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Interview with Tamara Field of Apollo Hosting

CPU Review recently sat down with Ms. Tamara Field, president of Apollo Hosting (www.apollohosting.com) to discuss the success that Apollo Hosting has experienced since 1999 and her approach to the web hosting market.

CPU Review: You’ve been with Apollo hosting since the beginning, is that correct?

Tamara Field: Yes, I’ve been with Apollo Hosting since it’s inception in November of 1999. Prior to that I worked for almost 15 years in the computer field.

CPU Review: To give our readers a sense of scale, how large is Apollo Hosting now?

Tamara Field: At present we have around 17,000 hosted accounts – across our 4 years we’ve had around 30,000 customers – those include domain registrations, VPS accounts, and shared hosting accounts.

At our main offices here in Austin we have 12 employees. Our technical support is located in Canada – we have 10 employees there. We also have data centers in Maryland and Austin – so in all we have around 30 employees.

CPU Review: Have you been working together with Alabanza?

Tamara Field: Yes, for our shared hosting we lease servers from Alabanza. We also have a data center here in Austin for our VPS accounts. The Alabanza control panel has gotten so much recognition, that it’s an asset for us.

CPU Review: What do you consider to be your core strategy or niche within the hosting industry?

Tamara Field: From the very beginning we have placed our emphasis on customer support. We’ve also made sure that we are always one of the first companies to offer new software and services. We base these decisions on customer feedback.

For example, when spam and virus protection software was first becoming available, we evaluated and tested products to offer them quickly to our customers. Our current solution is Postini, which is rated as the top Enterprise SPAM/Virus filtering by PC Magazine. We’re one of only a few companies to offer this. We were also an early adopter of Miva Merchant which has now become an industry standard.

We have most recently introduced our marketing toolbox as a result of our partnership with Eboz, Inc. This is offered free to our customers. So we conduct deep research into software that our customers are asking for, and we try to bring it to market quickly.

CPU Review: What are your core products and services?

Tamara Field: We serve small to medium sized businesses – most of our customers are small businesses. Over the years we have particularly developed core expertise in ecommerce. So a small business is able to call us and we can hold their hand through the entire ecommerce process. We can even recommend certain of our resellers to help them design their site.

Another key to our ecommerce success is our ability to offer ‘Silver Support’ to any of our Miva customers. This means that our customers can go directly to Miva for support – they can call them on the phone and receive quick and accurate answers. Apollo Hosting has also been offering the Miva product for over 4 years – so we are experts on their products as well.

Apollo Hosting is also one of only 30 ‘Premier Partners’ with Miva. That gives us a much higher level of training on the product – Miva sends their experts out to train our entire staff at least once per year.

We are also the only hosting company to offer full fledged Miva tutorials on our site – they can be accessed at: http://www.apollohosting.com/tutorials/.

CPU Review: Tell us about the Apollo Hosting reseller program.

Tamara Field: Our reseller program is really growing and we’re excited about our new offerings. What makes our reseller program different is that we allow resellers to start off small – many potential resellers want to ‘test the waters’ and see how it works – with Apollo Hosting a reseller can start off at a very reasonable cost and immediately begin receiving 35% off our retail pricing. Then they can step up at their own pace. In fact, for only $59.95 our resale system manager offers invoicing and billing which most reseller programs don’t incorporate.

A reseller can also customize their welcome emails, and customize their invoices – this frees them up to concentrate on marketing – all the billing and invoicing is taken care of. That process is automated completely.

CPU Review: What trends or developments do see emerging in the web hosting industry?

Tamara Field: We’re definitely seeing a trend away from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ cheap hosting plans. Those plans may be good for one sector of the marketplace, but we are seeing customers who want to move up.

We are seeing more customers who start out small and then want to move up. Apollo Hosting has customers who have started off with just one account and are now on dedicated servers.

Also support is becoming more critical to all customers. Businesses don’t mid paying more to get really good support.

CPU Review: What new products, services, or initiatives do you have ready to roll out?

Tamara Field: We are looking at implementing more web site design services for our customers. In the past we had tried to steer clear of that, but customers are demanding more help from us along these lines. It’s just another example of our desire to deliver to our customers the very best tools.

Editor’s Note: To learn more or to sign up for a hosting account please visit Apollo Hosting at http://www.apollohosting.com.

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