Auckland based Hosting Direct CEO Ben Simpson is changing gears. His business has traditionally been focused on the lowest price possible, but from his Albany based datacentre he is planning to tackle the much more lucrative business market.



Simpson’s strategy is focused around three key pillars, a new brand, a new more resilient network and new services to take advantage of its significantly improved datacentre and network capacity.

The new brand has been rolled out recently with the company shortening from Hosting Direct to just HD. "While we wanted to keep the brand, as it was well known to our 7000 + customers, it simply didn’t reflect our non hosting products” said Simpson.

 

While having been an Orcon wholesale customer for five years, Simpson hasn’t been satisfied with the company’s recent handling of its service delivery issues and has setup a significant new national network. This new connectivity to his datacentre removes previous bottlenecks and offers significant uptime guarantees that readies the company for future expansion.

Like most network and datacentre operators, HD has been busy signing up customers to its cloud services, promising impressive speeds, resilience and elasticity that only highly virtualised environments can offer. The company’s website has a dizzying array of offerings, which now include everything from VDSL connections through to dedicated blade server environments.

According to the website sitefinder.co.nz, which crawls thousands of NZ domains, HD is the third largest web hosting provider behind ICONZ and Internet Services Group in NZ. Check out the site yourself here.

Simpson’s next phase is to build a professional sales team, establish a 24/7 contact support centre and grow marketshare in the ISP market. With HD currently on the hunt for a Business Development Manager to spearhead growth for the organisation, Simpson is looking forward to the opportunities presented ahead.


Published by techday, written By Contributor, Thursday, 28th June, 2012
Link to article:  http://www.techday.co.nz/itbrief/news/hosting-direct-changes-into-higher-gear/24028/5/