By Douglas Hanna

I sat down with Ben Gabler, Operations Manager at shared hosting company HostNine’s offices in Jupiter, FL a few days before the company was set to publicly launch its new product, previously dubbed “future”, but officially called Reseller Central.

Question 1: Tell me about your background and how HostNine came about.

HostNine pretty much started last year with a couple of individuals that got together and had an idea to take our experience and put to towards a good cause and do something we all loved to do.

Question 2: What is your role at HostNine? What do you do on a day to day basis?

Pretty much everything from helping customers to marketing and sales to management of the employees. As far as our product development and things like that go, I make sure everything is as up to date as possible.

Question 3: HostNine experienced a lot of growth very quickly and very early on. What caused all of this?

Just the fact that we are a very honest company and we got a reputation for that pretty quickly. People realized that they were able to trust us with not only their data and web sites, but with us as people. Being polite and helping customers regardless of how much they pay or how long they’ve been a customer. The different types of marketing we were able to do and the the partners that we partnered when we started such as FastServers.net and ModernBill.

Question 4: How is HostNine dealing with that growth?

We are always staying on top of the employees. We are always hiring and training new people constantly. We set up a new phone system a couple of months ago so we can handle more call volume. Basic things like that – a lot of good management.

Question 5: What type of public interest was there about the “future” before its launch? What tactics did you use to promote what later became Reseller Central?

We worked on gathering what was missing today. What wasn’t out there and what people could benefit from. We presented that in a way that it could show where we think hosting is heading in the future. Pretty much changing the way that people look at reliability and uptime when it comes to hosting their web sites on the Internet.

Question 6: What is the elevator pitch for Reseller Central?

It really depends on what resellers are trying to do these days. The problems that we see with resellers is that they A) can’t figure out WHM or B) they don’t have the time to sit down and learn it. We wanted to make it as easy as we possibly could – not only just the way it functions on the backend, but the way that customers see the frontend of it. We wanted to make resellers feel more comfortable with hosting in general as far as adding and managing their domain names.

Question 7: What are Reseller Central’s key features?

One of the biggest key features is that it takes web hosting and kind of globalizes it. We are able have servers all across the world. Resellers can go in at any time and when they go to create an account, they can choose what location they want their web sites to be in. Whether it be in Illinois, Iowa, California, New York, London, Australia, they can pretty much choose from any number of locations that we have.

Another great feature is that even if they chose the same location for all of their web site (if they wanted to have them all in New York), we have so many nodes available in that location that every time they go to add a domain name, it actually randomizes what server in New York they will be put on. That way, they may have 20 domains added throughout 18 or 19 different servers at any time. Say server 5 has a hard drive failure; they may only have one web site affected for their entire account base.

Question 8: What value does Reseller Central add for the average reseller?

It depends on how they value their business. If you want to trust one server and data center with your entire business, and you are making a living off of that, then it is a pretty big risk to take these days.

The data center could go out of business, or there could be a storm, a power failure, anything – you can go three or four days without a web site – there are so many hosting companies that 10 minutes of downtime a month could make them go ahead and move their stuff to somebody else.

It is taking every precaution you can to protect your business and your investment.

Question 9: What changes and additions can users expect from Reseller Central over the next three months or so?

It is really hard to say. There are so many things we can do with it. We are really grasping for the feedback from the reseller. We want to give them what they need and what they’ll use most. Nobody really wants a feature that is never going to be used and is just kind of there. We would rather have a bundle of amazing features that resellers can benefit from on a day to day basis.

One of the better things that we have planned is the modular aspect of creating accounts. If you want Ruby on Rails or ASP, or a certain version of SQL server, you can pick it during setup. There are all different kinds we are planning with this.

Question 10: You mentioned that cPanel hasn’t seen this yet. What do you think their reaction will be?

I think they will be excited and amazed at what we have come together and done as a company in our first year of being in business. With us pushing Reseller Central, being that it is based on cPanel, whether we have 5 or 500 servers using it, that is just more licenses that HostNine has to register through cPanel. If this is just an avenue for us to increase our sales and server purchases, I am sure cPanel will be all for it.

Question 11: HostNine is a pretty small company. What is there to stop a big company from developing something similar and offering it cheaper?

There isn’t really anything. If it is going to happen, it will happen. There are plenty of people that copied cPanel’s idea and made their own control panel, but still to this day, cPanel is the number one leading provider.

Being that we developed this idea from the ground up, we will always have a better grasp on what can be done with it, how it works, what can be added to it, how to add things to it. We are going to be 10 steps ahead of them [our competitors] at every time because we are launching this and will continue to develop more features to make it the best possible solution we can.

Question 12: There is a thread on WHT comparing your “future” and its surrounding hype and publicity with some similar marketing tactics Site5 did a year or two ago. Is this parallel coincidental or was it done concisely?

It is more coincidental than anything.

How would you market something like this – would you just throw it out there and hope that people maybe slowing find out about it?

We feel it is such a big impact of what we are announcing and what we are providing to resellers and to hosting in general, it kind of deserves that anticipation of what is this going to be and how can it change. In our eyes, this is a big change because not only does it get us thinking and constantly working on this, but it will get other people thinking about how they can make a difference. I think it will actually level out the industry a little bit better. When you have 10 companies offering 10 different solutions it is better than 10 companies offering the same solution. That kind of gives everybody their own little niche. It lets customers choose what they want instead of being so confused about what company to go with when everybody’s offering the exact same thing.

Question 13: On that note, are you modeling anyone in particular company (in the web hosting industry or elsewhere)?

Not really. We try to separate ourselves from the industry as far as our competitors go as much as we possibly can. We’ll never compare ourselves to another hosting company even though there are plenty of good ones out there. This is based off of what we thought was good and what we thought would make a difference. This is based on customer and employee feedback and testing. It is pretty much based on that.

Question 14: What is next for HostNine? Are there more products like this in the future?

Mainly enhancements to Reseller Central. Perfection – adding as many feature rich requests we can for resellers. Based on their feedback and what they want to use and what we think will be a good enhancement. It may not be just specifically for certain things. There are all different kind of things we can do with this. Our primary focus is always on the customer and on customer satisfaction. As far as our service and product goes that we are offering, this is definitely our primary focus as far as we are going to be offering as a product line.

Thanks to Ben for sitting down with me. You can learn more about HostNine and Reseller Central at hostnine.com.