hosting options simply can’t match. Not only have we created a shared hosting solution like never before, but we are offering it at a price that any business can afford. At just $9.99 per month with unlimited features, CloudSites is bringing the cloud to the masses. And getting into the cloud couldn’t be easier – no special coding or configuration required.
Simply put no other hosting company can offer a level of service, performance, uptime, and support for $9.99 a month. The time for cloud hosting has come.
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What is the most challenging aspect to offering cloud hosting services?
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The equipment – at GearHost, everything has to be N+1 and in some cases even more. We offer a 100% uptime guarantee. To deliver on our promise, we have an army of nodes in the SAN, a ton (literally!) of networking equipment, a slew of blade servers. Plus some. Our cloud technology and equipment allow us to run thousands of customers, day and night, scaling up and scaling down, seamlessly. It’s expensive and time consuming for us to setup, but in the end it’s well worth it. We can offer our customers the most technologically advanced and reliable cloud web hosting services out there.
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What is it that makes GearHost a competitive company in the cloud market?
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We custom built our infrastructure and control panel from the ground up. Everything is integrated to be as efficient as possible. We’re not simply another host with a control panel; we own our own equipment, and we support it with the best staff and customer care in the industry. Customers get to choose their own user name - sounds silly? Other hosts assign one for you, and to them you are a number. When we say you’re more than just a number to us, we mean it.
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What new features have GearHost added for its customers in the past year?
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CloudSites is the big one with 100% uptime guaranteed on shared hosting accounts, something you could never get with traditional shared hosting. GearHost CloudSites feature a new control panel (myCloud), Windows 2008 R2 servers along with MSSQL 2008 R2, MVC, WebMatrix Support, unlimited disk space, bandwidth, domains, databases, and email addresses to name a few.
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What would you say is GearHost #1 asset to its customer base?
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Our customer support during and after the sale. We’ve cross trained our staff to be able to handle any issue; you won’t be transferred around to someone else. The same support engineer that can help you add a site to IIS, can also help you with billing questions. And we’re not just talking about people answering the phone. We built our infrastructure to be fail proof; servers simply don’t go down at GearHost and our customers can count on this. Our technology is second to none.
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Where do you see GearHost and the web hosting industry in three years?
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GearHost has implemented technology that offers full redundancy for all customers. This infrastructure means that we can continue to offer the latest technology, the most reliable service, the best performance, and exceptional customer support, all at an affordable price. Our cloud technology is so powerful and cost-effective that we expect to see businesses around the world dropping their traditional hosting solutions and getting into the cloud.
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How many customers do you currently have?
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Over 7,000 and we host over 15,000 domains within our environment.
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Who are some of your famous clients?
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Wall Street Journal
Herald Tribune
Home Depot
USA Today
The New York Times
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Do you own your own datacenter?
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No. Our space is leased through tier3 and SAS70 Type II datacenter.
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Where are they located?
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About 15 miles south of our downtown Denver office in DTC Colorado. DTC is Colorado’s Silicon Valley.
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What kind of back up power do you have?
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o Three separate utility feeds with diverse paths back to the substation
o 3600KW of on-site generator capacity at N+1 redundancy; expandable to 6000KW
o Modular power system providing an easily scalable, reliable generator infrastructure
o More than 50 hours of full load power on-site fuel storage
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Do you have multiple backbone connections?
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o Multiple active internet connections
o Carrier-neutral facility
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What connections do you have?
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o Two 10-Gigabit Ethernet Fiber (GigE) connections to SAVVIS
o One GigE connection to AT&T
o One GigE connection to XO
o One GigE connection to Level3
o Sub-1 millisecond access to SAVVIS’ four national OC-192s
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Do you offer 24/7 support?
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Yes using our Support Portal.
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Do you have technicians present 24/7 or 9-5 M-F?
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Phone and live chat is M-F 8am-5pm MT.
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What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
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10 minutes during normal business hours.
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Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
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No. All services are managed. There are rare instances where we might charge a customer for support if we are helping them fix a custom application (coding, configuration, etc.).
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Do you offer a money back guarantee?
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Yes. A full 30day money back guarantee is provided.
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Thank you for your time and insight into GearHost.
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Thanks, we appreciate the time to provide a little insight into GearHost and hope it helps prospective and current customers recognize the value in hosting with GearHost. We have grown a lot in 11 years, back from when we were a one man show in a dusty old basement, but our proactive customer service approach has remained the same. We’ve kept our basement-casual attitude and mixed it in with corporate-level business practices, because that’s who we are. And you can count on that.
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