Running a web hosting business is a unique experience with its own successes and challenges. We had the honor to interview Mr. Nagavishnu Sj from GenHost and learn more about his story.
Take a 5-minute break to read about it and learn more about GenHost and the hosting industry in general.
We always start our interviews with a brief history of the company. Can you tell us a bit more about GenHost and the idea behind it?
First, I would like to thank Hostadvice for this interview and thanks for selecting our brand as the Top 10 Reseller Hosting 2021 Award. This is Nagavishnu Sj (Founder & Managing Director
), I had started my business (Feb 2013) at my age of 18 as my Father has passed away suddenly due to a cardiac attack. So I want to manage my family left with some debts. I had left my college after 6 months of joining and I had some knowledge in hacking & blogging, then I came to know about hosting and servers. so I had started just with reseller hosting purchased from another vendor and started offering only shared hosting as an initial stage. My first preference in business, as my father advise which is “More than Money We need to have a Friendly Business relationship with clients”. I had started offering shared hosting 0.99$ monthly with unlimited* features. As the service level and support were good we got more orders over referrals which has been expanded to offer reseller hosting and other services later in a year. The name “Gen” was my favorite so I had started searching with genhost.in. (.in) mentions in India I had got the domain late at night. So my initial investment was around 1000 INR. I was the one managing the hosting and support as a single person and later after 2 years, I had appointed my college mates who will be offering support for our client’s technical needs. Now we have around 6 technical support agents and we will hire remote support in case of need in busy times.Your company has been on the market for more than 8 years now. What were the challenges that you faced when you started the business?
The company was started with a 1K initial investment just with a domain name, reseller hosting, my personal laptop provided by our tamilnadu govt as free for students, and lastly with my only “Hope”. The business went well due to the quality of service with the unlimited and new issue arrived on the family level that was “I was doing something illegal to make money” they indirectly forced me to close the business to keep me on their legs. But I had continued the business and invested the profits into the business to own servers in France. In the 1 year of completion, I had got a good client base. Later it started providing additional services and got a partnership with some vendors to offer other services and licenses.
The hosting industry in 2013 and in 2021 is quite different. What were the changes that happened over the years that were crucial to the improvement of the hosting industry?
The hosting industry got a lot of changes from 2013 to 2021 with the latest technologies added to the server and software level and clients are looking for new trends every time they had been released. We are adding the possible & affordable latest technologies to our servers and providing our best to our clients. Our plan’s pricing still remains the same from 2013 even after doing such new technology provisioned on our servers.
What are the main services and products that is offering?
offer shared, reseller, master reseller, alpha reseller, KVM VPS, managed VPS, and dedicated servers. VPS & dedicated servers we are arranging as per the client requirement and budget, We are sure clients will get the very affordable price of VPS and dedicated server compared with other providers with us. Our main aim is to deliver our clients good quality of service under the client budget including our low profit for us. For example, having 100 clients with huge profits is worth more than having 1000 clients with Low profit, which is my concept of business.A lot of customers care about the speed and security of their websites. How is handling the speed and security as a service?
Yes, customers’ first question will be what about the speed and security of the server? How can we trust that your service pricing is very low? We do understand and to keep the service on our marks all our servers are installed with Cloudlinux for server security & stability and we are using Litespeed web server for better performance for our client websites. So our clients will be getting worthy services more than what they are paying to us!
What about backup? Does offer backup as a service?
Yes, we do take weekly backups on all our servers which can be easily restored from the client-side with a 1-click restore option. As clients have developed their projects by investing $$ so we need to keep their backups safe!
We have to mention the pandemic as a huge influence on a lot of industries, including the hosting industry. What is your opinion about this topic? Has the pandemic affected your business?
Yes, We do face some challenges during the COVID Pandemic as most of our clients who are start-ups. So we had helped our clients by providing more grace periods for the payment and keeping their business up and we managed it ourselves.
What are the new trends and technologies in the hosting industry that are expected in the following period?
“CLOUD” so the next trend in the hosting industry will be cloud services which will be clients looking at the affordable price range and we will be looking for that too. We are closing looking for cloud-based services at affordable pricing suitable for our client budget and soon it will be available.
Where do you see in the next 5 years?
We are planning to build our own data center in our company location in Salem, TN which will be the first data center in our city which makes our city proud. We are working on it and soon it will be built once we got proper network support from the network providers.
Finally, is there anything else you would like to add about your products and services that would be of interest for the hosting community?
As we are very confident with our server’s uptime and support level we are offering SLA to our hosting plans to build trust in clients. We assure you that our clients won’t leave us once they have used our services. We will be giving our best to our clients in terms of service and support. Our motto is “Customer satisfaction will be in our first priority more than Money“. We do help new startups who are entering into the hosting industry. Startup’s enquiries are most welcome and we will be helpful for the startups on how to get into the industry and stand.
Reseller hosting can be the perfect solution for your business. Click here to know more about best reseller hosting.
