Interview with Tony Valenti, CEO of PowerDNN
Hello Tony, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Could you please introduce yourself to our visitors?
Hi. Thank you very much for the interview. My name is Tony Valenti. I am a long-time DotNetNuke community member as well as the founder and CEO of PowerDNN.
How did you get into web hosting business?
This is actually a two-part question since I actually got into Web hosting twice.
Back in the early days of DotNetNuke 1.0 I was a software developer and DotNetNuke consultant. I specialized in writing custom modules for DotNetNuke as well as troubleshooting some of the most complex DotNetNuke issues that people would find.
As DotNetNuke continued to grow, I noticed that many people were asking me who I recommended for hosting. Unfortunately, nobody was doing a good job hosting DotNetNuke so I had no recommendation. After doing a bit of research, I was convinced I could do a better job than any of the other hosting providers. I bought a “server” (it was really just a glorified desktop like most hosting companies provide) and started a small hosting business called “MobileNow” out of my basement.
Before I go any further, I want to talk about a core value of mine. As a software developer and consultant, I always believed that it was extremely important for me to take care of my customers. After all, if the customer was paying me, they had serious needs and they needed serious results. During my consulting career, countless times I burnt the midnight oil in order to help customers solve their problems.
Anyway, MobileNow was doing quite well but it had a major problem: I was selling $5-$10 hosting just like everybody else. It was very frustrating for me because I really wanted to go above and beyond what normal hosting providers do. When a customer would ask a question like “How do I do X in DotNetNuke?” or “I am getting an error in DotNetNuke, what does it mean and what should I do?”, I truly wanted to be able to answer their question. The problem was that if a customer was paying me $5-$10 per month, I simply couldn’t afford to help them with much more than what any other hosting provider was doing. I wanted to do more for my customers, but I couldn’t.
After doing this for a while, I decided that things had to change. People didn’t just want hosting support, people wanted DotNetNuke Support and I was going to give it to them. I was going to provide business-class service to all my customers. I was going to make the investments so that any company would be crazy not to host their DotNetNuke website with me.
However, in order to do that, a few things needed to change.
- I invested in colo space at a Tier IV datacenter. If you’re not familiar with datacenter tiers, Tier IV datacenters are the highest tier and provide the highest levels of uptime and security. Companies like Wells Fargo , AmeriTrade and PayPal are typically the kind of companies that use Tier IV datacenters. Those companies are in the same datacenters that we are.
- I invested in real, high-quality servers. While our exact specs are always changing, at the time of this article, our last batch of servers were 12-core servers running on Intel Nehalem processors with 24gigs of RAM. Nehalem processors are generally used in super computers.
- I hired DotNetNuke experts and we staffed up 24/7. Customers can call us any time, day or night, and they’ll be speaking to a DotNetNuke expert who speaks English as their primary language.
After doing this, I rebranded MobileNow as PowerDNN.com and we have been servicing our customers with business-class service around the clock ever since.
What are, in your opinion, the most important aspects when choosing a web hosting provider and why?
I think the most important aspect of choosing a hosting provider is to understand what you need and what you are paying for. This might sound obvious, but let me give you a real-world example:
The typical DotNetNuke website is approximately 100mb in size. We know this because all we host are DotNetNuke websites and we host more DotNetNuke websites than any other company in the world.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people get burned by choosing certain low-cost providers who offers extremely large volumes of disk space but don’t answer the phone when you call their tech support. In this case, the customer needs tech support but they’re paying for disk space.
It is commonly believed that tech support is the crucial factor determining quality of hosting service, what are your thoughts on this?
I believe that tech support is the crucial factor in determining the quality of ANY service.
Just think about the last time you called tech support for your cell phone. Did you have to navigate through 10 levels of an automated system in order to finally spend an hour on hold before eventually getting transferred to an agent who doesn’t speak English and knows less about your phone than you do? Frustrating, isn’t it?
I believe that tech support makes or breaks a product or service.
What motivated your decision to specialize in DotNetNuke hosting, rather than catering to all markets?
I am a firm believer that you should do one thing and do it well.
What's the difference between running DNN on other hosts and running DNN on PowerDNN? What specific features does your company offer that sets apart PowerDNN from other web hosts capable of running DNN site?
The two things that set us apart from other providers are our Support and our Innovation.
The most obvious thing is our support for DotNetNuke because we are essentially a hosting company and DotNetNuke consultant all rolled into one. I’ve already talked about this a lot already so I’ll move on.
Innovation is the second pillar that our company is built on. Every week we meet to discuss new ideas and what we can do to implement them. This has provided us with things like the PowerDNN Control Suite, PowerCache, PowerGrid Private Clouds, the PowerDNN Site Optimizer, our KeepAlive service, our DotNetNuke Security Scanner, and many more internal innovations. Even though we have an established reputation for being the best DotNetNuke hosting provider, we are always looking for ways we can provide more to our customers.
Can you tell us a little about PowerDNN dedicated servers? Are they managed? What level of management is included?
Unfortunately, in the hosting world, “managed” can mean any number of things. Let me tell you about our servers and what we do for our customers.
Every single server we sell is a complete ready-to-go webhosting company: all you have to provide are the clients. Dedicated servers are configured exactly the same way as our own shared hosting servers and include everything you need: Email, FTP, DNS, SQL Server, ASP.NET, the Plesk Control Panel, the PowerDNN Control Suite, and quite a bit more just in case you want it. The PowerDNN Control Suite automates many complex tasks such as DotNetNuke Installs and Upgrades and if you ever have any problems or any questions, we provide 24/7/365 phone and ticket support.
What are "PowerGrid Private Clouds"? Can you tell our audience more about this service?
PowerGrid Private Clouds are advanced environments that are designed to handle the world’s largest and most load-intensive DotNetNuke websites. PowerGrid Private Clouds include the load balancing capabilities of webfarms as well as the hot recovery capabilities of SQL clusters. For maximum performance, PowerGrid Private Clouds use physical servers which can be hot-added and removed in order to quickly scale up and down based on needs.
PowerGrid Private Clouds power the public websites of Fortune500 companies, national sports conferences, and government entities. If you need a highly-scalable, fully redundant multi-server DotNetNuke environment, a PowerGrid Private Cloud is for you.
Can users run other content management systems on PowerDNN servers?
From a software capabilities perspective, our servers are going to have just about anything you could ask for pre-installed and ready to go. This includes Classic ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, Phython, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server so you can run whatever you want to on our servers. However, we specialize in DotNetNuke and are able to provide advanced technical support and technical assistance for it.
Do you offer DNN transfer services?
Yes we do and we make things quite easy.
When signing up, simply select “I have built my website somewhere else and would like to transfer it to PowerDNN.” If you do this, we’ll send you the credentials for our write-only FTP site so that you can securely upload a ZIP file of your website and a SQL Server .BAK of the database. Once you’ve done that, we’ll handle the complete site migration process for you including restoring the SQL database and updating your web.config connection strings.
Could you share some info about your data center?
We currently have 4 datacenters in the US and 1 datacenter in the UK. We use only Tier IV datacenters which are the highest tier and provide the highest levels of uptime and security. To give you a better idea of how secure Tier IV datacenters are, Wells Fargo , AmeriTrade and PayPal are also in the same datacenters that we are. Multiple physical and biometric security measures are in place. We recently upgraded our bandwidth capabilities from 10-gigabit to 100-gigabit.
How would you describe the growth of your company? Slow, moderate, rapid?
Our growth is based on the growth of the DotNetNuke ecosystem.
Are you satisfied with your current success?
We believe that regardless of how good we may be, we can always be better. Every week we have a management meeting where we discuss new ideas about ways we can improve the company and our service to our customers. We are always looking for ways to improve.
How do you make sure you have satisfied customers?
First, let me say that if your goal is to have “satisfied” customers, you are setting your goals too low. We don’t want satisfied customers, we want Raving Fans.
Every time a customer contacts us, we ask them to complete a small 5-question survey about how we took care of them. I personally read every single survey result and if a customer is only satisfied, we personally call them up and find out what we can do to improve.
If you had a general criticism of the web hosting industry, what would it be?
Don’t outsource your “support” to third world countries and people who can’t speak English or have accents so thick they are not understandable.
What's your view on overselling, since it is always a hot topic in web hosting marketplace?
First, if you don’t know what overselling is, overselling is when a hosting provider sells more resources than they actually have and essentially places a “bet” that they won’t have to deliver on what they’ve promised to their customers. For example, let’s say that a web hosting provider is selling hosting plans that offer 1GB of disk space and is putting 200 customers per server, however, the server only has a 100GB hard drive in it. If you do the math, the hosting provider really should have at least 200GB of disk space in order to service their customers; they have “bet” that their average customer will only use 50% of their disk space.
I think overselling/oversubscribing should be avoided at all costs. First, it is unethical, and second, if the hosting provider bets incorrectly, it can create multiple issues for their customers including poor performance and downtime. We see this happen with other providers all the time, but I refuse to ever do this at PowerDNN.com.
What is the next big thing in the online world? What could it be?
That’s our secret and we’re working very hard on it. Keep your eyes and ears open and you’ll see our announcement.
What are your points of interest when you are not hard at work?
I am a restaurant/food critic and I frequently write reviews of new places I visit. I thoroughly enjoy cooking a good meal and then eating it.
Thanks a lot for talking to us and taking the time to answer our questions. Do you have any closing thoughts?
I think you should build your site in DotNetNuke and host it with PowerDNN.com.
Check out PowerDNN.com - Fastest DotNetNuke web host!
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