By Ahmad Permessur
Hosting Tech

Applied Innovations (appliedi.net) is a Microsoft Gold Certified web hosting provider specializing in Windows-based hosting solutions. Carlos Caneja is the Chief Technical Officer at the company.

Carlos, thank you for speaking with us today.

It is my pleasure to be able to speak with you today, Ahmad!

To get us started, could you please describe your company, Appliedi.net, and what kinds of services you provide to your customers?

Applied Innovation is a leading web hosting solutions provider based in Boca Raton, Florida. Founded in 1999, we provide cost effective web hosting solutions with second-to-none technical expertise and customer service, all designed for small and medium sized businesses. As a hosting provider, we have grown substantially over the past several years and now specialize in ASP.NET, E-Commerce, and SharePoint hosting. We also offer an array of Windows-based Virtual Private Servers.

What is your role within the organization?

As the Chief Technical Offer, I work in a range of duties that help bridge the gap between business and technology-I’m half geek and half accountant. I oversee the implementation of the many new technologies and services that we offer, and I also work with the management team to ensure we can maximally monetize these offerings.

One of the things you’ve mentioned in previous press releases has been your support of emerging technologies that tend to support the shift to Web 2.0. One such example of this is ASP.NET AJAX and your SaaS offerings. How do you see the role of Web hosting companies like Appliedi.net changing as the Web itself changes?

These technologies, like many other ones, are changing the way we view and interact with the Web. It is in essence all about allowing end-users to be part of a whole new Web experience—from Blogs to Gmail. Blogs, for example, are simple in practice because they are merely text and some pictures. Therefore, what makes Blogs—or any of the great big shifts of the Web—extraordinary, is not necessarily the actual technology, but rather the ideology that brought these services so close to the end user. Users no longer need an HTML editor and an FTP client to make and publish a web page.

To take that one step further, I will note that the world we live in has very much become a networked world, especially as we edge toward Web 2.0 (and what, 3.0 now?), which will ultimately bolster the importance of the Internet. On point, even I am surprised by refrigerators that have their own IP address! Hosting companies, like Applied Internet-driven services that reside in our networked world.

What plan or service has been most popular over the years? Are there any services you offer that used to be popular but now customers are flocking away from it? Have there been any surprises in this area?

Shared hosting plans in general have always been among the most popular with us. However, in the recent years we have seen Microsoft’s SharePoint as a very well selling service—thanks of course to its reliability and interoperability between the desktop and the Web. It is an effective and efficient method for users to collaborate online, something people are doing and is needed more of these days.

I would also add that we recently launched Virtual Private Servers powered by Virtuozzo and we are seeing a significant increase in demand on this service as well.

Your company was recently named a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Has reaching this status changed your marketing or communications strategies? Do you consider it an important achievement, and if so, why?

Applied Innovations has been awarded Gold Certified Partner competencies in both Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions with a specialization in Hosting Solutions. In order to achieve this certification, we had to meet some rigorous standards, and we are certainly proud of that.

Obtaining this status, however, has not necessarily changed the way we market or communicate. We do find that Gold Certified Partner status achievement speaks for itself when it is mentioned or noticed by prospective customers. As we note, there are tens of thousands of hosting companies in the market, but only a slim minority hold this status.

Appliedi.net offers both a reseller and affiliate program. How has outsourcing some of your marketing efforts to these channels respectively helped build your company? Is there anything you’d do differently?

Although reseller and affiliate programs tend to cross planes from time to time with other hosting companies, you will notice that they are two completely different services from us.

Our affiliate program allows users to get paid while they simply refer business to us. Alas, it is no secret that the best way to gain market share is via word of mouth. We view our affiliate program is a thank-you to customers to consistently refer business to us.

Our Reseller program is different. Featuring a package called Webseller, it allows users to private label their own hosting business—it appears as if their servers are completely independent. We cover these customers on all levels, going as far as billing solutions to private DNS.

Geographic location of the datacenter can be a very important factor for some customers in choosing a Web host. Appliedi.net is based in Florida — how does your location present advantages (or disadvantages) for a Web hosting company?

I could not agree more with that statement. Furthermore, we live in a world that faces natural disasters every day in almost every type of geographical situation—whether it is earthquakes that shake down structures in the West or ice storms that freeze power lines in the North. The Bottom line is clear: providers must be prepared for the worst.

Several years ago we partnered with Terremark, who here in the Miami vicinity are the number 5 recognized Tier-1 Internet Exchange point in the United States. Their incredible facility is a bullet-proof solution against our biggest worry—hurricanes!

What’s the next move for Appliedi.net? Where are you headed next?

As the demand for web hosting evolves, so do the services offered by our company. Today we are looking at offering a greater level of managed services and solutions to better empower our customers to be successful. New service offerings will include new managed hosting offers, new messaging and collaboration services, and many new tools and services to meet the needs of our developer customers.

To learn more about Applied Innovations, visit http://www.appliedi.net.