Interview with Tim Uzzanti of CrystalTech Web Hosting, Inc.

CPU Review sat down recently with Mr. Tim Uzzanti, CEO of CrystalTech Web Hosting, Inc. (http://www.crystaltech.com) to discuss the success that CrystalTech has had in building their web hosting customer base and their brand.

CPU Review – Give us a little background on the company.

Tim Uzzanti – CrystalTech was initially founded in 1992 in Phoenix, Arizona and we started offering commercial hosting services in 1997. We currently have 30 employees serving approximately 25,000 hosting accounts.

CPU Review – In terms of your market space, where do you consider yourself competing?

Tim Uzzanti - We just refer to our services as ‘web hosting’. We don’t see a difference between Unix and Windows hosting as far as general presentation of our hosting plans and our company. The battle that we have to fight is to have the proper tools and the proper automation to continue being profitable and at the same time, continue to offer the same level of service and support.

CPU Review – To focus it down a little further, you do operate on a Windows platform – and it appears that you are service oriented, not so much price oriented. Is that correct?

Tim Uzzanti - It is certainly possible to attract a customer through marketing channels. However, when you use traditional marketing techniques like banner ads, or CPC advertising, you have to sacrifice months and months and months of revenue from that customer to pay for all of the effort you went through to get them to sign up in the first place. To counter the outlay of revenue to attract customers, you need to get what I call ‘free orders’ or ‘free customers’ from somewhere – referrals, or people seeing good reviews and information about your company online, from web hosting review sites, web hosting or developer forums, etc. That’s where we excel.

It is very important to keep the service level high. That’s because as soon as a customer can’t get a hold of a technician, or a customer can’t get his money back – then you have a 50/50 shot of that customer posting something negative online about your company and your service. I don’t want that – and that’s the driving the direction we’re going. We are doing whatever we can to make a customer’s experience with us, from a billing perspective, from a stability perspective and from a support perspective as positive as possible.

CPU Review – So you don’t really ‘market’ online to get customers, you just rely on good word of mouth?

Tim Uzzanti – That’s not to say that we don’t market. There was a very long period of time where we didn’t market or advertise – at all. We’re at the point now where we like to brand our name. Are we going to spend a fortune doing this like so many other hosting companies? Probably not. Then again, we really don’t need to because our name has been around and mentioned in a very good light both online and offline. For example, Macromedia passes our name around as a primary partner at their conferences. Additionally, whereas online forums like ‘WebHostingTalk’ are sometimes the downfall of hosting brands, we have very little, if any, negative feedback on their forums.

We have done some advertising and we’re starting to do more of it. There is a difference between being a niche company and being more of a mainstream company. I’m trying to balance that – just as every company has to have balance. Marketing is always necessary in a company and you have to have it.

CPU Review – Who do you see as your competitors?

Tim Uzzanti – Truthfully, it’s the smaller companies. Here’s why – very large companies are unable to transition to new technologies, new plan offerings, and offer a high level of support as quickly and easily as a smaller company. While there are pros and cons to both large companies and small companies, I think our biggest threat comes from small companies because there are so many generic interfaces out there that can help a company or individual get into the hosting environment.

In fact, I just read an article that stated there are 35,000 web hosting companies…

CPU Review – What did you just say?!?! I had thought that there were only around 5,000 or so.

Tim Uzzanti – Yes, I read 35,000 hosts. So I did some math and calculated that the top 100 hosting companies are representing, at most, 10-15% of the industry. So it stands to reason that the bulk of the competition will come from the smaller companies as they’re the ones with the majority of customers.

So we’re competing against the smaller companies. Thankfully, CrystalTech has the ability to straddle between being a large company and a smaller company. We are able to provide the dependability, the stability and profitability of a large company – we’re here and we’re not going anywhere. Yet we have prices that are competitive with smaller companies, and we’re on the ball with the latest technology. That also contributes to our 75% customer referral rates.

CPU Review – Tell us about your reseller program.

Tim Uzzanti – CrystalTech has one of the most advanced reseller management programs in the industry. It is .NET driven and built on the latest technology. It’s ours and we built it from the ground up. It is very well integrated into our infrastructure – offering better account detail and many more features than a typical reseller control panel.

So from a reseller perspective they are able to manage 90% of the website functions on their own – this is also true for their customers. This dramatically reduces a reseller’s overall cost when they host with CrystalTech. That’s because now they don’t have to address many common questions and tasks that the customer will have – the customer is able to do the vast majority of day-to-day tasks on their own, like create DSNs, set file permissions, create FTP accounts – the smaller stuff that drives hosting companies crazy.

Resellers are a major portion of our business now – and we expect them to play a large role in the future.

CPU Review – What products or services which you are currently offering do you feel are industry-leading?

Tim Uzzanti – That would be the SmarterMail and SmarterStats applications we have integrated into our network. Many hosting companies are simply offering open source ‘free’ packages for these utilities (mail and website statistics) – while adequate, these are sometimes of a lower quality than licensed products. In addition, some hosting companies charge extra for web stats or don’t offer true POP/IMAP/SMTP functionality to customers. This is in contrast to CrystalTech – which offers true ‘enterprise level’ tools to all customers, and they are included with each and every hosting Plan we offer.

For example, our stats package has data mining capabilities, it can help with marketing analysis, and we keep customer log files for over a year! This is everything you would expect an enterprise to do.

On the mail side, we’re allowing our customers to manage spam at both the domain level and the user level. So the customer can come into a web interface, set up company-wide spam blocking, and then define further spam filtering for each individual email box. We also offer virus protection on mail, and on some plans we offer the ability to send out up to 50,000 messages per month. So the customer gets enterprise level stats and email features with each and every hosting Plan they purchase.

CPU Review – Do you have any special offers that potential customers should be aware of?

Tim Uzzanti – Our ‘free month’ offer is always available – that is where you pay for your first 2 months and get the 3rd month free. CrystalTech also always refunds for time not used – and when customers submit a cancellation, they get refunded the same day. This helps remove the gray area for the customer – which we try to do any way we can.

CPU Review – What do you consider to be CrystalTech’s strongest asset from the customer’s point of view?

Tim Uzzanti – Service and support. A customer just won’t find another hosting provider that will deliver a quality response in an average of less than 30 minutes. You also can’t find another hosting company who will issue you a refund on the same day you cancel. You also won’t find a hosting company where you can call up and get a system admin on the phone within a few rings. This is all made possible by the level of automation that our company is running – including multiple redundant internal quality checks.

CPU Review – Who is your ideal customer?

Tim Uzzanti – We have every range – from individuals and small businesses up to our dedicated server offerings which suit enterprises as well.

CPU Review – What is the greatest challenge that your customers face?

Tim Uzzanti – How to consistently make a profit. They can only do that with a truly responsive and committed hosting company. Here’s one of my favorite lines, “We’re not going to be able to make everybody happy”. We can make 99.9% of our customers happy – but there will always be someone who we just can’t be accommodated. It might be our fault, it might be their fault – but it’s just not going to work out.

We don’t have contracts for this very reason. You can sign up, and if you like our service you can stay with our service. If you don’t like the service, you’ll get a refund. In this way, we will not be a hindrance to our customers’ ability to be profitable. At CrystalTech we just really care about our customers and their business. It’s hard enough to be profitable in the current economic times – period. I don’t want our company to be a bottleneck to that.

CPU Review – What trends do you see emerging in web hosting moving forward?

Tim Uzzanti – I see the small companies continuing to grow. There are many providers, including CrystalTech, that can supply a dedicated server, stats, email, and a management package to get an entrepreneur on their way to reselling web hosting services. This points at the fact that there will be even more hosting companies.

I think that the very large companies who are slow moving, and slow to react will have problems. We may even see some big players stumble. So I feel that the future is in smaller companies, or with medium to larger companies who can move at the pace of a small company.

Fortunately for us, CrystalTech is a medium to large size company which moves at the pace of a small company, which is to say we have the ability to adapt, to change hosting plans, to change pricing, to adopt the latest technologies quickly and easily! We have always done this and will continue to do it. We’re not planning on going anywhere.

Editor’s Note: To learn more or to sign up for a hosting account please visit CrystalTech Web Hosting, Inc. at http://www.crystaltech.com.