I've been traveling a lot this year and meeting up with many of our dedicated server partners. Back in June, I was in Las Vegas at LT Pact, LayeredTech's customer conference. At HostingCon, I rubbed elbows with the crew from SoftLayer at a cocktail reception at the swanky W Hotel in Chi-town. Last week, I visited the future headquarters of ThePlanet located in Houston, TX. What did I learn? Servers, like pork bellies, are commodities, and just as diversification is good for your stock portfolio, provider diversification may work wonders for your business.
rackAID's Role
While at ThePlanet, many of their management struggled to pigeon hole rackAID into a pre-defined category. We are in the value-added reseller (VAR) space; we are in the integrated solutions vendor (ISV) space; and we are in the managed service provider (MSP) space. Who knew we needed so many acronyms to layout what rackAID does for its clients?
At our core, we are in the service business. We stress to all of our server partners that they need to deliver reliable services to us and our mutual clients.
In my view, reliable means something simple:
You say what you are going to do and then you do it.
Our clients trust us to find the best solution to meet their business needs. We do not care if it takes 10 minutes or 10 days to provision a server. What we do care about is consistency of service and manageable expectations. If a provider tells us the provisioning process will take 3 days and then it takes 2 weeks, we look the fool not the provider. Sure, we all make mistakes and sometimes things do fall through the cracks, but service failures should be the exception not the norm.
Dedicated Providers
If you created a top 10 dedicated server provider list, we likely manage or provide support for servers in that facility. Aside from the three I've already mentioned, we also work with 1and1, OLM, Bocacom, Rippleweb, ServerBeach, ServePath, Superb, Affinity, Godaddy, and Rackspace. I am sure I am missing some, but those are companies we've dealt with in the past week. Our involvement ranges from resold systems with server management and backup solutions to on-demand case-based support.
Working with all of these providers and then spending time with some of their management teams has led me not to recommend one provider over another, but to urge clients, especially shared hosting firms, to diversify their server provider portfolios.
Why Use Multiple Providers?
In my experience, the best leverage you have with any server provider is the ability to transfer your operations elsewhere. Now if you've only a single system, they may not care to much or call you asking to work something out. But if you've a dozen boxes, they may better work with you to keep you as a client. Churn is very, very costly for these companies. So keeping you with them should be at the top of their list.
The key benefit of using multiple providers is you've already built the relationship, learned the providers processes, methods and quirks. You know beforehand what to expect if you jump ship from one provider to move to another. I often find the greatest fear for people doing server migrations is the unknown issues surrounding the new company. If you've a presence in 2-3 facilities, then you can eliminate this unknown.
There are some other benefits besides the ability to switch providers (or threaten to switch providers). If a facility has an outage, only a portion of your operations are impacted. You can also better handle offsite backups and redundancy issues for your own operations and your clients. Also, some providers target different niches, so you may get better pricing on that mid-tier box from one provider while getting a better deal on that entry-level box from another.
There are drawbacks as well. You may not get the same volume discounts, you have to manage two vendor relationships, and your staff has to learn how to deal with two vendor control panels. These are issues not to be taken lightly, but when looking for a server provider you may want to consider looking for server providers.
Vendor Neutral ISV MSP VAR
When meeting with the three companies this year, they all had one question: "How can we get more of your business?" I don't see rackAID ever using a single-source server provider unless one company rises above the others in terms of service and support. The servers are basically identical. The data centers, if N+1, are largely identical. The software provided is identical. So the only differentiating factor is service. The service starts from the moment I order a server to the day I cancel the server. The hardware, network cables, and buildings are largely meaningless if the service within them is not predictable.
We are happy to source servers from a variety of vendors. Though we do not advertise it. We have started offering managed dedicated servers sourced through our various server partners. Right now, we can source servers through ThePlanet, LayeredTech and Softlayer and then add on our management and disaster recovery solutions to provide you with a commodity server with rackAID's support. By having a presence at each of these providers, we hope to gain leverage on the service side that a single server owner could not.
Conclusion
Most server providers provide the same servers and same facilities. The key factor is service. The server provider that delivers on service will win our business and that of our clients.
