We Talk with VistaPages President, Kaumil Patel

Kaumil, as President of a growing Hosting company, what is the one thing that keeps you sound asleep at night?

Our rock solid infrastructure. We have spent roughly one and a half years building our infrastructure consisting of IBM and Cisco products. Not to mention our proprietary customer management and order system, built from scratch to handle any kind of load. I have full faith in our system, and that’s what keeps me sound at night.

On the other hand, what is the one thing that makes you jump out of bed in the morning?

The single most thing that makes me jump out of bed every morning is our customers. Since the nature of my job is to not only lead the company, but to manage our customer service side of things, it makes my day a whole lot of fun when you are thinking of ways on how to improve customer satisfaction. It’s also great waking up in the morning and knowing that you’ll be making a bunch of people happier today.

Your company is focused in the highly competitive Budget Unix Hosting market, how do you distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack?

Our market is definitely competitive and it’s a good strategy to stay ahead of the game. Our company simply does what it can do to give the customer whatever they need to create an online presence. We’re different because we actually own all the hardware, have a proprietary customer management and ordering system; every aspect of a very expensive managed account is included. We believe that our service is different because of the level of customer service. We take our customers by the hand and guide them in the right direction; we do more for our customers, instead of the ordinary support.

As a follow-up, considering budget hosting, dedicated servers, reselling, windows hosting, co-location servers, etc., where do you see the biggest growth areas in the hosting industry over the next couple years?

As time goes on, individuals are getting more and more skilled and are starting to manage their own servers and what not. In my opinion, the dedicated server market, especially the new low-end $99 dedicated server market is going to see the biggest growth.

What is your company's advertising and marketing focus?

We focus primarily on the small-to medium-sized businesses that require web hosting services, so that's where we primarily market ourselves. We also have started to take on smaller colocation customers, although we do have some large customers, that have grown with us.

Can you briefly tell us how you got started and the background of the company?

It all started at the age of 14. I use to run a freeware download web site, and needed hosting. So I found a place to host (I won’t say where). It was fine, and then something happened, I couldn’t get my backups, kept getting knocked off the servers for outrageous reason and I finally said enough is enough. I decided to create a web hosting company that would treat customers the way I wanted to be treated when I was a customer, and thus far has proved very successful for VistaPages. The company was established in Ontario, Canada, in late 2004.

What unique skills do you bring as President that has contributed to your fast success?

I will start of by saying that I am not perfect, and I am not the "best" in this market, that's just being plain honest. However, the skills that I bring to the table each and everyday is an essential part of our business that has kept us alive for almost 3 years now. I have been involved in the web hosting industry for over 9 years now, and know the ins and outs of the Industry. I have also gathered important and useful contacts in the Industry, and anyone in business will tell you that contacts are key. The leadership I bring to this company has allowed us to maintain a very high customer satisfactory rate, in turn a successful, profitable company.

I see that customer support is a focus for you. How has that contributed to your success?

This is key. Most forget that customers are the ones that will talk about your service and get you more customers for free by word of mouth. Our dedication to providing industry leading customer satisfaction is paying off. Customers love to be treated and held by the hand, and when they see that they will be helped no matter what the circumstances are, they will stay yours forever. Building one-to-one relationships with your customers is vital to success.

Do you have any plans to venture into the budget windows market?

We are currently testing windows servers, and how they will integrate into our existing infrastructure, both technology and customer support wise. We want to ensure before we launch a product or service, we can fully support it and is glitch free; for the most part. We should see Windows hosting on VistaPages in late 2007.