10 Years in Web Hosting Part 5

Tasked with creating an article about ’10 Years of 34SP.com’ is not an easy one, especially having barely known the company. Ten years ago, when 34SP.com was gametal but with a goal I was quite literally half-a-world away sitting at home In Perth, Western Australia and quite possibly on the telephone trying to introduce a small business owner to the benefits of the Internet and having a website. As Daniel and Stuart both realised there was a niche market for cut-price Internet services. In Western Australia there was a single hosting company quoting prices that even today would scare people. Convincing people to invest thirty pounds a month in hosting a simple website was not easy!

That same year I found myself in Singapore where I ‘saw the light’. I found a website hosting company that made everything much more bearable and business boomed. Unfortunately for my customers these savings must have been coming from the ‘support’ budget but luckily, as I lived on their doorstep I could apply the required pressure when necessary.

Web hosting began to boom with companies popping up right, left and centre. ‘I’ll give them a whirl’, I thought. Two months later they’d vanished and have taken my website with them. This pattern I found repeated over and over and it reached the stage where it just felt safer to me to be with the Singapore outfit. My sites were safe, they offered everything – although I knew it meant me working all-hours in a support role.

Little did I know that many thousands of miles to the northwest 34SP.com was developing into exactly the kind of web hosting environment that I desperately craved. Be it traditional website hosting, VPS web hosting or dedicated server products, the company was spot on.

There’s the old saying, ‘You get what you pay for’ but this isn’t, I find always applicable. Especially when you only look at a situation from a monetary point-of-view. If you take into account attitude and the attitude of like-minded people who realise that good service coupled with realistic pricing is what the market wants then you’re on to a winner.

Ten years on and my customers who have always followed my advice continue to do so. I stumbled upon 34SP.com through a job advertisement and one look at the ‘Who Are We’ page and I knew these guys had the attitude I desired in a company and shared with them.

If I wasn’t working for them both I and my customers in Asia and the antipodes would certainly be with them.