By Ahmad Permessur

Can you tell us more about yourself and your role at Doreo Hosting?

My name is Frank Feingold and I’m the founder of Doreo Hosting. I’m responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations at Doreo.

For how long has the company been in business?

Doreo Hosting has been in business for over 5 years.

What were the challenges you faced when you first started and how did you deal with them?

The biggest issue we had when we started was simply being a little fish in a really (really) big pond. No one knew who Doreo Hosting was and what we could do. We solved that problem by taking on one very large client which was phpBB.com. We donated the hosting services for phpBB.com for the better part of four years.

Doreo Hosting has an excellent reputation for superb customer service and reliability just to name a few. If you had to pick one aspect to attribute to that the success of Doreo Hosting, what would it be?

Well I’d rather talk about two (reliability and customer service) but if I have to pick one it would be reliability. If your web site and email are not up, nothing else really matters. Whenever we make a change (software, hardware, network etc.), we always evaluate what kind of impact it will have on our reliability.

I can’t really talk about reliability without discussing customer support. Whenever we make changes that affect clients, we do our best to inform all the affected clients well in advance. For scheduled maintenance we notify clients at least a week in advance. We also schedule this maintenance during weekend off-hours. Changes do not always go in perfectly, but if clients know what was scheduled they are not surprised by the change.

How large is your company? How do you deal with those working remotely for you?

Staff wise, Doreo Hosting is really quite small. Working remotely is really relative. It all boils down communication and procedure. If you have 3 people that all sit in the same office but don’t communicate with each other it can be worse than then a geographically separated team. Internally we use a wiki for our documentation and procedures.

You’re using Righteous Backup to backup your customer’s web sites every 6 hours. Aren’t your servers’ performances affected during a backup or recovery process?

To be honest, the more often you run Righteous Backup the better it works. When we were first testing Righteous, we ran the backups ever hour. This worked great, but we want to retain 14 days worth of backup. When we looked at the client interface that the product offered 336 versions of backups (24/day * 14 days) was just too much.

Because of the way that the Righteous software works at the Linux kernel level, there is actually very little server impact. In the past when we ran cPanel/Ensim or rsync backups we would see a large load on the servers. With Righteous that load is simply gone.

All of our servers are also dual NIC’ed. One interface is the “public” internet interface and the other interface is for backups only. This keeps all the backup traffic off the public interface further reducing any impact of backups.

Restores (unless we have to perform a bare-metal recovery) really have no impact at all. We have done numerous restores and it’s usually just a file or directory that needs to be recovered. By the time we have initiated the recovery and go to check on the status it’s already completed.

What server monitoring application are you using for your Server Status section?

It’s a script that we found that simply displays all the services on our servers in a “traffic light” style. The status page is not really for “monitoring” it’s a quick dashboard display for clients.

Our server monitoring consists of three redundant monitoring systems. Two of these systems utilize the Nagios monitoring software. One server is located in TX while the other one is located in GA. These servers monitor all our core services every 5 minutes and notify us in case of a failure. We utilize HyperSpin for our third monitoring system. HyperSpin gives us un-biased 3rd party uptime reporting that we display on our status page.

You’ve attended HostingCon last year; what did you learn from this event and how you applied it to your business? Are you planning to attend HostingCon this year?

For me HostingCon is more of a networking event. While I certainly learned a few things (especially in the SEO session) I’m really there to look for potential partners/vendors. Marketing, for example, is not our strongest point so we look for vendors to assist us. It’s also really nice to just meet people that I have communicated with on forums and instant messenger.

So far HostingCon 2007 in on my calendar.

With the boom of Web 2.0 online services, how do you see the role of web hosting providers changing in the next 5-10 years?

The whole web hosting industry is moving so fast that I’m not really sure what will happen in 6 – 12 months. Doreo will just continue to focus on reliability and customer service, and I’m sure we’ll do just fine.

Does Doreo Hosting have any new upcoming products or services we can look for that are just over the horizon?

Well 2006 was a really busy time for Doreo. We implemented MailFoundry hardware spam and anti-virus filter. At the end of the year we implemented our Righteous CDP server. So far we have three main items to implement for 2007:

- A “white label” version of our MailFoundry for resellers
- Implementing the client recovery interface for Righteous CDP
- Upgrading all servers to cPanel 11