A few weeks ago we interviewed Pavin Joseph, Founder of Mailcheap, if you’ve not read it yet we recommend spending a few minutes and checking it out! Today we are talking to Andrew Storey, Director of Hostworld Limited. So let’s get started with the interview!
Tell me about your background and your company’s history?
Hostworld is a web hosting company located in the UK and ran by Josh and Andrew as the directors of Hostworld Limited. Our personal experience is wide-ranging having been involved in various elements of the web hosting industry over the last 10 years or so. We both understand the importance of delivering a consistent and high quality service with a smile.
We started out locally in 2017 in the web development industry in the Bristol area of the UK; and in 2019 we branched out into the web hosting industry providing shared and reseller web hosting packages as well as dedicated servers and this is when Hostworld was formed. Providing web hosting services is now the focus of our business. In January this year we launched our VPS range of packages and these have quickly become our lead products for our customers; and a product that we are going to develop with additional features in the future whilst appreciating that there is still a market for shared and reseller customers.
What would you tell someone looking to start a hosting company today? What advice would you offer?
Be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort and don’t expect to grow substantially overnight, it will take quite some time. It’s not easy gaining new customers in this very competitive and crowded market and you need something to stand out from the crowd. Think carefully about what will differentiate you from the competition before you start out; and if you launch a new product keep this at the forefront of your strategy.
Where do you think the future takes the hosting industry?
Just like the automotive industry there will be a gradual shift over time to new technology and the web hosting industry is no different. We recognize that there will be a shift in the future to cloud hosting by every web host as the standard form of web hosting across the industry. This will allow the ever-growing demand for “big data” to continue in a scalable, flexible and high redundancy manner. We’re growing ever more interconnected as a society and we have a responsibility within our industry to aid this process.
What makes your company unique in today’s evolving market landscape? How are you evolving with the times?
With the growth of social media and transparency provided by services such as TrustPilot for customer feedback, this means that we collectively across the industry and at Hostworld are more “visible” in the service that we provide to our customers. This is at the heart of everything we do at Hostworld. Each customer is valuable and we must make sure that they are entirely satisfied with the service being provided, and we take any learning opportunities on board. This also extends to continually developing our products to provide features and benefits that our customers require.
What do you enjoy most about your role? What do you find most difficult?
As one of the directors of Hostworld my role is quite broad. Personally, I enjoy is seeing a new customer come on board with Hostworld, getting excellent customer feedback and seeing that we are making a real difference to that customer. Essentially, we are the foundations to their online presence, from web developers, other web hosting providers, coffee shops, bloggers, charities and many more. They rely upon us to provide a reliable and cost-effective solution to fulfill their goals. A challenge that we encounter is fraudulent order placement, although Hostworld is not alone in this fight.
I enjoy working with our technical support team to ensure a high quality of service is provided and knowing that we are playing a vital role in supporting our customers is very satisfying.
Both personally and professionally, what guiding principles ground you?
Acting with integrity and being honest in all aspects of our daily lives is something that motivates us both professionally and personally. We apply these core values to our business and we always hope that our customers recognise these principles in their interactions with us. We will always deliver on commitments made to our customers.
Give us some details on new and exciting things you are working on?
We are working on implementing a range of new features on a number of our packages, including: internal networking between virtual machines, upgrade options to NVMe storage, multiple geographical locations for server deployment, bundled software and a few other surprise features (shh!).
We will always make our range of features available to new and existing customers.
Why should customers trust you and your business?
Our customers should trust the feedback that we have obtained from our existing customers, and this can be reviewed on social media and our TrustPilot page. We’re providing a consistently high-quality service and this is borne out by the positive feedback we have had to date. We also appreciate that uptime is important to customers and we back this up with an uptime guarantee and the service level agreement we have in place. We’re also open and transparent about our uptime and this can be viewed on our website.
Everyone at Hostworld is passionate about the web hosting industry and making sure that our customers have faith and trust in our service.
How has the Low End Box and Low End Talk community impacted your business and its growth?
We have posted a few times on Low End Box with exclusive deals and these have had great uptake. We are working to become a verified provider on the Low End Talk community, and we have no doubt that it will have a positive impact on our business and its growth over the coming months. We intend to actively participate in both communities and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Low End Box for their support by posting our offers to their community.
Final thoughts and anything you would like to add?
We never want to become complacent and we value an ethos of continuous improvement and with this in mind if anyone has any feedback or suggestions as to how we can improve our service these would be greatly appreciated (we’re already working on a new and improved website!).
Thank you to all new and existing customers that trust in our service and our ability to deliver on our promises.
If you would like to learn more about Hostworld, take a look at their Featured Listings on Low End Box or check out their website by clicking the banner below.
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Terrible service – site always crashes and they did not backup automatically every week as promised.