HostReview discusses hosting, business and technology with David Preston of Awardspace

In this exclusive interview, we talk to David Preston, Marketing Development Manager of Awardspace.

Please tell us about yourself and your position in the company.

I am Marketing Development Manager for Awardspace.com and have been working for the company for over 2 years now. I am responsible for the marketing strategy of all services and work on the business development with close cooperation with our CEO Dimitar Dimitrov. Apart from my current position I also have 10 years of experience in the field of sales and marketing mainly in the field of online business.

What types of clients do you prefer to accommodate and why?

First we can start with the fact that our bestseller product and main source of revenue are our shared hosting plans therefore our target customers are personal, small business, actually they are the ones that mainly use our shared web hosting plan. Regardless of that fact we also have a number of middle sized business clients and a few larger corporations. In our portfolio we are featuring: Domain registration, SSL Certificates registration, Shared Web Hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated servers

What might be the most impressive changes and improvements that have taken place at Awardpace over the last year or two?

The firs and the most important change made was to improve our customer service to highest possible level. Our goal and policy is to keep our customers as satisfied as possible with not only stable technical performance but good customer care. Thus a customer is not only paying the rent of a piece of hardware but an overall package of services and nice web experience. For example if a customer account is about to expire and this customer is willing to renew his account but for some reason he is not able to do this before the actual expiration date (if informed) we could extend the expiration date so that he does not experience any down time. Another example is if, at any point while a customer is with us and feels that we haven't satisfied all of his expectations, our team will then review the complaint and if we find that this particular problem is caused by us, then we will provide our customers with one month of hosting at no charge. In conclusion I could say that when you care about every single need of the customer even the smallest one is what we believe makes a customer emotionally engaged with our service. This would make him stay years and years without looking for another hosting provider to satisfy his needs. This is also the point where the most effective marketing is coming from – word of mouth. The other thing is to offer reliable service at reasonable prices because these are the two things everybody is looking for especially in times of financial crisis. Following this policy we are proud to announce that despite the financial slowdown of the economy we have a growth of almost 120% in revenue and customers. In terms of technical aspect we have broaden the portfolio of products that we offer to our customers. This would include Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers, 128 and 256 bits encrypted SSL certificates and dedicated IPs. We have also added some of the most famous top and country level domains like co.uk, org.uk, .eu, .me, .eu, .ca, .tv, .de and we are also planning to add some more in the next few months. Recently we have also added PHP 6, Python, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and most importantly ASP.NET working on our Linux hosting platform.

What do you consider progressive or unique about Awardspace's offerings and service?

As a middle size hosting company we are able to offer our customers personal and unique customer service and if needed a tailor made offer. We also offer a lot of incentives and bonuses to our new and existing customers. Our sophisticated clustered hosting platform allows us to reduce maintenance costs and therefore allowing us to keep the lowest prices possible without affecting the quality of the service.

What can a new client expect when they contact “customer support?”

We offer outstanding trouble ticket and email support with 1 (one) hour response time guarantee. Our customers can expect fast and accurate answers to their support questions. Some of the more complicated issues are escalated to highly specialized system administrators, so the answers and their resolution is as fast and accurate as possible.

What would our readers be impressed to know about “Zacky Tools,” the software application installer used by your company?

Zacky Tools installer is a 1 click install software package with more than 50 open source applications. It installs Blogs, CMS, Forums, GuestBooks, Shopping Carts and much more with a single click of the mouse. With it our users could build and enhance their web sites in minutes. Take Joomla for example which is included in the Zacky Tools package, everly customer can build easily a full features web site with no development skills at all.

What technologies and business practices do you feel will be most important in 2009?

Cost effectiveness combined with good management and proper service offerings. These are the key factors for a company to survive and continue growing at times of financial crisis and economy slowdown. Unfortunately many of the smaller and probably some of the bigger hosting companies will be experiencing difficulties in 2009. The way to success and business development will be constantly applying flexible strategies with excellent service. Keeping low prices will be also crucial in attracting new and keeping old customers.

In what manner and to what extent will the hosting industry be influenced by the slowing global economy?

The good news here is that although the world wide business is slowing down more and more businesses are going online in order to cut down costs on building facilities maintenance, store rentals. To minimize costs on manual labor more and more processes are automated and done online, which I believe will increase the demand for hosting and mainly eCommerce hosting. If used right the financial crisis might have positive effect over the web hosting business.

If I asked a client of yours what continues to impress them the most about Awardspace hosting services, what would they likely tell me?

Probably the technically advanced and feature rich hosting platform that we offer.

What should be expected from Awardspace in the coming months?

We will continue improving the features of the service that we offer to add new services and keep all our scripting languages versions and software applications up to date. On the marketing side of the business we will try to be as flexible as possible in order to attract and satisfy as many customers as possible.