We are speaking with Mr. Shubham Upadhyay, the Founder & CEO of HostMyCode, where we are going to learn more about his products and services.
Tune in to learn more about this exciting story.
What is the history of HostMyCode? When did it all start?
I had just finished secondary school and was about to go the university to study Information technology. Going back to how I started
is interesting. Information Technology is my first and keen interest from an early age. My journey began when I was 13 years old; I always dreamed of becoming an expert in IT at that age. I loved website development and the technology behind web hosting. I was very excited about web hosting and how things worked.That interest in web hosting and web development made me dive into web application security and penetration testing. By getting hands-on experience, I reported many bugs in top companies like Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, eBay, etc.
By that confidence, I started HostMyCode with the help of a friend in April 2014 with an investment of just $50. We were initially reselling Windows & Linux hosting services via other companies, and later on, we slowly expanded into running hundreds of servers.
What were the biggest challenges that you faced along the way?
For a start-up and every business experience, knowledge and strong financial position are mandatory to succeed. When we had started, we also faced similar problems and challenges.
The biggest challenges were the lack of knowledge on running a business and being dependent on the parent provider for support and uptime as we were reselling the services.
Another situation we were facing was the budget deficiency to manage our start-up and especially leasing and deploying our servers.
We were not in a position to hire experts for IT and business management.
In this digital age, surviving the challenges this age requires small start-ups – especially those operating online – to be super agile to counter the online security threats. Hackers are everywhere, and they will take advantage of any loophole within the systems installed within a start-up. However, my prior experience in the security industry helped me a lot to tackle such issues.
At some point of time during 2016-17, we had almost given up, and
was on the verge of shutting down due to significant financial issues. But We decided to give it another shot and never looked back since then.How did you overcome them?
The first challenge in developing an IT start-up is identifying the gap between what already exists and what people need. So, we started to understand the market & the cutthroat competition. Then, we did a complete analysis of market position, client requirements in this field, and how much we can penetrate.
Our start-up was a bit risky and challenging as we knew reselling hosting services won’t be sustainable or scalable for too long. But, with a proper strategy and Once you’ve identified a potential opportunity, the next step is to narrow your idea down, so it’s manageable. Finally, we realized that the customers would choose us over others powerfully as we offer a one-to-one personal level of support.
The next thing was implementing our strategy, so we leased our first server at a Tier III datacenter in France and started providing cPanel hosting services. That way, we had a lot of control over the features, uptime, and support. Initially, we thought about paying for a server that costs $200/month if we do not make enough sales, but things worked out well for us, and gradually, we started providing KVM VPS services and then scaled to hundreds of servers. However, it was a financial risk we had to do that and got very positive feedback from our customers.
What are the core values that drive and its team to success?
Most of us couldn’t care less about core values because if it does not reflect in our team or company culture, it is meaningless. But despite our skepticism, when we first started to hire and build our team, we wanted to define the values for our team to embrace clearly.
For that, I made a list of core values that we followed and created us successful.
- Customers are everything to us.
- We are Challenge seekers and problem solvers.
- Learning never ends at any stage.
- We are Honest and passionate about our work.
- The start may be small, but the journey is going to be great.
- We are generous givers, not self-serving takers.
Along with these core values, the thing behind our success is our support team. Without providing the best quality support – we wouldn’t have survived in the hosting industry.
What are the products and services that you are offering on the market?
Our motive is to provide swift, extraordinarily dependable services. It offers an abundance of resources at a very reasonable price, excellent for individuals that require high-quality hosting with the ability to manage large amounts of traffic. By keeping this in mind, we are providing our services, including cPanel hosting, DirectAdmin Hosting, Offshore hosting, KVM VPS Servers, Business email services & Dedicated servers. We are experienced and provide our best in these. Most of our services have free Enterprise-level DDoS protection too.
What are the markets that you are present in at the moment? Are you planning to expand?
For a start-up best thing is first to analyze and understand their potential market as the accurate target customers are one of the keys to success. As we are from India and it’s a rapidly growing market in the IT industry, that’s why we are focusing on the Indian market at the moment.
Though we have customers from all around the globe and we’re getting very positive feedback.
Currently, we do not have plans to focus on any specific country, but we want to target customers worldwide. Another milestone was in 2019. We acquired the .com version of
. We plan to develop an international version primarily focused on the global market. The hosting industry is not limited to any single country. That’s why we wish to go global.People are very excited about Bitcoin and this new way of payment for hosting services. What is your opinion about this payment and are you planning to introduce it?
Bitcoin is the new form of money and transactions are very safe from disputes & frauds, also privacy-centric. We love cryptocurrencies. We have a very positive approach towards it & we are already accepting bitcoin & other cryptocurrency payments since 2017 as we wanted to provide ease in making payments from all over the globe.
What about new technologies, products, or services that are buzzing on the market? Are you planning to introduce something new?
In this modern age of technology, trends, products, or services are changing every day. As a result, there is an advancement frequently.
That’s why many products & services are buzzing in the market, like containers as a service, elastic compute, private cloud, server management automation software, DIY Site building tools, etc.
We would love to implement new products & services in the market which people will love. We plan to introduce privacy-centric offshore cloud servers in the Netherlands based on a very modern system & we plan to make things as simple as possible for our customers.
Where do you see in the next ten years?
We hope to be more advanced and more prominent as a web hosting provider. I’m passionate about this industry, and I’d want to continue to work in a collaborative environment where everyone associated with us can thrive. We wish to have multiple POPs all across the world and create an impact in the global market. We also plan to be an ICANN accredited domain registrar soon.
At last, what is your message to the hosting community about hosting in general?
We live in the age of technology, and every enterprise wants to be online, especially in this pandemic.
While more and more people are coming online, the underlying costs of web hosting operations are increasing, like the recent massive increase in software license costs.
My message to the hosting community is, web hosting should be affordable for everyone. Furthermore, the industry should focus on the bigger picture as the whole world is getting connected quickly.
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