Having a reliable hosting partner these days is very important if you like to have a fast website and secured data. We had the pleasure to speak with Mr. Pavlo Astakhov from Host4Biz and learn more about their services and products.
We hope that you will enjoy this interview as much as we did.
You have been on the market for more than 10 years now. What is the story behind ?
In 2010, we were a team of sysadmins with a different experience – enterprise, telecom, hosting and we outsourced our knowledge to our customers around the world. We were responsible for the proper setup and operation of around 90 servers, in most, it was web servers and high-load projects. After some time, we decided to start our own hosting company to ensure our customers can get reliable service and focus on their projects. Later, following customers’ requests and political situation, we transferred our legal entity, staff, office, and main tech site from Ukraine to Poland and since 2016 we are operating in Warsaw. Since than, we built here a pretty big infrastructure, with all the main services – hosting, VPS, dedicated, cloud storage, etc.
From where did you get the idea of offering hosting services?
During our outsourcing phase, we noticed that most common customer problems were related to their hosting. Unreliable cheap hardware, slow support, unstable uplinks, and even unstable power – we had to communicate pretty often with customer’s datacenters due to that. So, having web and telecom knowledge, we decided to create a web hosting project from scratch and to build it in the proper way as we see it.
What was the need for hosting back in 2010 in comparison with today? How is the hosting industry developed since 2010?
Web projects were much simpler than now and most of them felt comfortable on usual shared hosting. Of course, I’m not talking about high-loaded projects, they required plenty of hardware even then. Also, it was harder to explain to someone, what does VPS means – nowadays most webmasters are aware of that and are using virtual servers much more often.
What are the main products and services that is offering?
Currently, we are offering all the range of hosting services, but there are five main:
- Website hosting (shared hosting) – it is suitable for most PHP-written websites and CMS. Also, all website hosting plans have an intuitive website builder, free SSL certificates, Git support, and other nice and useful tools.
- WordPress hosting – this is something special. The customer gets it with a pre-installed WordPress instance and he can interact with it directly from the hosting panel – enable/disable auto-updates for WordPress itself and its plugins, harden his WordPress with typical security hacks, install WordPress plugins, tune ModSecurity rules, and much more.
- Linux VPS – based on enterprise-grade NVMe drives these servers are primarily really fast. In comparison to popular cloud providers, we can provide our customers with around 8000 input-output operations per second (IOPS) instead of 300-400. Also, the nice thing is that our customer is not limited to our pre-made operating system templates – he can mount his own ISO image, boot it and set up whatever he wants using the VNC console.
- Windows VPS – these servers are too built over NVMe and are fast too. In addition, all plans include a Windows Server license with plenty of versions to choose from: 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 so every customer can run the needed software on the appropriate OS version.
- Dedicated servers – they are intended to those customers who have big requirements. We are not focusing on the cheapest configurations – we are trying to provide customers with outstanding performance even on our minimal Xeon E-2288G machines. Of course, we are using enterprise-grade hardware for them, so our customers can feel safe – hardware fails are really rare with equipment like this.
What are the markets that you are targeting at the moment? Are there any plans in expanding to other markets?
We started focused mostly on the CIS market and a couple of years ago started to expand on EU and US markets. I think other ones will be added accordingly to customers’ interest in us.
Customer satisfaction is very important for the success of one company. How are you handling customer satisfaction? What is your approach?
First of all, we are focused on the reliability of our services. So there are monitoring, backups, infrastructure reserve, etc. Also, we are trying to be proactive and handle all we can before our customer can notice it – or warn him as fast as we can. For example, all websites on the web hosting are being daily scanned for malware, script vulnerabilities, etc – and customers are notified about this instantly.
You have been picked as one of the top 10 companies for VPS servers in 2021. Can you tell us a bit more about this award?
Well, first of all, we are really proud of it. As I said previously, we are focused on reliability – and speed, of course. So all of our VPS machines are based on enterprise-grade NVMe drives to make disk operations nearly instant. Also, we keep eye on our VPS nodes to prevent resource outages and always have a reserve to avoid overselling.
What are the new technologies and trends that are going to appear on the market in the following period?
From what we see, bleeding-edge technologies are passing their hype peaks and later, finds their niches. For example, clouds are really good, but they aren’t cheap at all. So some big projects are coming back to bare metal. A similar thing is happening to website builders – Wix, Tilda, etc – they are pretty good for the newbies, but there is no control over your data, no option to modify the backend, and a lot of advanced customers are switching from them to WordPress or even more powerful engines like Laravel, Yii, etc.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
It is hard to predict that due to the fast-changing situation in the world at all and IT sphere in particular, but I think we will be still here to serve our customers. Anyway, monster corporations are unable to handle customers with the care that smaller companies can offer.
Finally, would you like to give any advice about hosting to our readers?
Do not hesitate to ask web hosting companies about things that are important to you during the selection of the hosting provider. Just imagine that something can go bad – will you be able to recover? Migrate? Get support in a reasonable time? Also, do not focus on the largest companies only – probably, a smaller company can provide you with more care, additional features, etc – you, as the customer, are more valuable for smaller ones and they will try to make you the best conditions. And anyway, I wish you all a 99.97% uptime for your projects! :)
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