Unlimited Hosting – The First Year in Review

It’s been just over a year now since we’ve launched Frog Host (woo!), and we’re still here. Here is an understatement, as our growth has been much better than expected. We originally opened up shop to facilitate our users from Hawk Host who wanted unlimited hosting, and we of course were interested in venturing into new markets. That’s not to say it’s all been a breeze though. Prior to this no one on our staff had any experience with the unlimited hosting world, and we sure did have a lot to learn.

Abuse: This one is probably our biggest problem. People often mistake unlimited hosting for a license to do whatever you want. This is far from the case of course, and we’ve had to remove quite a few users from our services because of it. Yes, you get unlimited disk space and bandwidth. What you don’t get is unlimited access to disk IO, or unlimited access to the servers uplink to saturate the line. You also don’t get to use all 12GB of memory, or all 16CPUs. Seems obvious, but some people would have you believe they should get the whole server to themselves. Implementing CloudLinux has helped with this though, but users will still use some awful MySQL queries, run some scripts which would cripple most servers, and try to run multiple high resource programs in parallel. We of course see this at Hawk Host, but not to this degree.

Support: Believe it or not, the average support volume (when you take an average of ticket per user, adjusting for the size of the user base) is actually much lower at Frog Host. We expected our support queue to be infinitely higher per user than Hawk Host, but this is far from the case. In fact, a majority of our users have never once contacted us for anything. While there are some users who make up for the ones who don’t submit tickets, we’ve been really shocked at how this dynamic has worked out.

Sales: When we first launched, we were doing a small volume of orders per month organically. We’re not ashamed to admit this as no new company does hundreds of orders per month, and what we were receiving was enough revenue to cover almost all costs. Yes, we lost money for the first few months we operated and we expected that. What we didn’t expect was the sudden surge of orders. We saw exponential increases month after month sometime around August, and within a few weeks our projected income put us at a point where we are actually making money! Of course the margins are affected as we had to add new hardware, but knowing that within 6 months we could turn this into a profitable operation was a really great sign. At this point we’re doing strong and we’re covering all our costs, which for a shared hosting company is a great point to be at after only 12 months in business.

Operations: Boy, there is a lot of work to do. And I mean a lot. Hawk Host keeps us all busy enough, but we have all been putting in 60+ hour weeks to keep everything going. The machines require a lot more TLC, so our sysadmins are almost always working on improving or optimizing one aspect of the machines or another to adjust for the days workload. Our operations team is constantly working on a ticket, looking for new places to advertise, or working with companies who are inquiring for partnerships. Again, we see this at Hawk Host, but this was something we did not expect in this magnitude at Frog Host. We’re all busy and we’re all loving it. As they say, the show must go on.

Customers: Oh, customers. You are our lifeblood and you’re the reason we’re here. You’re also from every conceivable place in the world. Years of schooling taught me nothing compared to the geography I’ve learned here. We’ll get orders from small islands in the pacific, or orders from these countries I’ve never heard of in Europe. And of course, being an information junky, I’ll proceed to spend an hour reading up on this country (perhaps *thats* why we’re always catching up on work). The diversity and reach of this brand is phenominal and it really is exciting coming into work each day wondering what country or place I’ll learn about today. On another note, you’re all really pleasant to deal with. You also really like to pay for a few years in advance – but don’t worry, we’re cool with that.

Every time we do one of these review posts, I like to include some type of numbers or graphics so you guys can actually see what we’re doing. Here are some quick stats for the last year:

- 412.5% increase in orders from February 2010 to January 2011(Note: We used January 2011 to get an entire months data)

- 937.9% increase in income from February 2010 to January 2011 (Note: We used Janurary 2011 to get an entire months data)

- Over 1000 domains hosted on our servers

- 50% increase in site traffic on February 4th, 2010 compared to February 4th, 2011

- One of the top 200,000 websites in the world

- Over 100 internal improvements committed and implemented

So in closing, this year has rocked. The Frog Host brand has proven itself to be a viable option in the unlimited hosting market. Our pricing is right in line with the competition, our offerings are pretty darn good, our staff is the best (right?), and most importantly we’ve proven that we can make this a long lasting brand that has a real impact on the shared hosting market. A sincere thank you to everyone who chose us for their hosting needs. There are a lot of options out there and knowing you wanted to use our services above them all means a very special something to all of us.