My name is Thomas Petersen and I founded Myriad Network (myriadnetwork.com) nearly three years ago. As Myriad Network’s President, I maintain daily involvement with both technical and customer support concerns to ensure our hosting services are of the highest quality. I’ve been in the hosting industry for more than five years and, prior to founding Myriad Network, I worked as a Security and Abuse Department Manager at UUNET Technologies (uu.net). I have also provided consulting for an information security organization.

What’s the history of Myriad Network – perhaps you could give us an overview of how the company started, the path it has taken since then, and its major milestones.

Myriad Network originated as an offshoot of SecurityMinded Technologies LLC, a company I founded in 2000 to provide information security consulting and hosting services to local businesses in the Northern Virginia area.

The first milestone we achieved with Myriad Network was the development of a unique industry position and a completely separate website from SecurityMinded. It took the better part of four months to design the Myriad Network site you see today, and we feel it was time well spent. Beyond offering state-of-the-art hosting technologies, we offer ease-of-use and personal service — things we think our clients appreciate.

I think, though, that our biggest milestone is simply that, while other web hosting companies have a hard time staying in business, we continue to thrive and expand our services. The management of online business continually evolves and, as such, we continually review our services to make certain we’re offering the best solutions for our customers.

What do you consider to be your core strategy or niche within the industry?

One of the biggest things that sets Myriad Network apart is the level of personal service we extend. We know our customers by name. They know us by name. Myriad Network has earned a reputation for being customer-centric and that means a lot to us. We’re easy to get in touch with and we provide a Dedicated Web hosting engineer for all new customers — so when our clients have a support concern, they’re able to communicate immediately with the person who will help solve it.

Our core competency is the ability to provide expert open source solutions to meet our customer’s various requirements. We offer unique solutions to the difficult issues our customers face and I’d like to think our solutions and customer-based approach really raises the bar in the hosting industry.

What about your data center, is there anything that sets them apart from other data centers?

Absolutely. We use two datacenters: Equinix in Northern Virginia and Cybercon in Saint Louis, Missouri. Both of our datacenters have set themselves apart in the hosting industry; Equinix hosts some of the largest fortune 100 companies in the world and Cybercon is a major player providing rock solid IP solutions.

The reason we use two datacenters is twofold. First, we offer all of our customers DNS servers and backup SMTP hosted in both locations. And second, since we are 10 minutes away from Equinix, we use that as our principal location and we use the St. Louis location primarily for secondary DNS, backup SMTP and disaster recovery.

You recently unveiled your VDS plans. When will you normally recommend someone to switch from shared hosting to a VDS plan?

We’ve actually been providing Virtuozzo based VDS solutions for over two years now. We recently launched the Virtuozzo product based on Dells 9th generation of servers, which includes the Power Edge 1950 and 2950. The significance of these platforms is that the two dual core processors give our customers access to over 12 Ghz of processing power and the use of 3Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives significantly increase available input / output (IO) thoroughput. Our CIO says that “These are the fastest VDS servers we’ve ever deployed…” I would go as far to say, these are the fastest Virtuozzo based VDS servers available on the market anywhere.

As far as when to switch from shared hosting to a VDS plan, The VDS platform bridges the gap for a customer who has outgrown shared hosting, but isn’t quite ready to jump up to a dedicated server. We use the cpanel platform to copy over accounts and associated data with zero downtime.

I noticed that your VDS plans use CentOS. How does CentOS stack against other Linux flavors?

Company-wide, we standardized on RedHat from day one. Since CentOS is just a repackaged version of the RedHat Enterprise series, which we already know to be very stable, we chose to offer CentOS to our customers, including priority access to our hosted CentOS mirror.

Like RedHat Enterprise, CentOS has been very stable and reliable for us. It serves our clients very well.

Can you tell us more about your Backup SMTP service? Is there a big demand for such service?

We’ve been providing the backup SMTP service for over five years now and it’s an excellent solution for companies who want to eliminate the possibility of bounced emails should an outage occur at their location. Basically, customers who sign up for our service add an additional, less-preferred MX record to their domain(s). In the event of an outage, the sending mail server will first try the customer’s mail server. If that delivery fails, then the sending mail server will deliver the email to one of our email servers and continue to reattempt delivery to the customer’s mail server every 15 minutes for up to 30 days.

The backup SMTP service is very popular in areas prone to outages, such as Florida and places overseas where Internet connections aren’t quite as reliable as they are here in the US. We typically see a high volume of signups when tropical storm season rolls around every year.

With so many services offering some sort of free hosting (hosted image gallery, files storage), how do you see the role of web hosting providers changing in the next 5-10 years?

I think free hosting is always going to work for some, but for customers who require high availability and 24×7 support, companies such as Myriad Network are always going to be around to fill that void.

Overall, the companies that have strong customer-centric support organizations and the ability to efficiently uphold their customer commitments will be the ones that last for the long haul. The days of promising 99%+ uptime on a $3.00 a month web hosting plan are behind us and we are now starting to see a new era of companies that are serious about providing customer-focused solutions. Along those same lines, customers are now spending more time educating themselves about the hosting market. Once customers fully understand the variables involved in reliable hosting, they will choose companies with good industry reputations — not necessarily the cheapest prices.

Finally, where do you see Myriad Network in 5 years?