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What is your name and position with Valcato Hosting?
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Hi there! I''m John Kipling, Head of Customer Service
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Please tell us the year established and brief history of Valcato Hosting?
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Valcato (Val-Cat-Oh) Hosting originally started in early 2002 when e-commerce was in its infancy; we were a free host offering 500Kb accounts. The response was amazing and we rapidly expanded into offering paid add-ons. The customers kept on coming and so in March 2002 we purchased our first dedicated server, such was the demand for our services.
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What do you offer your customers that are unique to your company?
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In addition to our great support, we are really flexible when it comes to server configurations; we are happy to make configuration changes and install additional software at the request of customers. If there''''s something our customers need, all they have to do is ask!
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What is the most challenging aspect to offering Web Hosting?
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That would have to be keeping everything running smoothly on a day to day basis. If the servers are running at optimal performance and as customers expect then everyone’s happy. Secondary to that is billing and accounting; we proactively make sure that everyone is being charged the right amount and are on our most recent and best-value plans.
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What is it that makes Valcato Hosting a competitive company in the Web Hosting market?
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I believe our extremely modern hardware and network architecture gives us an edge in terms of performance and efficiency. We’ve consistently upgraded our hardware throughout our seven year history, most recently in July, and this keeps our customer’s websites loading super-fast!
We are currently looking to the future and in the planning stages of a cloud-based, super-scalable hosting platform.
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What new features have Valcato Hosting added for its customers in the past year?
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This year we have added support for the web frameworks Django and Ruby on Rails as well as SPF support to help reduce spam levels.
We also made improvements to the way we communicate with our customers by overhauling our Service Notices System, introducing a Company Blog and joining in social networking on both Facebook and Twitter.
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What would you say is Valcato Hosting #1 asset to its customer base?
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Our number one asset is unquestionably our staff. We have a great close-knit team raring to jump in and help customers with any questions or problems. We all dedicate ourselves to personally seeing each issue resolved, and our customers really appreciate it.
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Where do you see Valcato Hosting and the web hosting industry in three years?
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Three years ago we were small-scale, but growing rapidly. Since then, we''''ve continued to grow steadily and now we''''re all very proud of the business we''''ve managed to build and the continued good relationship we have with our customers, both old and new. We''''re very excited about what the future will hold for Valcato, and in three years we expect to be looking back on an even better three years than the ones which have just passed.
We see the next few years being very important for two groups of customer: people who want personal sites, and people who are working on the next generation of Web 2.0 sites. For novices and personal users, we''''ve recently introduced a website builder to compliment the wide array of blog systems which could already be easily installed through our control panel. For the experts we''''ve added Django and Ruby of Rails support and are looking to add more frameworks in the coming weeks and months. To stay competitive in the long-term, we''''re looking into ways to best offer new, scalable services, such as cloud computing.
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How many customers do you currently have?
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We currently host in the region of 600 domains.
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Who are some of your famous clients?
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We vehemently protect our customer''s privacy so I''m afraid our client list is confidential.
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Do you own your own datacenter?
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No
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Where are they located?
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Texas, USA.
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What kind of back up power do you have?
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Uninterrupted Power Supplies and N+1 Diesel Backup Generator Architecture.
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Do you have multiple backbone connections?
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Yes
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What connections do you have?
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Multiple concurrent, high-capacity Tier 1 bandwidth providers with bandwidth from:
* AT&T
* AboveNet
* NTT
* Savvis
* Global Crossing
* Level 3
* Time Warner Telecom
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Do you offer 24/7 support?
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Firstly, our support is built upon a solid foundation of documentation – with hundreds of articles available to customers, most queries are already answered. We provide a support ticket system available 24/7; all answers come directly from a knowledgeable person who is able to directly help with your problem, and not someone who is simply working from a script. Furthermore, our live chat facility has proven very popular, allowing customers direct contact with us without even having to pick up the phone. We also provide a callback service for those who would rather talk to us via telephone.
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Do you have technicians present 24/7 or 9-5 M-F?
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Yes
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What is your average turn-around time on a support ticket?
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We are proud of our 2 hour average response time. This includes simple and more complex queries.
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Do you charge your clients for support? If so, please explain.
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No, all support is included in the price.
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Do you offer a money back guarantee?
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We offer a number of guarantees for the peace of mind of our customers:
* 30 Day Moneyback Guarantee
* 99.5% Server Uptime Guarantee
* 100% Network Uptime Guarantee
* No Overselling Guarantee
* Loyalty Reward Guarantee
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