This Month We Interview midPhase Co-Founder, Zak Boca,
and discuss their introduction into the Reseller Hosting Market.

Hostchart: What one word best describes the working atmosphere at midPhase and how is that attributing to your success?
Zak: How about three words?

Hostchart: Sure.
Zak: Hard work: As you know, midPhase is a 24 hour business. Our clientele consists of webmasters in over forty countries, so naturally they demand the same response for support and sales questions at 4AM, and at 4PM.

Personal: When we began midPhase we realized that we would be going up against stiff competition, but competition that simply didn’t provide the personal service that webmasters wanted; therefore, we decided from day one to make this traditional business-practice of communicating on a personal level with customers a major focus of ours. This, combined with a solid network has left us with practically a zero churn rate, and by providing service on an obsessively personal level has created an excellent flow of customers through word-of-mouth and personal recommendations.

Hostchart: You have just launched a new Reseller Program. Can you tell us a little about it, and how you decided to enter the reseller market?
Zak: From our induction into the web hosting industry we have been fascinated with the reseller market, and mainly how neglected it is. Reseller plans are intended for start-up companies, or ultimately companies that are looking to save capital by not building an entire infrastructure, even down to renting a dedicated server, which these days is only a few bucks more than a reseller plan. The point is that the people buying reseller plans are trying to save money, and if you compare a typical reseller plan to the newly introduced $50/month dedicated servers, the value for the buck is awarded to the dedicated servers. We believe that reseller plans should offer more value for the dollar, and consumers should not have to jump to a dedicated server that will remain 75% unused, and may require the company to hire an admin to install regular updates. From this, we introduced our All Inclusive Reseller plans, which are just that. They include the essentials in starting up a web hosting company, and entail necessary software that is valued at more than $500.

Hostchart: What do you see as the biggest growth areas of the web hosting industry (i.e. budget hosting, resellers, dedicated servers, managed servers, etc.)?
Zak: I would have to say unmanaged, low-end dedicated servers. It’s an exciting segment of the market to watch, because one day the industry-leader’s (RackShack) prices are cut in half by much of the market. To touch on that, I feel that these newly launched $50/month servers will be a hit to the common webmaster, but as far as the use of hosting companies, I believe that margins are flexible enough for the typical hosting company to afford to collocate or even rent a higher-end dedicated server. I do think that VPS will someday receive the justice that it deserves, because it grants administrators the flexibility that dedicated servers have, but ideally it should be half the price of a dedicated server with virtually the same amount of resources available that a low-end dedicated server has to offer.

Hostchart: What statement would best describe midPhase’s marketing strategy?
Zak: Our marketing strategy is really dependent on the service that we provide, and our ongoing updates to improve our offerings, which result in what we are seeing now--- extreme growth by primarily customer referrals. In addition, we have focused on minor ad-placements throughout web hosting directories and we have recently launched an affiliate program that will offer our customers monetary incentives ($50) to refer friends to our services.

Hostchart: What do you attribute your success to?
Zak: I attribute much of midPhase’s success to the ability to grow at the rate that we are, and still maintain a personal focus. Every single customer, up to the customers that joined us today have received a phone call from an employee of midPhase, if not from myself or my partner to personally greet them and answer any post-sales questions. Many hosting companies, or service-companies for that matter focus 100% on acquiring customers, and that’s as far as the effort goes. We do our best to make to make sure that all of our customers have made their way through the features we offer, and understand how they can fully access the features that they paid for.

Hostchart: How much of your business is North America versus Europe, Asia, and South America? Do you plan on increasing your presence overseas?
Zak: We actually see a great deal of our customers from overseas. As I said earlier, we have webmasters in over 40 countries, and I believe much of that is attributed to having staff available for both sales and support questions 24 hours a day. We are actually talking with the leader in performance-based marketing in Europe, and hope to fully enter that market as we have done in the United States, with the highest affiliate payouts in Europe.

Hostchart: As a leader at midPhase, what is the one thing that keeps you up at night?
Zak: Due to the nature of the business, I’m not much of a sleeper anyway, so even if things are in order I like to spend that extra hour before sleep browsing our customer’s websites, and emailing them with comments. I’m also a marketing buff, and I frequently find myself looking over a customer’s site that sells shoes, or something else that is completely out of my area of expertise, and I email them with how I would market their product. I generally receive thankful replies, but to this day, I don’t believe I have had any follow-ups sharing a success story from my marketing insight. I believe I’ll stick to web hosting!