Latest News
Q&A: Value Reseller President Ali Davachi
By David Hamilton, August 21, 2009
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/082109_QA_Value_Reseller_President_Ali_Davachi
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Coinciding with a re-design and re-launch of its corporate website, private-label reseller web hosting provider Value Reseller (www.valuereseller.com) has launched two new plans, "Pay As You Go" and "All You Can Eat," offering resellers simplicity and flexibility.
Introduced last week, the All You Can Eat plan provides unlimited websites, bandwidth, transfer and disk space, as well as 100 free control panel accounts for $297 per month -- and as a limited time promotion to celebrate its launch, Value Reseller cut the price to $197. The Pay As You Go plan offers disk space for $0.50 per GB and $4 per GB of traffic.
Both plans include 24/7 live phone support, automated account creation and billing, and a 100 percent uptime and satisfaction guaranteed, as well as a full-featured control panels with site building apps, web-based email and blogging/forum software.
The re-designed reseller plans are delivered on a next-generation cloud hosting platform, signalling an industry shift from dedicated servers to cloud hosting. To further differentiate it from competitors, Value Reseller does not compete at the retail level against its partners, re-assuring its resellers of its commitment to helping them succeed.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Value Reseller president Ali Davachi explains the strategy behind the company's new reseller plans and what it means for its partners.
The WHIR: How does Value Reseller define cloud hosting and how does its new "Pay As You Go" plan fit into this model?
Ali Davachi: The cloud and cloud hosting isn't that new. In fact, by its very nature, web hosting is a cloud service. What is different is our offering of virtual dedicated servers rather than a reliance on one physical dedicated machine. There are just too many downsides to trusting hosting to one machine. With a virtual dedicated server hosted by a cloud infrastructure, clients can access a virtualized set of resources, which provide exceptional scalability, high availability and resiliency. The economic advantages are obvious as well, since you can leverage a larger infrastructure without having to pay for it.
Value Reseller's goal is to enable our hosting clients to deliver high quality services to their end customers. To that end, we've implemented an end-to-end virtualized infrastructure so our customers can leverage it to provide a whole range of services to their clients.
Pay As You Go allows customers to only pay for resources they actually use. It was launched to allow our resellers to leverage resources as needed and used, and to mitigate any large, upfront investment on their part. As with all our plans, there are no contracts or minimum lengths required.
In the past few months, Value Reseller has acquired LogicSupport, which provides white-label, outsourced technical support, administration and management services exclusively for web hosts, and Javascript Zoom, a Javascript application that allows users to zoom in and focus closely on website images. Did these acquisitions factor into the timing of Value Reseller's hosting package re-design and website re-launch?
AD: Both acquisitions are in line with our corporate focus of providing the most complete service offering to our resellers. The acquisitions and our launch of new plans weren't purposely timed to coincide. They both lead to our goal of providing the best possible service. The acquisitions increase the breadth of our offerings so our clients only have to deal with a single source. The new pricing models provide more options that fit within the various budget needs of companies, especially during these tough economic times. Our objective is to be on the cutting edge and to consistently offer the latest and greatest, so our resellers can provide the same to their customers.
Why did Value Reseller decide to do away with its dedicated server-based plans?
AD: We found through our years of dedicated offerings that the overhead in managing servers and the impact on customers when issues arise are tremendous. From the time a dedicated server issue crops up to resolution could be many hours, downtime that's unacceptable to most businesses these days. With new virtual dedicated offerings hosted on a cloud infrastructure, there are no worries about single points of failure such as CPUs, motherboards, disks or power supplies. The LogicSupport acquisition gives us the ability to offer fully managed virtual servers and provide end user support for resellers. We believe every virtual dedicated client is unique, and thus we tailor the plans to meet their requirements.
Will existing customers be migrated to new plans?
AD: If clients are happy with their existing plan, we will not disrupt them in any way. If they review our new plans and wish to move we will be happy to do so.
Lately, we've heard the word "unlimited" more often to describe hosting packages, however, it becomes increasingly hard to offer unlimited services as rich media applications proliferate. How unlimited is Value Reseller's "All You Can Eat" plan? Is there are certain point where you have to cut clients off?
AD: The All You Can Eat plan is hosted on our shared virtualized cluster. As such, we can provide a laser focus on availability, network services, and virtual instances. We do have an exclusion for media sharing and file sharing sites. Our offering is focused on our core customers who are clients who provide application and web hosting to their customers. Beyond this, there are no other exclusions in our plan.
