As part of our continued interview style Q/A sessions today we are talking to Armand, the founder of AALayer, a web design firm based in Albania. Armand has been a community member at LowEndTalk for a few years with nearly 10,000 visits and over 1000 posts.
Tell me about your background and your company’s history?
Hello! My name is Armand. I run a small digital & web design firm located in Tirana, Albania. I have more than 6 years of experience in the hosting industry. I even had my own web hosting ‘companies’, but really i was just reselling some other’s servers. It is was only mostly for experience. Now i’m focused mostly on designing custom websites for the hosting industry, we have plenty of customers not to mention a few ‘big’ brands. We also had released a few years ago a theme called ‘Lowendhost’, totally free and integrated completely with WHMCS and Blesta. In our website alone we got more than 1,000 downloads. Positive feedback as well! My apologies for my grammar as I am not a native English speaker and doing my best.
What would you tell someone looking to start a hosting company today? What advice would you offer?
The hosting industry is flooded. It’s a market that you do not want to enter unless you have a good strategy, and the money to keep it up for at least 6 months without generating a single cent from it. Clients will not popup just with a nice offer and nice web design, forget it. It needs constant work and marketing all the time. My suggestion would be not to start it at all if you’re not sure yourself where you are headed.
Where do you think the future takes the hosting industry?
It will be even cheaper. Plenty of competition and a lot of oversellers in general. Market will try to keep up with cheap hosting plans that will make the competitors either deadpool or change their pricing plans to something even cheaper just to keep their business running. Meaning more oversell. We will be having many bad hosting performance, in my opinion.
Tell me about your top two failures in business? What did you learn from them?
Honestly I have no idea how many times I failed that I do not recall what brands and companies I was trying to keep up with. More web design agencies, more web hosting companies.. endless projects… marketplaces… but I’ve learned more from the web hosting industry. From my 2 most failed hosting projects I have gained a lot of experience and generally it is some industry not for me. They made me realise keeping up a business is nowhere as easy as I thought it was.
Tell me about your top two successes in business?
AALayer and Alimemaj (mother company). AALayer is focused web design firm and Alimemaj provides all sort of digital services. Plenty of customers that trust us monthly for their presence [Alimemaj] and endless web design requests from new hosting companies from AAlayer. And we intend to keep it running for many years ahead.
What do you enjoy most about your role? What do you find most difficult?
I’m self employed, my own boss and have no one to report to. That’s the good thing. The difficult one is that having no one to report to sometimes makes you lazy or not even showing up to office, which in my opinion is lack of motivation that affects my business in general.
Both personally and professionally, what guiding principles ground you?
Client always comes first. That is professional side, try to accomplish their requests as much as you can no matter the price. They’ll come back or bring other people to you if they’re happy. Personally i try to keep a friendly ‘air’ with anyone i can, client or not client. You might be needing them one day.
Give us some details on new and exciting things you are working on?
Internationally I’m working with some hosting companies and exciting projects that are somewhere very potential. Locally I am building some new projects for Albanian marketplace only that are very common in other countries.
Why should customers trust you and your business?
We only provide quality work and try our best to keep everyone happy. Thankfully I have had no incident or unhappy client in my business history so far. Even if they were not happy with some service, I would re-do it from 0 again for them with no extra costs. So overall, we have maintained a positive reputation within the years that we have been running.
To learn more about AALayer, please visit https://aalayer.com.
Related Posts:
- Have you ever visited the web’s busiest hosting forum? LowEndTalk awaits. - September 27, 2022
- Grab the deals first by subscribing to our new deal alerts - September 16, 2022
- LowEndBox is on Instagram and TikTok! - August 5, 2022
Leave a Reply