Poindexter's Pond Blog |

Team Approach Builds Customer Confidence

March 26th, 2012 by Kevin Swan in Industry Insights, Sales | No Comments

I am admittedly and proudly a Mac user. And like all Mac users, I know that when an issue comes up, whether it is a hardware and/or software problem, I can always find answers at the Genius Bar. Sure, the name might be a little too much but I will tell you that I have never left the Genius Bar without a solution to my problem.

I think one of the best elements of the entire Apple store is that everyone across every position and department seems extremely well educated and knowledgeable about the products and services Apple offers. No matter whom you walk up to in the store, if they work there, they are going to be able to point you in the right direction. They may not have the answer you are looking for, but they always seem to track down a person who does. It is extremely clear that every team member has a defined role but they work so well as a unit it makes for an extremely pleasant customer experience.

Although we do not have a massive glass building that our customers can come into with their problems we do have a very similar team structure. When customers run into technical issues, they are able to call, email, or instant message their sales consultant. The sales consultant is kind of like the quarterback of the team as he is in constant contact with the account consultant and the systems administrator also on the team. Just sitting together as a unit allows each person to learn from one another other every single day. The sales consultant is always picking up on new language and industry developments, while the tech is able to hear how new business is created. Our customers love knowing that every time they call, they are going to speak to someone on a team that specifically manages their business.

This team approach is also very useful in creating a consistent level of dialogue throughout the entire organization. Our operation guys have an understanding of the sales departments thoughts and concerns and vice versa. We most certainly have customers who are more technically savvy than others and prefer to speak directly to a technician while others would rather speak to the account consultant because they handle more day-to-day activities. The point is that no matter who is the first point of contact for a customer, that if they are not able to easily provide a solution, they know what team member will be able to do so. This level of commitment is the backbone of our Customer Bill of Rights!

Mission Possible: SingleHop Opps

March 19th, 2012 by Kevin Swan in General, Hardware | Comments(3)

In a previous post I alluded to a recent victory our data center technicians and development team captured. Now maybe I’ve been watching too much March Madness, but this was an absolutely unbelievable accomplishment by some of the hardest working guys in the industry. I am very grateful that our Director of Facilities alerted the entire company about this big win! I think it’s extremely important for a rapidly growing company to acknowledge those who excel especially when it is the product of amazing teamwork too!

The challenge came in Wednesday afternoon last week when a client put in an order for 100 servers. Now if you are a SingleHop customer you know we pride ourselves on accurate and extremely efficient installs and if you’re not a client, you do now. Our highly automated infrastructure allows us to deploy virtual machines in under 20 minutes and dedicated servers within 61 minutes. However, a 100 server order is something a little different. In a previous post I mentioned the industrial side of this industry that very few people get to see. They choose a server, they may customize that server to their liking but either way, once they click ‘deploy’ it’s like magic! By the end of the story you’ll understand that it’s not magic at all it’s just good old-fashioned hard work and industry-leading automation.

Once the order for 100 servers came in our data center operations team went into swift action. The first phase was making sure there was the appropriate amount of cab space ready ahead of time. A huge thanks goes out to Nick and Vladi who not only came in early but stayed late too. By Thursday morning Jeff and Matt were able to have all servers audited, reserved, and ready for installation!

While this was going on Joe was working with our client’s developer to make sure he was able to get the image complete and ready for deployment. Again, this is where the industrial side really comes into play. We’re talking about real moving parts and mandatory team coordination in order to get the job done correctly. The installation and QA continued through Thursday night and into Friday morning and because of that we were able to finish ahead of schedule by several hours.

So to our team of data center operations, you guys are truly all-stars! A huge congrats goes out to Nick, Brian, Alex, Joe, Jeff, and Dave for a job well done! Thanks are also very much deserved for the rest of our System Administrator and DC Operations staff whom ensured our other existing and new clients received the support and attention they deserved while this massive deployment was underway.

March Madness, SingleHop Style

March 15th, 2012 by Kevin Swan in Announcements | No Comments

It’s that time of year again! The time of year when you find yourself cheering for school you’ve never heard of. This time of year for buzzer beaters and Cinderella stories. It is March Madness!

We apologize for the late notice but it was a creative spark that happened at the 11th hour from our sales and marketing team. Its went a little something like this: “Hey guys, so if we all love March Madness and participating in office pools, why don’t we get our customers involved too?” I mean, we like you, you like us, why not??

I myself am not even a college basketball fan until, the tournament begins. Which is why you don’t have to know much about the sport, the teams, or even the tournament to be a winner! Honestly, I think about 90% of the time the office pool is won by “Helen” in accounting who made her selections based on the mascots!

If you’re not fired up enough on sheer competition we have added a few levels of incentives to join our bracket challenge! Firstly, the winner of the entire pool will receive a brand new iPad 3! Secondly, we have hidden a killer coupon code on our ESPN bracket page. It only takes about 5 min. to get signed up and make your picks which is a good thing because time is running out!

Good luck my friends!

Behind The Data Center Curtain

March 13th, 2012 by Kevin Swan in General | Comments(1)

Most of us work on a computer or even computers, throughout the day. We move from application to application, website to website, and all of this is happens without a second of thought behind how it all really works. I remember my first week on the job when one of our co-founders said “the hosting business is actually quite industrial,” and I thought to myself “is he serious?”

My, how little did I know! If you have never had the opportunity to visit a data center I suggest you do it NOW! It is truly amazing the amount of detailed production and coordination that goes into place each and every day. No matter the angle you analyze a data center from, the scale and functionality are both extremely profound yet, really concrete and “industrial.” I recently had my first experience with a massive data center in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. I honestly felt like I was in the middle of the James Bond movie!

It was a phenomenal experience to see the nuts and bolts (literally) that have made our success possible. It was also great to be able to put faces to the names of our data center techs. We currently have approximately 75 employees but only half of those are located in our downtown Chicago office while the other half are in one of our two data centers. I’ve always thought of our DC techs as the Marines of our operations. They are always on the front lines – whether it’s a hardware replacement or a complete cabinet assembly, there right there in the thick of it!

Not only do our DC techs have to be extremely well versed in a constantly evolving industry, they have to be great communicators too. Our tech support and system administrators that work in our downtown office are in constant communication with those techs within the data centers. It is imperative that the two sides not only speak the same language but also understand the importance of our clients needs. We have always had extremely rigid internal timing standards and just recently made those same guidelines public in the creation of our Customer Bill of Rights!

It is because of their hard work and talent that I am literally able to write this post at the same time our nearly 4,500 clients’ businesses are running smoothly. Check back this week for a recap of “Operation 100,” a recent install of 100 servers from truck to up-and-running in 48 hours! Cue the “Mission Impossible” music now!

Putting Big Data to Work

March 7th, 2012 by Igor Serebryany in Cloud Computing, Development, Industry Insights, Software | No Comments

If you’ve read my post on the value of good statistics-gathering, you may have guessed that SingleHop is gathering a lot of statistical data for our clients. In fact, we have very extensive performance data on VMs and their nodes — so extensive that it was overwhelming our ability to deal with the flood of gigabytes. As a result, I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to figure out how to fix the problem.

Singlehop uses MySQL as the main persistent store for keeping track of our datacenters. This means information about dozens of different objects — datacenters, cabs, switches, ips, servers, VMs, clouds, inventory, vlans, and more. We wanted to keep this DB small and limited for a number of reasons: faster backup and recovery, faster and more predictable performance, immunity from statistical DOS attacks. We decided to store our statistical data — stuff like access logs, bandwidth stats, and of course virtualization stats — in Mongo because we anticipated eventually having lots and lots of data, and Mongo looked like it would be easy to scale.

Of course, we made a number of rookie large-dataset mistakes. One of the biggest was that we were taken in by NoSQL’s promise of schema-less designs and so we didn’t really plan our document schema. We ended up with several different formats of data stored in the same collection, and having to cover our for past mistakes with logic in the code, creating code complexity. Standardizing the schema is extremely expensive, as it requires re-writing all of the old stats to the new schema.

Recently, however, we were able to rectify this mistake, because we were forced to aggregate our data. By standardizing on a common schema and using it throughout the code, we were able to create automated tools which go back into the data and reduce granularity; we now store raw stats in approximately 5-minute increments for only the first week, and then reduce the granularity to every hour and eventually every day. As a result, we were able to improve statics performance retrieval times as much as 90%. These are real improvements you can see in LEAP if you look at your historic data for your objects!

I’m probably bringing up an issue familiar to many people in today’s software industry. We’re all bombarded by massive amounts of data. The data is full of valuable knowledge, but the sheer volume of it makes learning anything elusive. Because everyone encounters these problems, though, there’s lot of help on the internet with how to solve them. I particularly appreciated a pair of posts from music service SoundCloud: this one, on their troubles with Mongodb (which we also use) and this one, about how they fulfilled their requirements using MySQL.

The moral of both our stories is clear: think about your data, understand your performance bottlenecks, and use the right tool for the job.

SingleHop’s Customer Bill of Rights

March 1st, 2012 by Kevin Swan in Announcements, General, Solutions | Comments(3)

We have all been disappointed with a product or service we have purchased at one time or another. I think the value, from a monetary standpoint, has a lot to do with the amount of disappointment felt when that product or service doesn’t quite work as advertised. For instance, if you get one bad peanut M&M in an entire bag, you’re probably not going to call and scream at someone at Mars, right? However, if you purchase a brand new gadget or maybe even a car and things start to go haywire, something tells me your disappointment and/or anger is going to be fast and furious…

It seems like the more expensive or valuable the item is, the smaller the fine print that accompanies it seems to be. Why is that? At SingleHop we’ve always had extremely rigid internal service level agreements (SLAs) to make sure our customers receive the best service and support as possible. Because of that dedication to the details and the importance we place on our customers’ time, we thought it was necessary to go completely transparent! That’s why I am thrilled to announce the launch of our Customer Bill of Rights!

Finally, a service level agreement that actually means something! Not only are we upfront about the timetables in which we promise to find a solution, if we miss a mark you’re entitled to a credit. Imagine if the rest of the world’s service providers adopted such a system. What if your cable company gave you 10% off your bill the next time they were to a service appointment? HAHAHAHA, that would be the day! Or what if your wireless provider gave you a 15% discount on your next bill because you dropped a call? Something tells me neither of those luxuries are going to end up in your mailbox anytime soon.

The Bill of Rights covers everything from hardware replacement to network uptime. We are absolutely thrilled about the Bill of Rights and hope that you take it as yet another sign of our commitment to excellent service and solutions.

To see the specifics (not fine print) please click here

Tandem by SingleHop Touches Down

February 28th, 2012 by Kevin Swan in Announcements, Cloud Computing, Industry Insights, Tandem Reseller Program | Comments(2)

We have always had a very successful reseller program within SingleHop. The goal from its creation was to always enable our resellers with the greatest amount of resources and complete autonomy. We want our resellers to look and feel like enterprise companies while being able to take advantage of our wholesale prices and white label technology. As we as a company have continued to grow and increase our product line we have passed those advances on to our resellers. This has never been more evident than the redesign of Tandem by SingleHop.

If you are unfamiliar with the term tandem as it pertains to skydiving is a very simple concept. A novice jumper is literally harnessed to a veteran jumper in order to make sure experience and knowledge trump fear and nervousness. Our Tandem Reseller program works in a very similar manner.

SingleHop’s resellers are given absolute complete control over their hardware, which in turn allows their clients to have complete control as well. We also understand the importance of added value when running a business which is why we offer a number of perks other web hosting companies use as additional add-ons and premium costs. Our client portal LEAP3 is the industry’s fastest and most robust and can be completely white labeled for our Tandem Resellers.

The principal product for our resellers over the past few years has been dedicated hosting. We are thrilled to announce that we have now tripled the amount of products that are available for reselling! Tandem clients are now able to sell cloud and shared hosting! We know that both cloud and shared hosting are rapidly growing areas and hope that our clients are able to take full advantage of them!

The Cultivation of Company Culture

February 21st, 2012 by Kevin Swan in General, SingleHoppers | No Comments

I recently came across a great article on company culture entitled “Your Perks Aren’t Motivating Your Employees” via Inc. Magazine. Being a relatively young company, our culture is a constant discussion topic. Don’t get me wrong we have management meetings, marketing meetings, and product meetings just like any other rapidly growing company because those are necessary to achieve success. But culture, is one of those funny things that if you don’t address it, considerate it, or cultivated it, it might evolve into something that is less than ideal.

As we continue to grow both in revenue and in number of employees it’s extremely important that we take our culture into consideration. Understanding that culture cannot be created by Ping-Pong tables and free energy drinks, is a very important distinction for young companies to understand.

Space, as an office space, can be a huge factor in a company’s culture. We for instance have a great space but we have completely outgrown it and have been forced into some less than ideal office arrangements. It would be harmful to the culture if we just continued to cram desks into one another and not acknowledge the less than ideal situation. The flipside is the decision to be very open with the staff about these arrangements being temporary and the stressing the importance of finding the ideal office for our company. Our team leaders have been organizing more social events than normal to make sure our newest employees get the chance to meet everyone. Remember new employees do not have a frame of reference to how it “used to be.”

Our next space will be open air and allow our teams to work closely with one another. But until then it’s extremely important that we not let the physical constraints of our office keep us from building our ideal culture.

Another very important factor in creating culture is free stuff. I know that sounds like a radio station giveaway, but it’s true. The weight of the “free stuff” or office perks has to do with the value in which employees place on it. I know this sounds pretty basic, but you would be surprised how many companies say “I don’t get it, we provide free coffee, what else do they want?” The question is, do people in your office drink coffee? And if so what kind of coffee do they like? Does everyone drink the same kind of coffee? What about those of the offices that drink tea? What is the value of your “free coffee” to those employees? I am happy to say that the drink options at our office rival any 7-11 convenience store.

The true value factor of office perks cannot be forgotten. If it is the perks and even the incentives that are part of those perks will suffer. Think of it this way, if it’s not valued, it’s not a perk. Engaging with employees to find out what they like, want, or need is probably a surefire way to build the culture you want.

Change Can be Scary, But Not With SingleHop

February 2nd, 2012 by Kevin Swan in Announcements, SingleHoppers | No Comments

Any time you go into a new experience there is an adjustment period. This could be purchasing a new car, changing financial institutions, or starting a new job. The bottom line is that change takes time, patience, and understanding. At SingleHop we recently created a team of specialists that help our new clients adapt to their new product and/or services.

After doing extensive research and utilizing our Net Promoter Score (NPS) tool we discovered that the longer our clients stay the happier they are. We saw the opportunity to better our systems and service to our newest clients to ensure that their first 120 days are nothing but smooth sailing. Switching providers can be an extremely stressful process when you consider all of the factors – the migration process, a different technical support team, and billing just to name a few.

Our team of New Client Specialists’ (NCS) goal is to make sure the transition is as seamless as possible. If this means daily phone calls or simply monthly checkups, our guys make sure the job is done and done well. I recently had the chance to speak Ryan Joyner, one of our specialist about this newly formed team.

How important are the first 120 days?

The first 120 days are very important because it sets the standard for what kind of service they are going to receive. The better we can make their experience, the more likely we will be able to build a lasting business relationship.

How have clients reacted when they find out about the level of detailed service they’re going to receive when they become a SingleHop client?

So far we’ve received a great amount of positive feedback about the program. I think people really like knowing they have someone they can quickly contact to solve a problem. This is a note I received from someone just this morning:

“Thanks for your contact. I really appreciate the way you at SingleHop take care of your clients. I never experienced this level of customer care, and I’m really satisfied. For sure I will make contact with you if I have some question or need some information. I also would like to be contacted via email, cause its easier for me, I fell more comfortable.”

To no surprise the New Client Specialist group will continue to grow and improve as time goes by!

Adrienne Wicklund

Account Consultant

Hours

9AM - 5PM

Mon - Fri

I'm here to answer your questions.

Let me know if you need any help.

Singlehop Blog