Interview COO INXY: “Hosting Companies Always Seek to Boost Sales”

Photo Vadim Kolchev
Vadim Kolchev, СOO INXY: “Hosting Companies Always Seek to Boost Sales”

INXY.HOSTING offers a marketplace where you can choose from a wide selection of hosting services including dedicated servers, CDN solutions and managed DNS services. Some well-known hosting brands offer their products here, such as Verizon, Highwinds, Servers.com, and Leaseweb. HostingJournalist sat down with Vadim Kolchev, COO of INXY, to talk about their business model.

“The INXY Hosting marketplace aims to provide all major hosting solutions a user may need,” said COO Vadim Kolchev. “All hosting solutions we provide go along market needs. The quantity and the exact type of solutions provided have been determined by the market itself.”

There are relatively many CDN solutions being offered on the INXY Hosting marketplace. Why is that?

“We make sure our clients get the best solution possible when it comes to any product, and CDN is a good example. In fact, all CDN solutions being offered are different. The list of features and application purpose for example. Some are suited for live streaming, while some other are better for VoD, et cetera. The number and locations of network Points-of-Presence may also differ, just as the network capacity available and also the cost. We strive to provide well-tested and reliable CDN solutions for virtually any reasonable budget.”

We see a great number of dedicated servers in all kinds of configurations offered on INXY, also cloud storage, but no cloud instances. Can you explain?

“This is what we will be looking into in the future, but currently it is not possible due to software reselling limitations. Cloud hosting is not easily managed outside of its ecosystem so it demands very serious development to be made and thus requires complex strategy that we will look into later on in our roadmap.”

What about the use of software-defined hosting solutions, can we expect these to be offered through INXY as well?

“Software defined hosting solutions have always been around in the form of shared hosting, VPS, and now cloud hosting that is becoming more and more popular. We are looking into opportunities with cloud hosting for some time already, but it must be understood that in the end all cloud solutions are hosted on physical servers, so in general I don’t think bare metal servers are going anywhere soon.”

What are the USPs of the INXY marketplace?

“In the INXY Hosting marketplace you get a proper shopping experience. It’s a unique marketplace where you don’t just go and purchase hosting solutions. First of all, we offer our free-of-charge expertise built up over more than 15 years to find the solution that suits clients’ businesses best. We have our own dedicated team of salespeople taking care of our clients.”

“We have a dedicated first level support team. This means that for each service, INXY Hosting customers get double support – from us and from the hosting provider. That usually makes things faster and more reliable.”

What’s the earning model of INXY – it’s not affiliate, right?

“No, we have direct agreements with our partners and the clients that come to us are actually our clients in terms of communication, billing and management.”

“Customers pay to INXY. This means that they have a single point of entry to multiple providers. They’ll never have to think of prolonging anything or where to contact and manage something. We try to keep the pricing scheme as budget friendly as we can. This is possible because of special contracts with our partners. We find satisfaction in helping our clients and not in killing them with huge bills.”

There’s a wide choice in hosting products on INXY, but from a select number of partners. Those present include some of the largest in the industry. How come?

“I can’t say we are aiming for certain providers while rejecting others. Our main goal is not to get the largest providers, but the most reliable, because the hosting business really is about availability and performance. Any provider may enter if they have the desire to do so and can provide a needed level of performance, reasonable SLAs, guaranteed availability and good service.”

Is INXY still growing its partner base?

“We are always looking to do so, since the larger choice we have for our customers the better. But we are a bit careful, as quantity does not equal quality and we want to make sure that our customers are assured of getting good solutions. We also properly test them before adding any solution.”

What are the benefits of INXY for partners like Highwinds, Servers.com, Leaseweb, and Verizon?

“Hosting companies, no matter how large they are, always seek to boost sales, preferably without much of additional expenses. In our case, we try to bring sales to us, thus also to them. We have our own sales, support, marketing and development teams, so we do the promotion of products and negotiations with clients by ourselves. I think our partners are quite satisfied with this.”

What does it require exactly from a hosting provider to get its products live on INXY?

“First of all, to have a reliable service. Secondly, they will have to let us test it after which we must come to an agreement.”

How do you over time maintain a smooth interaction between your users and the hosting providers exposing their products on INXY?

“In the beginning this was what concerned us. But over time we have found out that our strategy of carefully choosing partners and testing their solutions before offering them to our clients brings benefits.”

To learn more about the INXY Hosting marketplace, visit: https://inxy.hosting/