Green Geeks Interview with Trey Gardner by www.thehostingnews.com

Green Geeks Interview with Trey Gardner

April 28th, 2010 By: Hosting News

Tell us a little about your background. What industry experience you have? And what did you do before your company?

I have been in web site hosting for over 10 years in a number of positions including management, service development and business development. I have experienced practically every aspect of hosting and I have put together one of the best teams I could possibly have hoped for here at Green Geeks.

What is the History of your company and what has led to your success in the hosting industry?

As I mentioned I have been in the hosting industry for over a decade and I knew that when I built Green Geeks I wanted to take ownership of every aspect to make sure that the company ran correctly. This does not mean however that I am a control freak, just that I wanted to have over site on as many areas as possible so that my personal standards of quality for the business were imbedded into all aspects of the company.

In addition to my personal over site in all areas of the business I hired the best people I could find and in all the years in hosting I knew some great minds to bring into the business. Those great minds as well as my involvement have allowed us to put together excellent services and support. Like most things however, there is an evolution to get to become the best in a certain area whether it is support, features, uptime so long as you continuously look for solutions and improvements you will find a better way to do something and this is what we have done here.

Tell our readers about your company, your products and services.

Green Geeks offers shared and reseller web site hosting services. Our shared web hosting services offers customers unlimited disk space for their web site files and traffic with a free domain registration and the ability to host unlimited domains. Bother services (shared & reseller) come with cPanel and the fantastico script library, which is the most popular web hosting control panel and script library in web hosting.

There are tons of features for our clients and we have terrific uptime and customer support. To find out if we support a particular feature you want with your hosting I would encourage you to check our web site or contact our support department who are always happy to assist our existing and future clients.

Do you have any other changes or additions to your service in this coming year?

We are looking at possibly offering dedicated server packages, we’ve offered them in the past and discontinued them so that we could focus in some other areas which we have really made rock solid and now we are contemplating if we want to get back into dedicated server offerings.

How does your company fit into the web hosting industry? What makes you different?

I believe we are better than 99% of the web hosting companies out there and I believe that we are better in so many areas that it would be a bad decision to host anywhere but Green Geeks.

First off from an environmental friendliness standpoint, no one compares with us and we wish they would. There are companies who have gone green and we do thank them for doing so but there is so much to do in terms of spreading the message and enacting real solutions to our industry’s carbon polluting problems that we always strive to do more and we hope others follow.

From a hosting services and support stand point we have very few who can match what we do as well. This is not to say there are good & honest hosting companies out there but we live by different standards than most.

Many companies outsource support or hire cheap uneducated support reps, we don’t, we hire the best we can find and we train them on all of the support aspects that they will have to know.

Many companies purchase cheaper less robust servers. Again we make the investments to ensure that we have the best servers we can buy that can maintain great uptime and speed for our customers.

We also are honest in what we provide and we don’t try any bait and switch or up selling to our customers and we offer a 30 day money back guarantee so that if anyone decides they don’t like us they are able to get their money back

How many customers does your company currently have and what have you found has been the best way to grow your customer base?

We have over 7000 customers. We have found several ways to grow our customer base including online marketing, group associations and client referrals.

Do you currently have your own datacenter and where are they located?

Our servers are co-located at the SingleHop award winning data center in Chicago. We do not own the servers but rather prefer to lease them which makes maintaining the servers far easier as if we have a problem hard drive, RAID card or server, we can quickly have it replaced and drop the cost of the old bad server.

Do you have multiple backbone connections to the internet?

Absolutely we have redundancy to the internet and we have access to most major bandwidth providers through our Juniper routers and Cisco and Juniper switches.

As far as support goes, do you offer true 27/7/365 support with live technicians?

We have always provided 24x7x365 support and over the years we have perfected how we provide support to our clients, again this is part of the evolution of our support area. We have 3 tiers of support which allow us to handle the easy mid level and tough issues our clients face. Tier 1 handles the easy stuff, getting clients information and helping them with quick fixes. Things that may take a bit of research get pushed up to Level 2 which either handles the issue or if there is something server side that they don’t understand or an unrecognizable issue they move that to tier 3 which are our server admins who are our tier 3 reps.

The hosting industry has changed a lot in the last year, what predictions do you foresee for this coming year?

There are always rumors floating around the web hosting industry in regards to mergers and acquisitions of hosting companies which make for interesting discussions. Outside of that I predict we’re going to see more companies embracing the Green aspect and there could be a couple of new technologies I have been hearing about but to really go into detail would be speculative, we’ll see what happens.

Lastly, what is your favorite website and the most recent book you have read?
I am currently reading The Pianist, which was made into a movie several years ago about a Polish Pianist who lives through Poland’s occupation of Germany in World War II. I am also finishing The Next 100 Years, Voltaire’s Candide and Strong Fathers Strong Daughters about raising daughters for which I have the pleasure of having the greatest little girl in the whole world.