Sorry for the delay in updates – it’s been a hectic few months and the following post will most likely provide some insight as to why.
How do you define a value added proposition in an industry whereby there is little, if anything to differentiate between you and your competitors? Sure, the ridiculous data allowances helped (but appear to have been now mimicked by a number of our competitors with little regard for their sustainability and with seeming disregard for the business model associated with offering such services) and advertising “exceptional service” is a misnomer as the phrase is usually a standard affair on any web template you can download from TemplateMonster (with all due respect to many of the talented designers which cater to this market).
That was a freight train of a sentence, but I digress;
Staying ahead in this industry is hard. With so much diversity (read: competition) there’s little to discourage your competitors from copying pretty much everything you do. So what’s tiny, two-man-one-woman operation to do? Leverage any and all advantages you have to drive your costs down so you can leverage unencumbered operational expenditure to repurpose as capital expenditure.
In other words, we built a datacentre.
But wait Curtis, aren’t datacentres ridiculously expensive to build, maintain and administer? They sure are, if you’re doing it wrong.
The traditional model of co-location implies significant inefficiency and overheads in the hope the telehouse vendor can service the most number of customers: in order to leverage your investment you need to cater for the lowest common denominator. The beauty of building a facility tailored specifically to the requirements of your business is that you are able to strip out un-required and unnecessary infrastructure used to service requirements that your business just doesn’t need – and tailor those you do specifically to your requirements.
There’s a smug sense of self-satisfaction knowing that you can service a full cabinet full of dual-core web head-ends for less than $500/month in electrical and mechanical costs (for the purists out there, yes that does include chillier load). Connectivity costs real money of course, but short of building our own national network, that’s something we just can’t avoid. I’ll leave the wasting that kind of money to the Australian taxpayer.
What does that mean for our customers? Let’s sum it up in a few bullet points:
- We now have PoPs in three highly available datacetres/carrier hotels across Brisbane, one of them our own.
- We have have the potential to reduce our overheads per server to approximately 40% of what it was when we initially began offering services.
- We have an independent location from which to deliver services, away from any reliance on a particular carrier or location.
- The clean room of our datacentre is nice and cool, so we won’t have to swelter this summer.
With these changes, our service offerings are now even more profitable than they were six months ago. Will we reduce prices? Probably not, we’ll use this money to bring new products to market and seek to continuously improve the service offerings that we provide currently.
Onwards and upwards – I have no doubts that next year will be a year of significant growth, and we have nobody else to thank for this but you.
Curtis