Interview with Siddesh Hoogar, Founder of ScopeHosts
Sometimes you find yourself in an accidental profession. I’d like to say Siddesh’s career path brought him into hosting accidentally, though he had the experience and loved it.
We learned more about his business and what he offers. It’s a fun story to see how this small Indian company now has a global presence.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?
I’m an Internet geek, and during my college days, I was an active member and moderator in some webmaster and entertainment forums. Initially, I had an interest in building my own entertainment forums which needed to web hosting space, but then I started cultivating knowledge in web hosting and the technologies used for providing hosting services. This is how I fell in love with web hosting industry.
How did the company begin?
I founded ScopeHosts along with my closest friends Prateek Shetty and Vijay Patel during our final year of college. The SCOPEHOSTS.COM domain registered was on November 28, 2008. At first having only reseller hosting services, SCOPEHOSTS served active webmasters and their small websites with just shared hosting services. With our passion for providing quality web hosting services and support, the three of us worked around the clock on shifts.
ScopeHosts now serves more than 8,000 clients with around 40,000 domains hosted in our infrastructure. The company, which started with just 3 active staffers, now has 45 highly skilled and experienced staff personals covering 24/7 support. We have 12 onsite engineers at our multiple datacenters reducing any hardware and network disruption to minimal.
What services are offered by ScopeHosts?
Our company started providing only shared hosting services since founded in 2008. At the time we offered in UK and Germany locations. About a year later we started providing VPS hosting in Germany using Parallels Virtuozzo 4.0, with the greater demand of VPS hosting from our existing and new clients. Initially we started with only Linux OS and later after some time we added the Windows environment. By the end of 2010, we had served more than 3,000 clients around the globe.
The year 2011 marked a revolution in ScopeHosts history. This year, we shifted our technology partners from Parallels Virtuozzo 4.0 to SolusVM Powered OpenVZ Virtualization. During this year we extended our services locations in Netherlands, Luxembourg and USA, providing VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers in these locations.
Our research and development team in parallel was striving for implementation of an Xen Virtualization, which was capturing majority of the hosting industry. We successfully launched Xen Powered Virtual Private Servers in 2013 initially with only Linux based VMs and later followed by Windows.
Presently our company is now offering Shared Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, Unmanaged VPS Hosting, Managed VPS Hosting, Cloud VPS, and Dedicated Servers in USA, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Canada and some additional services like Domain Registration, SSL Certificates, Virtualization Solutions and Server Management.
We have recently launched Cloud Hosting Solutions, which is in the BETA stage and it is presently powered with the CloudStack-based KVM platform. The platform is built on open source KVM hypervisors, combined with fast network-attached storage. Hardware failure on a hardware node will cause the Virtual Server instance to restart on a different node, minimizing downtime. Still there is room for improvement and by the end of this year we will have cloud solutions functioning with all updates.
Where are most of your clients based?
Majority of our clients base is from Whole of America and Europe. Quite a number of clients come from the Asia-Pacific and Australia regions. Now we are presently getting good number clients from the China Market.
Where is your infrastructure based out of?
Our headquarters is based in Hubli, India. We have a support branch office located in London, UK covering Technical and Sales Support for European and American clients. We have strong team of 60 working hard on which we are expert in Sales, Marketing, NOC, Development, Technical Support … We believe in communicating directly with clients, providing quality services and support through highly skilled specialists.
We are operating in multiple locations and datacenters by co-locating in every place. We own all the server hardware and networking routers, which gives us full control over our resources and upgrades when required. Presently we own more than 1150+ servers in all the tier III datacenters and operate with 500Gbps state-of-the-art network connectivity.
Can you tell us more about the DDOS protected server offering you have?
Basically now any kind of enterprises small or larger one are targeted with Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks. To protect their business from any disruption, look into web hosting company which provides in-house protection and does not depend on 3rd party. Our DDOS Protected Dedicated Servers are located in Zurich, Switzerland and are monitored with around the clock surveillance, ensuring an absolutely secure environment. DDOS mitigation equipment will protect client dedicated servers from any TCP/UDP based attacks that scale up to 400 Gb/s. Basic 10 Gb/s protection is supplied with every server.
What is the difference between a managed VPS and a cloud VPS?
Our Managed VPS are powered by the industry’s most commonly used software OpenVZ and Controlled by SolusVM Panel. Our fully managed VPS service comes with a free Premium control panel (cPanel/WHM Panel, Plesk Panel, DirectAdmin), Firewall Configuration, Malware/Trojan Protection, Basic DDOS Protection, Webserver Optimization, PHP Hardening and many more. This VPS Hosting Solution is available in multiple locations.
When compared to Managed VPS, Cloud VPS is provided on the CloudStack-based KVM platform. Unlike Managed VPS, Cloud VPS comes up with only Linux or Windows Operating Systems installed. The client has to self-manage the Cloud VPS. A client can order the control panels and other add-ons separately, while ordering the cloud VPS hosting service.
Can you describe the differences between SolusVM and XEN VPS services?
Solus Virtual Manager (SolusVM) is GUI based Virtualization Management System, which fully supports OpenVZ, Linux KVM, Xen Paravirtualization and Xen HVM handling. SolusVM provides a GUI platform for Hosting Provider and their clients to manage the VPS clusters with good security and ease.
Our Xen VPS Hosting services are provided and handled on SolusVM GUI Platform. We provide Linux VPS Hosting on Xen Paravirtualization and Windows VPS Hosting on Xen HVM. Our Xen VPS Hosting is provided in Germany and Netherlands only. Soon we will be implementing it in our other locations.
I see you are having many new upcoming offerings, including a CDN, Canadian hosting, Windows VPS, white label reselling programs, and more. Can you tell us about each of these offerings?
Let me start with Canadian Hosting. We are dropping this location based hosting service by the end of 2016. The potential market which we analyzed during the inclusion of Canada location hosting services is not up to the mark. We have diverted our attention towards Singapore, UK and France locations, presently these locations are in great demand from marketing survey.
Windows VPS Hosting Services is already provided in Germany and Netherlands locations only. Soon by the end of next year we will be launching in all the locations we are operating.
CDN is in our todo list and will be executed in at least a year. As of now our company is concentrating on expanding the business locations.
We already have white label reseller program for VPS Hosting. We will be launching similar programs for dedicated servers for all locations. The resellers will have option to scale up their web hosting business with discount slabs available from 5-25% on each server.
What else is planned by ScopeHosts in the next 5 years?
We will be striving hard to cover up all the areas to stabilize the company services and competitive pricing. Yes! Of course we will be extending our business locations, reaching out to all possible locations of the globe. We are here to concentrate on clients’ productivity, with our impeccable quality product and services. Our team will always try to be the pioneer of client needs.
Is there anything else we should know?
I would like to thank HostAdvice Team and Tamar Weinberg for being patient with me and my team during this delayed interview, which went off the time chart for various reasons. HostAdvice is doing a great job, searching upcoming web hosting companies which are still to establish foot in Hosting Industry Scene. Behalf of my team, I would like to wish HostAdvice a great success in your future work.
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