New Office = New Inspiration

April 25, 2008

Skilled employees are one of our most valuable assets therefore our German team has moved to a new wonderful office in a newly renovated historic building. With both city and bay views it is a very inspiring location to work from.

Office Building at Night

System Administrator / Development Area

I saw something the other from a fairly large webhosting company that astounded me and might even insult a fair amount of their customers.

What they did was to offer large free upgrades available to new customers only! Basically new customers got three times as more storage than older more loyal customers - for the exact same price!

While I understand that there are pulling a promotional I still do not find it good from a customer standpoint when loyal customers finances upgrades for new customers only. It simply violates my principles for good business.

In my opinion the entire telecom industry should be looking more towards how good old offline companies are building value for their customers. The most successful companies are building relationships with customers based on trust and my providing loyal customers with the best deals.

At Servage we want to follow the good "old-fashioned" business model that a lot of other online companies do not seem to believe in. Therefore we upgrade accounts of all current customers a little bit every day so that loyal customers always get the absolutely best deal - after all they are the key to our success and generate most of our revenue.

It has been a really busy and successful year at Servage Hosting with higher growth than I ever dared to imagine! The success has been made possible by our team of extremely committed employees who really walked those extra miles for our customers.

So what did happen?
Well most importantly our customers kept telling the world about our services! Customer referrals have always been our main source of new customers so we can thank our customer for our success - and we never forget that. This motivates all members of the Servage team members to keep doing amazing things so that we continue being the best hosting provider around.

"Bästa möjliga anslutningar" - say what!?
Yes guess it, Servage is expanding with localized versions. This year we started offering the world a Swedish version (what to see something funny: servage.se) and we will expand in multiple new countries during 2008. Our goal is to provide services in as many languages and markets as possible to ensure our international customers with an even better service.

We eat fibers for breakfast
In ten years we will look back at 2007 as the year of the big updates. With three new gigabit connections and hundreds of new servers our administrators (myself included) spend countless hours installing new equipment. This is one of our favourite things to do as it is very satisfying to scale our system to the benefit of our customers. Our systems are now more redundant than ever before but of cause it can get even better - and we already have a plan!

At last I would like to take this opportunity to wish every one of our customers and employees a merry Christmas (for those of you celebrating) and a happy new year!

Is open source a true alternative old fashioned routing solution when security, stability, scalability and uptime are required to be perfect? Yes, defiantly we turned off our last Cisco router a long time ago!

Our company has set a goal to only use open source products before the end of 2008. At this time all systems must been shifted over to open source based systems (except for some Office and accounting applications). Our movement towards an open routing platform was an important step to achieve this goal.

We gave our self the almost impossible task to get fairly common server hardware to perform the same tasks as traditional expensive commercial routers. We were actually fairly skeptical when testing this but excellent results started showing almost instantly!

How we implemented the New Routers
We modified the open source systems a bit (which is easy to do as they are – well – Open Source) and tested them systems extensively for a period of time. As the new system was determined stable it was taken into the production environment but still with the old Cisco system as failover (just in case). After a few months of testing Servage shifted all routers to the new setup and have not experienced anything change but improved network performance and stability

As you probably already know a hosting company like Servage has a huge high end network using eBGP, iBGP and OSPF routing multiple gigabit of Internet traffic. Open Source routing works great for us – chances are that it could benefit your network also!

Steffan Sondermark Fallesen / My NetId