Interviewed on 29 Jun 07
Daniel Ushman, Co-founder, VP marketing, midPhase Services, Inc.
midPhase is a web hosting provider based out of the Chicago loop. Myself, and my partner Zak Boca founded it, in 2003. We started like many hosting providers, with no money, no business experience and simply a dream. We funded our operation with a credit card and started signing accounts. Early on, we decided to build a real business. We both left school, opened an office in the suburbs of Chicago. Four years later we have 90,000 customers, over 60 employees total between our Chicago data center, sales, and marketing offices and our European support center. We employee all our own people in both offices and do not contract out to any other third parties.
What unique selling points do you offer?
Well, we’re not. Hosting is hosting—we all know it is a commodity. I could sit here and talk about the size of our packages, but that doesn’t matter. Everyone can oversell. I feel our main advantage is our aggressive focus on service and marketing. We promote ourselves heavily, but we back up every promises we make with a solid guarantee, and even more solid service. Just read my answer to question one for more.
Describe the services you offer?
For a web site to be made available on the Internet, it has to be hosted on a web server. This is where web hosting comes in. It's just like renting property.
Describe your target market?
midPhase operates a number of brands with different focuses. We also have a sister company with the same ownership called SingleHop. We focus mainly on the SME market, however our AN Hosting brand targets bloggers and individual web sites.
How is your company planning for the future?
Our goal is to continue growing both organically and through acquisition…
What benefits can you offer your customers?
Developers tend to really enjoy hosting with us because of our talent pool. We have more system administrators than sales people, more tech support than billing. Technical people make up a huge part of our client base. System administrators or people who have a lot of technical knowledge answer most of our calls and tickets. Having someone to talk to who understands what you’re trying to say is important for developers. I know, my side-hobby is writing PERL and MySQL code.
How do you support your customers?
Telephone calls, tickets.
