Turnkey Webhosting

Alabanza says that ISPs looking to get into the webhosting business, "get a fair return on their investment by signing up with us because of the total solution we can provide."

by Jeff Goldman [December 27, 2000]

Alabanza offers a complete package to automate virtually all of the processes required to run a webhosting company. Over 650 webhosting companies worldwide currently lease Alabanza's webhosting technology, with more than 165,000 web sites powered by the software. Fifteen thousand new sites are added to their network every month.

In September, the company launched a new Hosting Solutions division, which will provide customized software solutions for larger clients who want to stay in their own data center facilities.

Hosting with integrity
Thomas Cunningham, Alabanza's Chief Executive Officer, founded the company in 1995. Cunningham's aim was twofold: to make the building and managing of web sites as easy as possible for end users, and to streamline and automate the process of running a webhosting company. The company's name gives a clue to another aspect of its beginnings (the word "alabanza" is Spanish for "praise"). Alabanza was first created to be what Cunningham calls "a Catholic multimedia company."

These days, according to Paul Zohorsky, Alabanza's President and Chief Operating Officer, that vision has settled into a more general focus on integrity. Alabanza has always refused to host any pornographic or otherwise obscene sites. "We have people of many faiths here at the company," he said. "We're just an environment where people can feel comfortable about their faith."

The focus of Alabanza's offering is the Customized Control Panel, which offers essential tools to end users in a uniquely straightforward graphical interface. The company claims that the panel can reduce customer support requests by over 40%. Solutions in the panel include an email account manager, a web site creation tool, a site traffic analysis tool, and Alabanza's proprietary AlaCart e-commerce solution.

For the webhosting company itself, the Alabanza Domain System Manager automates most basic administrative procedures. Domain signup, setup, registration, confirmation, and billing are all handled automatically, and a number of reports can be generated online. The Alabanza software also includes network firewalls, security monitoring, automated backups, memory allocation monitors, port monitors, disk space monitors, and server monitors.

A value solution
It's not cheap. Alabanza's prices are far higher than you'd pay for basic hosting services. The basic SCSI server, with 512MB of RAM, a 733-MHz Pentium III CPU, and an 18GB SCSI hard drive, costs $895 per month plus a $500 setup fee, with 50GB per month of traffic included.

For more demanding users (at $1695 a month plus the $500 setup fee) an advanced RAID server is available, with a full GB of RAM, dual 700-MHz Pentium III CPUs, three 9GB hard drives, plus 100GB per month of traffic included; this option costs. But price isn't everything. Zohorsky explains that the company's intention is to offer a uniquely comprehensive solution. If that means it's a little more pricey, he's confident it's worth it. "We consider ourselves a value solution," he said. "If you're a systems administrator and you can do all the bells and whistles and link things up, and stay awake 24x7x365, that's fine. But we have a solution for an ISP that wants to get into the business—they get a fair return on their investment by signing up with us because of the total solution we can provide. I don't consider ourselves inexpensive, but we consider it a value solution-we have some clients that are doing very, very well; they've made a lot of money for themselves on our solution."

A client agrees
One such client is James Rogers, owner of Rogers Internet Services, who's built and sold two webhosting companies in as many years. "I'm thirty-six years old, and I'd never touched a computer before in my life," he recalls. "Two years ago, I started online, fooling around, and I came upon a webhosting reseller and I started doing it, and I ended up with a few customers. Then I found Alabanza. I leased a dedicated server; I still had a full-time job. I knew nothing—I didn't know HTML, I didn't know CGI, I didn't know Perl, I didn't know anything. I built my first hosting web site, and their guys basically sat on the telephone and answered my questions constantly, twenty-four hours a day, every day."

Rogers credits Alabanza's exemplary customer service, as well as the intuitiveness of its control panel, with the success of both of his businesses. "Their control panel software, there's nothing out there that compares to it," he said. "Their service and support, there's nothing that compares to it. I've dealt with a bunch of people on the web, and most of them? They'll help you up until they get that credit card number charged regularly, and then they don't want to help you any more. These guys, they went out of their way, and they always have."

Focus on automation
Alabanza's product continues to expand in logical ways, while the essential offering remains the same. "We're continuing to enhance our product, continuing to make it cutting edge," Zohorsky said. "Whether it's being able to WAP-enable web sites, or to do caching and content distribution, we have solutions in products in all those areas. So we consider the automation to be excellent, but what we'll be offering now and in the future remains on the cutting edge of what webhosting is."

Zohorsky stresses the value proposition, contending that Alabanza is simply the most logical offering out there for an ISP seeking a smooth transition into the webhosting business. "We have the best automated webhosting solution available," he said. "It makes it easy for a reseller of webhosting to get into the business easily and inexpensively, generate additional revenue with very little investment, and continue to capture additional revenue streams from their existing client base through another offering."

—End

 

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