Interviewed on 5 Jan 10
Wade Dube, Manager
Apps4Rent, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is the leading provider of premium hosted applications to businesses and resellers at value prices. Apps4Rent supplies a selection of hosted applications including the ever popular Hosted Exchange, SharePoint Hosting, Hyper-V Hosting of Virtual Dedicated Servers, Hosted Kaseya IT Automation Software.
Apps4Rent serves business customers located in more than 50 countries. Apps4Rent’s primary goal is to host most reliable platform for widely used business applications and provide high touch premium support. Our plans reflect our philosophy of simple value pricing without any gimmicks. You pay what you see on our site at www.apps4rent.com with no set-up fee, no contracts and a 30 day risk free trial.
Apps4Rent team has extensive experience in delivering high availability hosting solutions to savvy, high-growth clients who need maximum business and application uptime. Our clients benefit by being able to tap vast expertise without having to hire full time staff to truly understand topics such as load-balancing, high-availability clustering, security, data recovery, data back-up, E-mail archiving, Spam protection, Exchange, SharePoint, Hyper-V, Windows or Unix/Linux administration, Microsoft SQL, or MySQL database administration.
We provide real 24 X 7 support via chat; e-mail; and phone. All our support services are staffed by experts who would be glad to assist at any point of time throughout the year. We provide free migration services to customers moving to our environment.
What unique selling points do you offer?
We are one of the leading providers of Hosted Exchange and Hosted Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Our pricing is perhaps the best in the industry. We do not charge any set-up fees for any of our plans. Our most basic plan of Hosted Exchange comes with 1 GB of mailbox and is priced at $6.95 per user per month. This includes ActiveSync and free download of Microsoft Outlook/Microsoft Entourage. Similarly, you can add unlimited users in our Hosted WSS 3.0 services even with our most basic plan.
While our competitors consider ActiveSync as an add-on service and most of them price it separately with additional charges; we do not charge any additional amount for ActiveSync.
Similarly, migration services are charged separately by many providers. We provide free migration assistance for our customers. If you already have an in-house Exchange installation that you are finding difficult to maintain or upgrade, we will help you migrate the existing e-mail accounts to our Hosted Exchange 2007
Our services are customer centric and driven by customer satisfaction at all times. We provide real 24 X 7 support via e-mail/chat and phone. Our support is staffed 365 days a year and is 24 X 7 manned by experts who are more than willing to use the expertise for prompt resolution of issues and help our customers.
Many of our competitor’s plans make you buy mailboxes in bulk in advance; in hope that they will be used someday by you. In such cases you are paying for more mailboxes than you actually need or you use. On the other hand when you outgrow the mailboxes which you have bought; you need to pay higher price to add more users. With our customer centric plans, you buy as many as you need and then you can scale it to any number when the need arises without paying higher price for adding new mailboxes.
You can ‘mix-n-match’ users. This allows you to have some users on one plan, some on others and so on. The plans can be upgraded without any downtime from our control panel.
Describe the services you offer?
We provide premium hosted services for users. We provide Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange 2007; Windows SharePoint Services with unlimited users and Virtual Dedicated Servers built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology.
Our Hosted Exchange 2007 offering starts at $6.95 per user per month with fully functional Hosted Exchange Mailbox and includes ActiveSync without any additional charges.
Our Windows SharePoint Services is priced attractively at $8.95 per month for unlimited users. It’s a fully functional WSS 3.0 and unlimited users can be added. SharePoint is a powerful Collaboration environment where you can store documents; host blogs or wiki; track projects; share calendars and so on.
Describe your target market?
Our nature of business provides us an opportunity to serve customers across the world irrespective of location or size. Our state-of-the-art setup allows individual users to start using our services and then scale it to any limit. At the same time, our setup and processes ensures that large corporations use our services effectively and are able to scale up based on the requirement.
With our migration services all users irrespective of size can take assistance from us to move from the in-house solution to our state of the art setup in planned and organized manner with no downtime.
How is your company planning for the future?
Apps4Rent changed the market dynamics by offering premium services at affordable prices. Apps4Rent will continue to strive and provide new cutting edge technology at the best pricing. We will continue to increase our capacity and add more cutting edge products which our users can use and simplify their day-to-day communication and drastically reduce IT cost by finding a trusted partner like Apps4Rent. Our core goal is to keep our standards high and deliver nothing but the very best to its customers.
What benefits can you offer your customers?
In nutshell, we offer complete solution, peace of mind and value for money. We provide 24 X 7 via e-mail; chat and phone. Our response time for incidents is one of the best in the industry and is becoming a benchmark.
With our competitive pricing for Hosted Exchange 2007 ($6.95/Month for 1GB Box, free ActiveSync, Outlook) and SharePoint Hosting Services 3.0 ($8.95/Month for 500MB, unlimited users) customers can get the complete value for the money. If you already have an in-house Exchange installation that you are finding difficult to maintain or upgrade, we will help you migrate the existing e-mail accounts to our Hosted Exchange 2007. Or if you want a tighter integration of your email with Microsoft's business software, then hosted Exchange is the answer for your needs.
We employ 100% redundancy which allows us to provide you with an SLA of 99.99% uptime.
How do you support your customers?
We provide true 24 X 7 knowledgeable support via e-mail/chat and phone. The support is staffed by highly trained professional technicians who will be glad to assist you and guide you towards resolving your questions. Our response time is one of the best in the industry. This is strongly driven by our urge to help customers and assist them in achieving what they want.
