In case you haven't heard the typical Internet-hosting-horror-story, it goes like this: A wannabe entrepreneur, "Dick," drops a big chunk of his life savings on his sure-fire new business: The Porn Internet. He's heard how it's practically like printing your own money and he wants in. Dick buys hot content, shoots some exclusive footage of his wife, and has a serious marketing plan. He's ready to sit back and watch the cash roll in. To save a couple nickels, Dick bets on a low-budget, flashy company to host his content.
Oops. Bad idea.
One day, Dick tries to log onto his Website and wham. 404. All gone. He calls his hosting company: The fly-by-night firm that promised the stars has dissolved, leaving no trace of itself or Dick's Website. Their phone is disconnected. The office address turns out to be a P.O. box, and Dick is shit outta luck.
The moral of the story: Whether for a dinner party or your mega-super pay-site, you can't overestimate the importance of a reliable host (and, of course, “Don't be a Dick”).
Telling the difference between the good companies and the bad ones can be a daunting proposition, however. "Just look at who’s talking about a given hosting company," advises Phil Doroff, the chief technical officer of Reflected Networks, a mid-size hosting company and Internet Service Provider. "Message boards are a good place to look. Use the search options for whatever hosting company you’re researching. See who’s talking about them. If it’s just a couple of people you’ve never heard of before, then, you know, there might be something to be concerned about there. And see if you get the impression that people really mean what they’re saying about that company, and they’re not being paid to say it."
Reflected Networks has so far earned itself a reputation as a reliable, stable host, both on the boards and off. The company promises its customers all the hosting services they could possibly need, with a personal touch some feel may be missing from many larger firms. "We can go after more of the not-so-major customers more effectively," explains Doroff. "Where [larger hosting companies] have thousands of customers per employee, we’re in the dozens-of-customers-per-employee range. So people will call and get the same person that they talked to yesterday. We can actually build relationships with customers. If they're small right now, we can grow with them."
For a relatively new business - Reflected was founded a year and half ago - maintaining a steady stream of satisfied customers is of paramount importance. For the most part, Reflected has focused on customers who match their own up-and-coming status. "The majority of our clients are the mid-range, maybe some large TGP posters, some large free sites, and we’re getting into some of the small programs and pay sites. Kind of a progression of a host. You start off with very small customers and work your way up," Doroff says.
Their pricing scheme reflects this same level of commitment to their customers. "We’re very aggressively priced in our services right now for what we offer, just to get word-of-mouth going about us," Doroff says. "Our bare-bones price for our very lowest starter package, which would be a virtual hosting package, would be $9.95 per month, and that $9.95 will get you Websites with 500 megabytes of disk space to store video files, pictures, HTML, whatever content you like, and up to two gigabytes of data transfer a month, which is the transfer that end users will pull off of our servers to get to them. And as your visitors to your site go up, your data transfer will increase greatly. So we’re definitely able to pick up the lower end of the market with the hopes of growing with you."
On the other end of the scale, Doroff reports some larger clients taking advantage of Reflected’s more lavish hosting opportunities. On the top of Reflected Networks' top-end: $6,995 monthly gets you two dedicated dual-Pentium 3 1.13 GHz servers with 2 GB of RAM and 80 GB of hard drive space with a private network between machines, and 100 Mbits of bandwidth via a1,000 Mbps uplink port. Of course, there's something for every need in-between.
Price isn't everything, however. According to Doroff, the services provided are exceptional as well as priced to move, with a definite commitment to reliability: "We have multiple connections to the Internet from diverse providers. We have backup power, backup battery systems, redundant cooling. And all our core network equipment is 'fail over.' So for every device in our network that is absolutely necessary, we have another device that can take over operations for that one seamlessly with no customer interruption.
“Two days ago we had a core router failure that, if we didn’t have backups in place, we would have been down for half a day. But since we did, customers didn’t even notice the outage. It took five seconds for the backup to take over for the primary routers’ responsibilities, and life went on. Nobody even noticed it, and that’s the way we want to keep it."
Las Vegas-based Reflected was founded by Dustin Hamilton, an entrepreneur with a background in the adult Internet, and Doroff, a techie with a background in the dot-com boom (and bust) of four years ago or so. "Originally, I started to work in the corporate sector with a dot-com. I did Linux Apache administration and clusters, Web server clusters," Doroff says.
Hamilton's story is Horatio Alger-esque - he started out with a one-man, manual labor business that he grew into a very lucrative set of companies. "He’s been an entrepreneur all his life," Oroff says of his partner. "He worked in the window cleaning business before he found the adult market. And he started that off with just him going around with a bucket of water and a sponge to, I believe, a couple of dozen employees making a pretty good living at it. And then he transferred that knowledge into the adult industry and has been going full bore every since."
So far, Hamilton's adult-industry and business expertise and Doroff's technical knowledge has proven a winning amalgamation. "It definitely is a great combination," Doroff says. "We get his business expertise and adult industry knowledge, and we can combine that with our technical knowledge and expertise. So it’s working out pretty well."
That business experience has resulted in an interesting plan for diversification in case of a downturn in the business of the adult Internet. "A lot of adult hosts are strictly focusing on adult; we’re trying to go a different route. I’d say right now our revenue is probably 75 percent adult, so it definitely makes up the majority of our business. But we’re also trying to diversify some … in case there’s a downturn in the adult market. And we’re also trying to start up services that compliment our adult offerings.”
Their idea: business-class access services to smaller, tier 2 cities. "Minneapolis and Las Vegas are the two markets we’re going into initially," Doroff says. "We’re trying to go directly to the eyeballs that will view the content."
