HostReview.com Web Hosting Interviews

An Interview with
Eric Mandel, CEO, BlackMesh, Inc.

June 11, 2008

HostReview: Please tell us a few words about yourself and your position in BlackMesh, Inc.

Eric Mandel: I co-founded BlackMesh in 2003 and am currently the president and CEO. BlackMesh was founded to help address the information technology needs for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). When we founded this company, many large managed hosting and managed services providers were ignoring the concerns of SMBs and we saw an opportunity to provide custom, personalized services to these businesses.   

HostReview: According to this case study, the personalized approach was a key factor in securing BlackMesh a contract with Phase2. Please tell our readers more about the ways your company ensures the quality of personalized service, and why it is important.

Eric Mandel: Personal relationships are the foundation of BlackMesh’s business.  We assign a team of technicians and engineers to each customer and develop a relationship to understand their needs and concerns.  As a result, when there is a problem, the customer already knows the technical team who is helping them and the technical team already knows the solution they are troubleshooting.

HostReview: Phase2 is actively involved with open source projects; on their site they list LAMP, Java, and Drupal. What is your take on open source software, and did your position on that issue influence Phase2's decision to choose BlackMesh as their hosting provider?

Eric Mandel: We are heavy users of open source software.  We use and support CentOS, the entire LAMP stack, Drupal, and Puppet to name just a few.  In addition, we are experts at optimizing and scaling the LAMP stack.  Our open source knowledge and experience contributed to Phase2’s comfort level.

HostReview: What other traits of a hosting provider do you think are important to clients?

Eric Mandel:  In addition to relationships, reliability and responsiveness are very important.  When we speak with existing and prospective customers, they are always worried about down time and how quickly they can come back online.   At BlackMesh, we address these issues with our network reliability and staff responsiveness.  With 100% network uptime for the past five years, our network is proven and reliable.  With less than an average 10 minute response time on support tickets and a one hour hardware replacement guarantee on all failed hardware, our customer service is unmatched in the industry.

HostReview: Tell us a bit about your clients: what kind(s) of companies do you work with?

Eric Mandel: BlackMesh works with development companies, ASPs, SaaS providers, and small businesses.  We provide, maintain and administer the entire infrastructure, everything from the network up to the customer’s proprietary code, so our clients can focus only on their business development.

HostReview: A more general question: what technologies and practices do you think will have the biggest impact on the industry in the coming months?

Eric Mandel:  The biggest new technology impact will be from solid state drives.  Solid state drives offer the user a huge speed improvement and they offer the host a dramatic reduction in power and cooling costs.  Virtualization is the big buzzword right now, but we find it is best used for consolidating hardware and not for gaining performance or horizontally scaling.

HostReview: Finally, tell us what can we expect of BlackMesh in the coming months.

Eric Mandel: We have number of exciting projects underway, most focused on open source technologies such as Drupal.  In addition, we are in the process of forming some partnerships which we hope to announce by the end of the year.  These partnerships will help our customers accelerate and ease the adoption of the latest technologies and features.

Copyright © 2008 DevStart, Inc. Permission is required to use the material on this page.