Since its inception, a young Hosting company had used innovative marketing methods and had achieved explosive growth. It was able to grow from a single server Reseller to a 22 server Hosting company in just One year. Throughout this period the company had used Bobcares Shared Support to take care of its Tech support while the hosting company was able to concentrate on its marketing efforts and expand.

The company now needed to scale with its own dedicated team to exclusively handle the company’s tech department. The company approached Bobcares with this requirement. Bobcares first established a Dedicated Administration Facility (DAF) with a team of 3 engineers in a period of 4 days. These were experienced engineers who had worked with various Hosting companies. They knew exactly the steps the company needed to take at this stage when it was poised for explosive growth.

An action plan was put forward to company management. Servers were to be classified into various categories and allocated a standard software configuration, Hardware and bandwidth resource and Security configuration. An optimum number of users was suggested for each class of servers considering a combination of maximum profit and the best resource utilization. On approval, the team went to work and within a month had steadily configured servers and migrated clients till it reached the optimum level. New customers were straight away shifted to the new servers which were built with the new configuration. This way the company saved thousands of dollars by completely utilizing existing resources.

Emergency channels were setup early on. All the servers and critical services such as Web services and Email were put on special 24×7 Server Monitoring systems. The systems were configured to send SMS messages to the group the moment any server or service went down. Communication channels were setup with the datacenter so that if any server went down, the datacenter would know in less than 5 minutes. The team knew that customers needed reassurance if any emergency arose. Mass announcement systems were setup, so that customers got an announcement before they had to find out.

The HelpDesk was taken over so smoothly the customers did not even know. The team would make sure that an issue resolution took place in less than an hour. By making the server stable and establishing emergency procedures, customer issues had reduced to a large extent. This enabled the team to spend more time over individual customers, leading to rise in sales due to customer referrals.

The team did not limit itself to just answering tickets, it needed to make itself more efficient. Efforts were put into developing a FAQ and Knowledge Base with commonly asked technical questions. This enabled the company to reduce the basic queries it was getting from beginners. Reason ? The technical team knew the company was poised for more growth. The team could save the company money if it could handle more servers. The FAQ made it possible for the same team to handle at least 30% more servers.

While the team had been dealing with the technical challenges, the company could concentrate on its marketing efforts. Yet it needed all the help it could get. While the company looked at external sources for new customers, the technical team looked at the internal customers. Customers who were taking more resources were identified and referred to the sales team. They received targeted promotion and almost 80% of such customers were converted into Dedicated Hosting. Several others upgraded to higher plans. This was a cache of gold the management had not even thought about.

The company has now graduated to a NOC with 100 servers and around 25000 hosting accounts. Bobcares team provided company management with expert consultation on the NOC hardware, Network architecture and software, thus saving thousands of dollars on external consultancy agencies. Though the company management had trouble digesting Outsourcing initially, now, a year later they say that they consider the Bobcares team as part of their company rather than an outsourced provider.