Website Hosting Support with 34SP.com

What can I really say about my time here at 34SP.com? Even though I have only been working here for a little over a year this is only a short time of my experience of the company.  The first time I heard of 34SP.com was when a friend secured a job with the company.  Not too soon after I was invited to what can only be described as a small office party more commonly known to the staff then as a ”Rock Band Night”.

When I showed up to the night and met my friend I then went on to meet numerous staff members most current and some now former.  After introductions the night pretty much went as followed.  Here is a guitar, here is a beer, go play rock band and thus followed an extremely entertaining night.

Over the next couple of years I was told of numerous employment opportunities at 34SP.com which I chose not to pursue as I believe the job not to be for me as I felt I lacked some of the skills required and would have preferred a more hands on job in the IT support industry.   During these years I had a more more encounters with the 34SP.com crew as such, pretty much all of them involved fun nights out.

When times were hard, I found myself unemployed with no company seeming to want to give a graduate a chance to prove himself in the industry (A place many a person has found themselves).  I was once notified of a job prospect in the form of the weekend support role.  This time I decided to bite the bullet so to speak and take the plunge into realm of web hosting, an area which I had always wanted to pursue.

Safe to say after an interview and some deliberation time I was hired and started work soon after.  From this point on I underwent my training and after a few weeks was soon running support on my own at the weekends (Cue a bit of I’m so Ronery).  Unfortunately my first weekend alone at the helm was not issue free and arrived at work early on Saturday morning only to be greeted by hardware issues.  After a not so small amount of panic and a quick phone call to the advanced team things were back running smoothly.

The next year involved many things both personal and business related.  Personal ones include both good and bad, most good but some bad (the main bad being I lost my weekend nights out) but all things considered this was a small price to pay for invaluable knowledge, skills and experience I have gained over the last year.  Business related ones however are all good, showing an increase in the demand for our Professional web hosting and dedicated servers which has resulted in the rolling out of many new servers for these products as well as similar increases for both VPS and reseller web hosting products and the hiring of new staff.

Having now moved from my weekend role to a fully fledged member of the full time weekday support team I can only say my time with the company so far has been extremely beneficial and a joy.  Judging from the last year I believe I will be saying exactly the same next year and others further down the line.

I Ain’t No Techie!

Like so many of the staff here, I was a customer of 34SP.com looong before I joined the staff. I was working for a charity at the time (unlike most peeps here, I don’t have an IT background) and had been given the task of making our website more user friendly, and, if possible, enable it to take online donations. The site I’d inherited was hosted with plusnet at the time, written in Frontpage (oh for the days!) and site visitors needed a pair of sunglasses to view it it was that “loud”. Our host at the time was plusnet, and it didn’t seem to matter how I tried to get the site set up, I kept hitting limitations in the server setup that just wouldn’t let me do what I needed to. After asking a few questions in the plusnet forums, their own staff referred me to 34SP.com – always nice when the competition send customers your way! It was their opinion that 34SP.com provided exactly the flexibility and configurability in hosting I needed in order to get the site to do what I wanted. And they were entirely correct – I would never have been able to get pages set up that encrypted form mail before sending sensitive donation details where we had been hosting (the tutorials I passed onto 34SP.com about setting this up are still lurking in the Knowledge Base somewhere). I doubt I’d have been able to do it on any shared hosting server with any other provider to be perfectly honest. From my point of view as a customer at the time, the support was second to none and nothing was too much trouble for the guys (mainly Ian) I had been dealing with. When the opportunity came up to go for a role with the support team here, I really felt that the company had an ethos of friendly, professional and timely assistance that it would be one of the few in the private sector I’d be happy to work for.

Luckily for me, a keen attitude and willingness to help people was, and still is, more important than technical aptitude. You can teach someone the skills to do the job, but you’d have a hard job teaching the right attitude. This came in handy on my first week on the job, when a server went kaput. This was at a time when a dozen calls a day was the norm, so to be suddenly getting that many in an hour was very much a case of being thrown in at the deep end. Happily, our Sys Admin team had everything up and running again in short order. A busy start to my new career, but a sunny disposition had seen me through the “trial by fire”! There had, of course, been some challenging customers, understandably upset that their site was unavailable, but these were far outnumbered by clients who have since become more than just a voice on the end of the phone, they’ve become people you can really have a friendly chat with whenever they call or email (you know who you are!). I think we’ve managed to retain so many of our customers over the years because of this attitude, in that we’re as much about knowing our customers as much as we are about knowing their needs.

We’re also about having a good time whilst we do it Admittedly it’s been at my insistence, but each year since I’ve been with 34SP.com, we’ve held a Eurovision party (keep May 14th 2011 clear guys!). Everybody dips into the lucky hat and pulls out the country that they will be supporting for the competition. The fun then begins when they have to then bring along a dish or dishes representative of their country. I’ve never seen such a disproportionate amount of satisfaction from a programmer in their ability to toast almonds for a Greek pudding. If that’s taught me anything, it’s that sometimes it’s the simple things in life that make the biggest impact.

34SP.com Memories

When I look back over my time working at website hosting company 34SP.com and even before – when I knew the team, but hadn’t started working here yet – I think fondly of the times outside of work when co-workers become simply: friends.

To say that the crew here is fun would be a huge understatement. To say that our outings are epic would equally be an injustice to the language and the outings. While we have spent numerous days and nights hanging out together doing various and sundry activities, there are three main events that really stand out.

1. Stuck in an Elevator
I have only ever been stuck in an elevator once. It was after work on a Friday. A group of 6 of us from 34SP.com were headed from work to the pub for a few well-deserved pints. We took the elevator from the 20th floor of Portland Tower down to the ground floor. At around floor 12 something happened. A lunge or a lurch and then a drop and a hard stop.
”What was that?”
”We just dropped two floors.”
”We’re stuck.”
Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and Daniel called via the elevator phone for help. We stood up for about 3 minutes, and then one by one sat down. Strangely we had already run out of things to talk about, or perhaps each person was engaged in their own thoughts.
”This sucks.”
”I wonder how long we’ll friggin’ be in here.”
Then I remembered that I had my laptop with me. At first I thought maybe I could connect to wifi and surf the web. Then I remembered that I had stuck the ‘Iron Man’ DVD in it the night before.
”You guys wanna watch Iron Man?”
”Hells yes!”

So we all watched about 45 minutes of Iron Man together in the elevator before being pried out by the building maintenance staff. After being ‘rescued’ we proceeded to the pub with a great story to tell about why we were late meeting the rest of the team. As we walked along, I realized that there was no other group of people I would rather have been stuck in an elevator with. Not even close.

2. The Beer Train (Our Monthly Outings)
Each and every month the whole 34SP.com team plus wags goes out for an outing. Sometimes it’s the dog track, bowling or carting – just anything really fun and relaxing. So there was this one time we went out and they all called it ”The Beer Train”. Now since I wasn’t familiar with this expression, I thought we would ride a train around and drink beer in the train. In fact, the beer train was an entire day-long excursion through the north of England and back – stopping at numerous towns along the way and partaking of a pint at a local pub before re-boarding the train to continue on the journey. Now needless to say, this creates a bit of a rowdy bunch of revelers on the train. It was probably the most fun I’ve had on a train. Period. You can view the pictures below to see some of the team both on the train and in the pubs.

3. Christmas Parties
It would take far too long to write down all the great times we have had during our end of the year (read Christmas) parties over the last few years. The basic premise is: hit the pubs for a few great pints then move along to an elegant dinner consisting of multiple courses accompanied by fine wine and then move along for a nightcap and dancing. I hope that the pictures give a sense of how great these evenings are. I do remember one incident quite clearly though.

We were having our soup course at the restaurant and we had all opened our crackers but there was one extra. Now keep in mind that these are ‘dress up’ events where one wears their nicest clothes to fit into the elegant restaurant atmosphere. So I am sitting there soaking up all the great doings and Tom our newest engineer at the time finds this extra cracker and holds it over his head – and then pulls it really hard. The prize came zinging out at light speed, flew about 6 feet across the table and landed in the middle of my hot soup – drenching my finest outfit with soup and goo.
After getting over the shock of the ”explosion” I started laughing. Then we all started laughing. You just couldn’t do that on purpose if you tried for a million years – perfect shot. Needless to say I cleaned myself off and continued to have one of the greatest times of my life with the greatest people on the planet – the team from 34SP.com.

The reason that 34SP.com is so great to work together with is that the people who work here are genuinely caring and giving. Ten years is only the beginning as long as we keep the spirit of companionship and comradery going. All the thoughtfulness and generosity that have blossomed in our outings simply confirm that when you need them, the 34SP.com team will be there for you. Here’s to the next decade!